Es misión de mi
Gobierno liberar a España del peso de esa herencia … No disponemos de más ley ni de más
criterio que el que la necesidad nos impone. Hacemos lo que no nos queda más
remedio que hacer, tanto si nos gusta como si no nos gusta. … No pregunto si me
gusta, aplico las medidas excepcionales que reclama un momento excepcional.
-President Mariano Rajoy, parliamentary address, 11 July 2012
By August 2012, the Partido Popular (PP) had won the
general elections the year prior, securing the presidency for Mariano Rajoy and
an absolute majority in Parliament, which would consolidate the conditions of
possibility for partisan state rule. The absolute majority enjoyed by the PP
had quickly become an exercise of unilateral political power that sought
justification for its legislation and policies from the emergency of the
crisis. Urgent spending laws and other measures were rushed through approval in
Parliament by Decree-Laws that had forgone debate on these proposals and, not
least, a space for dialogue in opposition to them. In his first year of office,
President Rajoy cancelled the Debate on the State of the Nation, which
precluded answering publicly to the opposition and the population at large. So
too did the PP’s absolute majority repeatedly block the opposition’s demands
for responsible political and financial players to appear before Parliament and
thus provide public explanations about the party’s alleged involvement in
corruption cases and the mismanagement of banking and financial institutions as
a whole.[1]
In contrast to the opacity
of information from the seat of representative democracy, on the other hand,
the general public was addressed in other forms. Throughout the first year of
conservative rule, Spanish residents had heard a uniform partisan discourse circulated
in the media—a clear pedagogical program from local, regional, and national PP
representatives—that discredited the Socialist (PSOE) party’s tenure for having
left a “poisoned legacy” of “lies,” “empty coffers,” and “unpaid bills.”[2]
Though very worthy of critical reflection, the so-called Socialist inheritance
was constructed in official state discourse as the immediate culprit for the
crisis, in continuity with the general election campaign. In its reductive
comparison of state fiscal management to a household economy, the language of
this metaphor addressed to Spanish residents, and echoed by likeminded media
analysts, established a moral lesson for minding one’s personal finances (i.e.,
beware of depleted bank accounts and unpaid bills) and public shaming for
economic insolvency in the age of austerity, explored in Chapter 2. The
rhetoric on the disaster of the Socialist legacy and its fiscal
irresponsibility laid the bases, in turn, for the PP’s own claims to resolve
the crisis through “the only alternative” available, that of continued
austerity, “externalization” (i.e., privatization), the “flexibilization” of
labor (i.e., precarity), and the dismantling of social welfare programs, among
other neoliberal reforms pursued during the Socialist tenure before it.
Excluded from this language addressed to Spanish residents, however, and thus
unquestioned in partisan speech, were the roles of confluent economic and
political interests in the specificity of Spain’s crisis, despite their denouncement
from successive popular demonstrations and investigative reports in the news
media. Rather, the Socialist inheritance had been crafted in partisan speech as
both the culprit and the legitimated terrain of action for the cure, thus
weaving the optical effect of a break with the Socialist program on austerity
rather than an aggressive continuation of it in other forms. In this rhetorical
accomplishment, the constructed duality of an inheritance as both the reason and remedy for action fostered the illusion of dialogue between two
speakers, a sort of ventriloquism that monopolized the arguments of the
opposition, recast them in its own terms, and contested them from a similar
position.
Now, some readers might view
this discursive re-appropriation as cynical politics as usual, which is
undoubtedly not unique to Spain. This much is certain. At a time when little
credit is given to politicians’ words, as cultural theorist Jon Beasley-Murray
has noted, cynicism “leaves little room for a politics of either denunciation
or revelation,” on the one hand, while ideologues aim to combat apathy or
estrangement by arousing popular belief in partisan programs, on the other
(176). But, this form of discursive re-appropriation in official state
discourse should not be underestimated, in my view, for it configures one part
of the field from within which the illusion of popular sovereignty is both
constructed and negated, at once. Political discourse, both despite and due to
its possibilities for deceit, comprises an operative terrain of public influence
that aims to legitimize power relations and actions in the name of the People,
the imagined sovereign subject of state rule in liberal democracy, against the
erosion of popular adhesion to political programs via partisan channels.
Speech acts likewise form an integral part of state pedagogy and media
analysis, in which the predominant language and metaphors in public circulation
bear the capacity of partitioning and redistributing the terms of a given
debate, even wielding power from spaces of silence. Their potential to mold
social perception when repeated in circulation and recast as “truth”—through
what Deleuze might call a passive
synthesis, or the acquisition of habit in discursive repetition—should not
be overlooked for their role in shaping the exercise of state powers. Still,
the speech of politicians may be instrumental to deceit, but also to
oppositional practices that deconstruct this illusion of sovereignty in
representative democracy. Therein within the fissures of discourse lie the
possibilities for oppositional readings and actions that have proved, in part, one basis
for social mobilization and articulated desires for change, such as those enacted in 15M.
What is at stake for the
state in official discourse on its management of the crisis is more than just
“talk” alone, but the particular positioning of a field of action through which
techniques of government can be legitimated publicly in the name of the People.
Perhaps nowhere more evident is this configuration exposed, paradoxically, than
in the state’s selective abandonment of the People as the imagined sovereign
subject of state rule, which overturns the presumption of representation in the
interests of the represented in democracy, claimed for the benefit of the
common good. Such claims are well known in authoritarian regimes that seek
exceptional powers for rule in which this mandate is dictated to the
population, on its very behalf.
Articulated in Rajoy’s
parliamentary address after his meeting with leaders in the European Union,
Spain had “no choice” but to undertake neoliberal reforms “that no one likes”
in an absolute violation of the PP’s electoral program that brought it to power
(Fig. 1). Whether one reads these claims as disingenuous, perhaps as cynical or
literal in their address, Rajoy’s speech designates a limited terrain of
possibilities from which the party (state) can govern, subjugated at once,
according to this language, to more powerful forces, past and present: the
fiscal inheritance of its partisan opposition and the European Union as an
economic project, respectively. In both cases, the subordination of the state
to the markets and fiscal management blows the cover, so to speak, on the
illusion of sovereign power as the representation of popular interests imagined
in liberal democracy. That the violation of this constituent relation between
representatives and the represented would serve as a legitimating terrain of
action for the state, however, configures both the conditions and possibilities
of sovereign rule in liberal democracy as an articulated state of exception. To
paraphrase this public address, the state governs with exceptional measures at
exceptional times, which shall go unquestioned for their necessity, whether the
represented care for them or not.
 |
|
Fig.
1. Mariano Rajoy before Parliament, 11 July
2012, RTVE.es / EFE.
"Hacemos
lo que no nos queda más remedio que hacer,
tanto si nos gusta como si no nos
gusta. …
No pregunto si me gusta, aplico las medidas excepcionales
que reclama
un momento excepcional."
|
Political theorist Carl
Schmitt defined the sovereign as he who decides the rule of law and its
exception; thus, sovereign decisionism is constituted from the powerful choice
to grant selective impunity, to determine when the law is applied, to whom, and
under what circumstances.[3]
Thereby, the sovereign power decides the rule of law and the exception, and
particularly, within its auspices of action, the impunity of sovereign power
and its protected interests from the rule. Sharing its place within Schmitt’s
formulation, sovereign decisionism is a terrain of possible choice and action
reserved for a political class by
profession and its (capital)
interests, in which the political formation, in practice, has become
increasingly synonymous with a state that governs by fiscal policy alone. As
Professor of Constitutional Law Javier Pérez Royo argued, the PP had forged its
own terms for a state of exception through unilateral mandate within the first
few months of its rule, made possible by the PP’s absolute majority, despite
the social clamor of protest and, in Parliament, minority partisan opposition.[4]
This is not to say that the Constitution of 1978 has been suspended de facto,
which is precisely what would make the techniques of government legible as an exception by definition.
Rather, as Pérez Royo observes, there exists an absolute divide between the
governed and the government that acts in the name of its represented. It is a
circumstance Pérez Royo observes in other European governments subject to a
European bailout (i.e., Greece, Italy, Portugal), in which the return of
technocrats to public office serves only to sustain the European economic
project and common currency, specifically, by subordinating state affairs and
social policies of Europe's intervened economies to the priorities of fiscal management. Departing from Pérez
Royo’s observation, it should not go ignored that the PSOE had similarly
violated this constituent relation between representatives and the represented
by rushing through the ratification of Constitutional Art. 135, without a
popular referendum, which will prohibit the Spanish state from incurring a
deficit greater than the margin established by the EU. Partisan distinction, in
other words, may operate within the illusion that exceptional practices belong
exclusively to one political color or another, rather than signal the economic
impetus, specific practices of government, and structural conditions within the
state that have allowed this exception to prevail. Still, as Pérez Royo has
noted, the PP has pursued this exceptionalism vigorously in its own strategies
of government made possible by its control of the legislature.
On the other hand, this
exception has not manifested itself as an outright suspension of democratic
procedure or the Constitution itself, nor does it imply the executive
administration of justice that sovereign decisionism requires by Schmitt’s
formulation, even as indications of exceptionalism, scattered and dispersed
throughout and beyond the state apparatuses, strongly recall those of
undemocratic regimes. The protections of confluent political and economic
interests are, amid the crisis, the greatest operative terrain of impunities
offered by this exceptional circumstance, despite popular and minority partisan
opposition to them. They are made evident in the legal and judicial limitations
that prohibit the timely trial or conviction of select political and economic
corruption cases as criminal offenses, or for siphoned public funds to be
returned to state coffers. They are perceptible in state policies that pursue
new sources of revenue from the population at large while leaving fiscal fraud
by the greatest fortunes largely untouched. They are made visible in the
circles of elite wealth and influence that benefit from the crisis
economically, as the largest fortunes in Spain accumulate greater capital, and
the political protections provided from the so-called revolving door of
corporate advisory boards and the politicians who serve on them, and so on. In
this regard, selective impunity and exemption is woven from juridical
limitations, private interests, and the government policies that protect the
latter, but not specifically the sovereign decision of pardon, self-impunity,
and the selective application of the law. The distinctions of state protections
on the flows and capture of capital, it seems, have transformed the terms of
the exception, in which sovereign decisionism, or the choice powers of
(self-)impunity, have been supplanted largely by the state administration of
sovereign debt and the selective powers of (self-)exemption in private interests.
Aside from these matters in
structural (juridical) limitations, fiscal policy (i.e., state management of
taxation and sovereign debt), and corporate spheres of political influence,
there also exist specific practices within state powers that make this
exception readable as a crisis of popular sovereignty. Once the PP had secured
an absolute majority in the general elections, the party self-situated its
exercise of power within a sovereign right to rule, and to rule alone, as it
dispensed with state affairs to the benefit of its partisan interests and
powers, which have actively sought to diminish spaces for oppositional dialogue
and dissent from which politics must inevitably emerge in democracy. These
practices would extend beyond the time of the first few months of its rule and
beyond the spaces of its executive and legislative competence. The perceptible
forms of exceptionalism are evident in the stronghold of partisan power that
relinquishes possibilities for open dialogue, opposition, or transparency of
information, essential to democratic procedure, in favor of unilateral partisan
decisions that protect an establishment increasingly unable to justify the
evidence of corruption allegations, and its obstruction of judicial investigations, against it.
The partisan capture of the public media has become another important
indication of this exception, as are the attempts to institutionalize
bureaucratic and legal restrictions on rights to demonstrate and assemble in
public space, as well as for the independent and mainstream press to cover
these protests and forced evictions. The opacity of information through
process, it seems, whether originating in the sovereign seat of government, in
the controls on the public and private media, or in the population’s access to
the public itself (e.g., public space, public information, public social
services, etc.) has augmented specific controls and stops that bear exemptions
on the procedures and practices of democracy. Met with violence from the
policing apparatus against protesters and evicted homeowners, these modalities
of enforcement and restriction bear a form of state authoritarianism. And yet,
despite these perceptibly undemocratic practices across branches of the state
apparatuses, none of them correspond specifically to the question of selective
impunity granted by sovereign decision that defines the exception in Schmitt’s
historic formulation, which deserves further attention here.
The practices of democracy
in the Spanish state—here, I am referring to both those enacted from democratic
values, among which transparency of information, accountability for actions,
and public dialogue and debate share a place; and those engendered by operative
structural mechanisms, such as the separation of powers[5]—had
forged the exceptionalism of unilateral mandate from within the existing
framework of the Constitution of 1978. That democratic mechanisms in their
structure, content, or practice, should fail to prevent this exception,
suggests, as cultural theorist Cristina Moreiras-Menor has argued, that their
conditions of possibility have always already been present in the conception of
the democratic state, even as the present-time may only bear witness to this
inheritance in partial, scattered and dispersed (il-)legible forms.[6]
The exceptionalism of state sovereignty in representative democracy, in other
words, appears not as the exception
per se, but as the rule.
In Moreiras-Menor’s work, I
perceive this issue of the (il-)legibility
of the inheritance to be at the core of questioning the present’s relationship
to (and memory of) the experience of the twentieth century, in which
authoritarian forms and practices of government—never the same as in the past,
but transformed into something “new”—reside in the very conditions of
possibility that have materialized the exceptions of state sovereignty, with or
without popular consent, as partisan
property (i.e., at once, the presumption of partisan ownership of the state implied in property, a party politics “proper” of corporatism, and the private interests implicated within them).
How have practices of democracy within a given state not developed regulatory
mechanisms, so to speak, that dually detect and prevent the exercise of power
from acquiring authoritarian forms? It would seem that the present, in effect,
has not been able to overcome or dismantle the practices of power that bear the
potential to slip into authoritarian strategies of rule, despite the latter’s common
regard, falsely, as a “thing of the past.” In a similar vein, it would seem
that the illegibility of these practices as an exception—even despite official
state discourse in which executive-legislative measures and their circumstance
are articulated as exceptional—requires the present to make sense of their
fragmentary character in ways that sovereign decisionism cannot fully account
for in the current conjecture, at least not by the same terms of the
twentieth-century experience with totalitarian regimes. For technologies of
government, access to information, and mechanisms of police repression today
tend to recall a time in which not only was official politics a matter reserved
exclusively for the state, as a separate sphere of activity from the social
body. At my time of writing, official state politics has likewise retreated
into a domain of activity that is increasingly abstruse and sheltered within
the powerful protections it establishes for itself, for the strategic
exemptions of the political profession and capital interests. For, in a legible
indication of the confluence of powers between the state and monopoly capital,
no longer are the police dispatched to use force solely against demonstrators,
but likewise against evicted homeowners. Yet, to temper this assessment before
readers conclude that my aim is to equate the current conjecture with
totalitarian rule, I should like to clarify that the question I propose is one
of readability: of reading the exceptionalism of state rule, which is both
articulated and perceptible as an exception, and yet
does not correspond to twentieth-century formulation of the term. These
techniques of government and policing may bear authoritarian forms, but they
are not exclusively the result of a direct, top-down adjudication on the rule
of law and its spaces of amnesty, as in the sovereign exception of regimes
past. How, then, might one read the scattered (il-)legibility of this exception
in the present?[7]
Writing amid the political,
economic, and state crises of the 1970s, Nicos Poulantzas perceived the
compounded crises of monopoly capitalism and state sovereignty as bearing the
potential to produce forms and practices of authoritarian statism, particularly
through the corporatization of government as a striking indication of “the
constitution of a new form of capitalist state with characteristics appropriate
to the ‘authoritarian state’ or ‘strong state’ that could signify simply that a
certain form of ‘democratic politics’ has come to an end in capitalism” (320).[8] In
this sense, the crises of late capitalism have always been existent, but are
accentuated, and thus more legible, in the compounded character of an economic
crisis that exposes a political crisis, against the crisis of the state in
liberal democracy (i.e., representative democracy of the People). For
Poulantzas, this sort of self-reflexivity of multiple crises may bring to the
fore the legitimating fields of action from which the state apparatuses must
maneuver, some fractured by internal antagonisms and others concordant in
apparent unison. Poulantzas understands the state as a plural, shifting site of
social and capital (power) relations in constant negotiation, which bears the
material forms of powers inscribed within its institutional structures, subject
to change. His writings take into account the complexity of evolving
antagonisms within and beyond the branches of the state in which opposition is
always possible. On practices of opposition within the State, several examples from contemporary Spain come to mind, in the
unprecedented mobilizations of state employees against austerity and
privatization (e.g., the multicolored “Tides” of protests in education,
healthcare, justice, research and development, etc.); in the conflicting
positions within the police corps on the use of violence against demonstrators;
or among employees in Hacienda who rebuke executive mandate by proposing
publicly to pursue fiscal fraud from the greatest private fortunes and
corporations, and so on, as signs of state transformations and opposition undertaken
by state personnel within it.
Specifically, Poulantzas
conceives of the state as an institutional ensemble of operations and relations
that, in Bob Jessop’s development of his writings, practice strategic selectivity by rewarding those allies to the ends and
aims of the powerful, and by placing selective stops on others that destabilize
these power relations—both within and beyond the state (i.e., private and
public interests). Thus, not unlike the corporation, internal antagonisms are
observed in the powers that seek priorities and objectives pursued
competitively by some state branches and that short-circuit others within a
hierarchical, networked system of power relations (i.e., administrative silence and non-decision here also play an important
role) (“The Capitalist State” 309). Despite their contradictions, state
operations may accomplish their aims without a global project and may give the
appearance of a scattered micro-politics in different contexts, but across their
apparent chaos there emerges a pattern of governmentality and policy that, like
the flows of capital, structures certain actors and their privileges over
others.
Whereas the exceptionalism
of sovereign power, according to Schmitt’s formulation, relies on the exercise
of decision to grant impunity and its self-exemption from the rule,
Poulantzas’s notion of strategic
selectivity in the exercise of state powers may provide a more accurate
approach in the current circumstance to how exceptions are crafted selectively
as impunities and exemptions within a micro-politics in which the adjudication
of the law by the sovereign is no longer exclusively at hand. Poulantzas’s work
approaches reading the transformed configurations of social, political, and
governmental relations of networked powers that no longer bear organizational
forms uniquely to labor and production alone, but to that of segmented labor in
the released flows of capital and the production of production itself in
advanced capitalism, which have eclipsed the former. In the state
transformations enumerated at his time of writing, Poulantzas provides a
possible framework for reading the state powers of exemption, the maneuvers to
legitimize sovereign rule, and the contradictory practices of strategic selectivity
specific to advanced capitalism, distributed and scattered across the operative
fields of action within a state managing the “crisis of the crisis management”
or the “crisis of the management of the crisis” (“The Political Crisis and the
Crisis of the State” 320).
If one accepts Pérez Royo’s
assessment (indeed, also that of protesters in 15M) that popular sovereignty
has been captured exceptionally by the state management of debt, fiscal policy,
and flows of private capital, then the priorities of capital within the state,
following Poulantzas, are perceptibly deterritorialized into micro-scenarios of
exceptions and impunities no longer consolidated within a specific sovereign
figure. It is a question, here, of legibility in their scattered selection that
takes as its basis the transformation of power relations in ways that no longer
correspond to the return to totalitarianisms as they were experienced in the
twentieth century, but to reading the new forms and articulations of
authoritarian powers that on occasion suspend democracy in certain practices,
while paradoxically retaining democratic procedures, even as this paradox
tumbles the illusion of popular sovereignty in liberal democracy in its
foundational concepts (i.e., the People). It is not my intention here to
address Poulantzas’s methodology in structural Marxism or to position his
conception of the state and capital in relation to the tradition of Marxist
critique he draws from[9];
much in the spirit of Poulantzas’s unorthodox Marxist critique, his work could
be read, in a way, by taking his own suggestion, to depart from some of the
operative critical concepts in his work (i.e., class struggle and agency in
Gramscian hegemony) by privileging instead his turn to the micro-politics of
the state as a social relation, or, its biopolitical character.[10]
In this light, I draw from Poulantzas's work for its ability to comprehend this
selectivity in the current crises, where generally democratic practices are
perceived to be at risk, while this risk, paradoxically, is not legible as an
exception for state maneuvers that continue to operate permissibly within the
structural limitations and procedures considered democratic. (Given recent
events in the United States Congress that provoked the shutdown of government,
one is inclined to wonder if the present is not witness to new strategies that
enable the authoritarian capture of popular sovereignty, which vary in practice
but are not altogether unique to Spain, either.) That is, the illegibility of
these maneuvers as a form of exceptionalism guarantees, in part, their
survival.
As I explore here, within the patterns emerging
across these micro-politics, which Poulantzas describes as authoritarian akin
to those of a “strong state,” state powers tend to operate relationally through
the selective access and controls of public information and services provided
to different publics (e.g., legally inscribed social and economic exclusions,
opacity and bureaucratization, state control and corporate influence of the
media, etc.); through the selective application of the law via channels
that do not correspond uniquely to the justice system (e.g., budgetary policy
and financing, policing and surveillance, etc.); and in the political and
economic alliances within and beyond the state that establish exemptions for
privileged actors (e.g., the guarantee of corporate and financial support for
state policies and aims, negotiated corporate privileges as provisions against
the application of labor laws, etc.), and so on. Their micro-politics operate
within the structural limits—or, in some cases, indeed test these limits—of
what are legally and constitutionally permissible actions in democratic
regimes. Authoritarian statism is, then, the democratic appearance of politics
as usual, perhaps more than ever a form of corporatism practiced within and
in concert with organs outside the state. Thus, authoritarian statism is consolidated through
practices and operations that conserve or bolster economic and political power
relations and that, in the case of Spain, have been pursued assiduously through
a partisan capture of the state via capital interests.
Within the state itself, the
concentration of the executive powers at the expense of the parliamentary
sovereignty it represents, constitutes one of the basic characteristic features
of what Poulantzas observed as the new form of authoritarian statism. Such a
concentration of powers is evident in the executive’s public announcement of
legislative proposals to become law before their rubber-stamp approval by
Parliament, or in the Constitutional Court defense of its head magistrate’s
militancy in and monetary donations to the ruling party.[13]
Thus, the “organic confusion” of executive, legislative, and judicial actions
and competencies exposes the already prevalent confluence of interests among
them. These overlapping authorities likewise extend to financial and economic
interests that inform, if not determine, strategic state policy-making. As
such, Poulantzas notes, state powers are sustained in part by the return of
(economic) technocrats in the bureaucratization and administration of the state
against the decline of political parties as channels for popular sovereignty, as
Pérez Royo observes in the Prime Ministers of European states subject to
EU financial rescue (i.e., Greece, Portugal, Italy, etc.).
By 2012, the state-owned
media were also subject to partisan controls. At this time, new executives of
Spanish public television and radio (RTVE) were appointed, several of them with
clear political ties to the ruling party. Immediately, RTVE purged choice
journalists, editors, and directors of its news programs—Asuntos propios, Los
desayunos de TVE, En días como hoy, Informe
semanal, La Noche en 24 horas,
and Telediario matinal, to name a few[15]—who
had practiced journalism under the protections provided by the Press Law of
2006, on the neutrality and independence of the state-owned media from partisan
interests. Given that RTVE was subject to censorship under the Franco Regime,
the national public media in democracy would continue to operate, until recent
memory, largely at the service of the ruling party in power, as Hooper and G. Montano have argued.[16]
That the state should undertake the purging of journalists and directors who
tended to criticize austerity measures, confirmed that partisan tutelage of the
public media had returned to the discretionary practices of self-censorship and
state control of information. Tightened controls of information designate what
Poulantzas observed as the dislocation of concentrated centers of state power
in its apparatuses into networked structures indirectly influenced by the
executive (i.e., here, in the state-owned media), in which public access to
information and secrecy are administrated by controls or stops that selectively
provide some flows of information while restricting others. The executive’s
staged “press conferences” that deny journalists a round of questions,
broadcast on occasion to reporters via closed-circuit television, provide an
indication of the kind of micro-politics pervasive in the control of
information that reaches the media and the general public. Such a control of
information through strategic selectivity, which encompasses its designated
spaces where popular sovereignty is represented publicly in liberal democracy
(i.e., parliament), delimits a clear abuse of power while retaining the forms
and procedures of parliamentary democracy. Restrictions and flows of
information, their opacity or transparency in different contexts and for
different subjects, prove vital to the (il-)legibility of authoritarian
statism.
Within these intersecting
spheres of influence, following Poulantzas, the large-scale orchestration and
development of organizational networks parallel to the state, in public,
semi-public, and private endeavors, may unify and manage state power in line
with its directives and those of private interests at large. At once connected
to the interests of the state, yet removed from its institutional structure,
“think-tanks” hold a privileged position to government for their production of
research in strategic policy-making today, often in line with the economic interests of a given partisan program (on a range of issues in public
policy, foreign policy, monetary policy, energy policy, immigration policy,
economic development and investment, etc.). The “who’s who” of corporate
members in non-partisan and partisan think-tanks alike, such as those in the
Elcano Royal Institute (i.e., whose membership includes high-ranking
representation from former ministers and presidents, the public and private
media giants, and Spain’s largest corporations in energy, telecommunications,
transportation, banking, and retail, and so on), establishes a privileged
channel for intellectual labors to inform strategic planning among elite
spheres of influence, at once within and beyond the state. That the Spanish
state amid the crisis should charge Elcano Royal Institute with the task of
researching the positive international perceptions of “the trademark Spain”
(“la marca España”), provides a double indication of both the confluent
corporate and political interests inside/outside state operations among these
sectors, and the capitalist paradigm of strategic policy-making within the
state that aims to market “Spain” as a brand for foreign investment. Reading the Elcano think-tank's reports, one finds a clear alignment between the production of knowledge that favors the political program on austerity and the state and capital interests that seek a positive evaluation on perceptible recovery, despite the social reality, and its violence, experienced by residents.
Other signs of this
exception are furthermore legible elsewhere, scattered and dispersed throughout
state administration and its apparatuses, which directly infringe on democratic
rights and practices in Spain: in the documented police persecution of
protesters and the journalists who attempt to report on demonstrations and evictions,
and in the violence of the police dispatched against evicted homeowners and
civilian protesters—both of which bear resemblance to the practices of a
“strong state” in Poulantzas. The penal state and policing state are revealed
in specific interstices that justify the use of violent force and the
restrictions to public protest in public space; in the case of forced
evictions, policing passes through the reinforcement of a judicial order to
pursue an eviction, solicited by a given bank for a homeowner in default on
mortgage repayment. The abusive character of the Spanish law in difference to
European counterparts, for example, reserves no right to forbearance unless
negotiated exceptionally with the bank, a terrain in which Plataforma para los
Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) has provided significant support on a case-by-case basis;
that is, the law provides protections for the banking institution to execute
the eviction while the homeowner retains the burden of debt for a property s/he
no longer owns. That the policing apparatus should be dispatched towards this
end provides a clear indication of the use of state violence to protect banking
institutions and their profits. On the other hand, the legislative and
executive have worked in concert to block civilian initiatives on forbearance,
spearheaded by PAH, that aim to modify the law with a substantial impact for
those at risk of eviction. Continued police force to conserve the status quo,
in lieu of the legislature’s adoption of proposed popular initiatives, provides
an indication of the administrative controls and stops placed on established
channels for direct participation in representative democracy, in which the
social body remains largely removed from official state politics, despite the
violence that the policing apparatus permissibly exerts upon the former.
Before adjourning for summer
vacation in 2012, Rajoy’s administration announced the sharpest measures of its
austerity program at that time, which equated to the greatest cutbacks to
public spending in Spain’s democratic history, approved unilaterally by the
ruling party. The select ledgers targeted for these cutbacks confirmed that the
dismantling of social welfare was a program derived from a conservative, or
neo-con, stripe of neoliberalism, which rolled back social protections for
women, immigrants, the disabled, the disadvantaged, and so on, and annulled
laws de facto that the party had opposed in prior legislatures, such as the Law
for Historical Memory, by depleting it of state funding. There exist, in other
words, clear methods of selective enforcement and simulated repeal of the law
that bypass conventional legislation through budgetary policy alone. Among
them, the labor law reforms that minimized employees’ rights before an employer
(i.e., part-time and successive temporary contracts, reduction in severance
pay, the legalization of firing practices based on projected corporate losses,
etc.), inaugurated new permissible contractual terms that favored labor
precarity to encourage corporate profits across sectors. On the one hand,
whereas the law does not discriminate between sectors or labor segments,
largely affecting workers across them in favor of capital interests—and indeed
may serve as one point of transversal solidarity for workers mobilizing across
these sectors—certain corporate “cultures” continue to provide severance
bonuses, securities, and other negotiated benefits for high-ranking executives
who remain largely unaffected by the law’s application. Thus, generally, the
labor law comes to bear evenly upon vast segments of the working population,
as it provides negotiable contractual terms with an employer for an elite
executive class of management. The former case provides an example of how the
state may enforce legislation selectively and strategically through budgetary
policy alone, whereas the latter illustrates how corporate contractual practices may
provide privileged protections from the law itself.
These measures and their
rapid introduction into state policy and law constitute what Poulantzas refers
to as a conflation of public and private matters in the structuring of an
emergent relation of individual controls among vast segments of the population.
Stated otherwise, they constitute the exercise of biopower as a strategic tool
of political selectivity—i.e., to uphold some laws and social protections,
while voiding others in practice or policy—according to the criteria of
political (partisan, capital) interests. Their selectivity resides in the
possibilities of advancing certain aims by maneuvering structural state
limitations (i.e., the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial
powers) on the one hand, and of restricting access to state provisions for
certain segments of the population, on the other. Here, too, there exists a
great paradox in the practices of government in the current circumstance, in
which the state in liberal democracy, in theory, cannot intervene into the
private affairs of the individual, while it extends its reach in practice into
diffused powers still operative within the breadth and depth of society,
addressed in greater detail in Chapter 2. For the policies of neoliberalism,
which developed historically in part from the promise that its equation of
capitalism to freedom could prevent the rise of a “strong state,” have aimed to
limit the state’s hand in tempered, interventionist economic policy and to restrict its provision of welfare services; but as Wendy Brown has noted in her reading of
Foucault, this limitation paradoxically engenders the exercise of power
relations diffused within the social body, or biopolitics, where technologies
of government act upon the governed, with material consequences. Thus, the
relations of state powers do not wane with the “reduction” of the state.
Rather, they bear new forms of acting upon individuals through restrictions to
access, controls, and the rolling-back of social protections and rights, which
may provide a characteristic incoherence or illegibility of reactive state
“micro-politics” without a greater social project other than that of curtailing
welfare services. In sum, these micro-politics, Poulantzas observes, are “the current forms of
‘reform-repression’ that mark the policies of Western capitalist states” (322).
Beyond the restrictions to
information and access practiced in the legislative, executive, and the public
media, explored earlier, there exist selective and, at times, strategic
controls and stops enacted within the individual’s navigation of the state
apparatuses, which illustrate their biopolitical (or, for Poulantzas,
“micro-political”) dimension. The bureaucracy of specific areas of the state,
such as immigration, exemplifies these limitations placed upon access, which
operate from the opacity and contradiction of public information between the
Police, the Ministry of Justice, and the Civil Registry, and the subjective
criteria (i.e., reported cases of discrimination) for immigrants to pass
immigration filters and advance from a given procedural stage to another. That
state employees from the Civil Registry should denounce the executive’s
maneuver to bypass their competencies in favor of public notaries, for private
profits, indicates both the economic restrictions of equal access and the
antagonisms between the state apparatuses in executive maneuvers as their
competencies are minimized and granted to other privileged organs within and
outside the state. So too are undocumented immigrants subject to new
restrictions on their access to public healthcare unless paid out of pocket, the
procedures for which are obfuscated in the division of competencies between
healthcare professionals (who may or may not choose to honor the law), the
regional government that administrates healthcare services, and the state
mandate itself. Thereby equal access to information and social services is not
guaranteed, and in fact embeds discriminatory practices within institutional
structures in which a given state employee at a given stage within this
networked circuit operates as a “switch” to permit or deny individual access in
specific contexts and based on a range of factors (e.g., economic ability to
pay, ethnicity, language competence, social status, etc.). Therein also resides
the possibility for a state employee to oppose laws and policies by granting selective access
whereby it is otherwise restricted in structural design.
Gatekeepers who can allow,
restrict, or fully deny access selectively, may exercise a form of decisionism
proper to the sovereign in a micro-politics of power relations in specific
contexts. The contingencies of the criteria to grant or disallow access
discriminatively depend on the circumstance, but in all cases gatekeepers may
be said to perform their function based on either a directive of power or the
self-corrective modalities, for example, such as those developed in the
professions against the threat of litigation. It is what Andreas Kalyvas has
observed as a transformation from Poulantzas’s “authoritarian statism” to an
“authoritarian legalism” in liberal democracy.[17]
This form of self-regulation bears a disciplinary character in the Foucauldian
sense, but not necessarily to a given disciplinary enclosure, implied in the
term “gatekeeper”; rather, the exercise of the gatekeeper to switch and stop
relates specifically to access of information along circuits, such as in
Deleuze’s assessment of the control society, where the disciplinary enclosures
are no longer uniquely at play. Copyright laws serve as a tangible example that
restrict and thus privilege access to information, in which institutional or
individual gatekeepers (say, a university library or a professor who assigns
readings for her course) are expected to perform their roles in providing and
restricting distribution according to institutional policy and law.
Within the Spanish state,
however, such material restrictions to access (i.e., economic determinants) are
enacted, for example, in the PP's institution of court fees for all individuals who
pursue legal recourse on matters ranging from civil cases and contentions
against state administration, to consumer claims, employer abuses, and fines. Access to the Spanish justice system now presumes an expendable capital to pursue litigation, thus inaugurating discriminatory access based on economic means. Aside from the courts, residents of Madrid who choose to exercise the right to
refuse copayment on pharmacy prescriptions, another of the PP's recently adopted policies, must sign a legal statement of
non-compliance with tax liability and a voluntary release for personal data to
be included in a database administered by the regional government. Actions such
as these work on individuals in micro-political contexts as a form of state
interpellation in different scenarios of everyday life, in which the state bureaucracies
play a specific role in limiting and granting access selectively. In the latter
case, they play a role in interpellating a given subject to forego a right to
healthcare services in its suggestion of his/her incompliance with tax law and
subjectivity to state monitoring on this alleged infraction. Althusser’s
classic example of interpellation, of the subject who turns around when hearing
her name called by an unknown other, acquires a depersonalized bureaucratic
medium for self-correction in the legal release, through which the state, in
its suggestive threat of vigilance and litigation, attempts to mold self-compliance
with its restrictions on access. In this manner, the stops or controls on
access to information emanating from different spheres of sovereign activity
within the state—in parliament, the executive and ministries, etc.—may bear an
uncanny resemblance to the operative mechanisms of the control society and its
restrictions of access experienced among the governed who navigate the bureaucracy
of state administrations (i.e., public healthcare services, social and legal
protections, etc.). Navigating these administrations presumably requires
developing certain forms of knowledge to gain access to them, in which
specific forms of address and social relations prove advantageous to earn one’s
admission to specific circuits. Specifically, the forms of knowledge and address required to gain restricted access are the institutional materiality of
the state in which knowledge and practice constitute exclusions that, by
the nature of their exclusions, are inherently political.
Furthermore, to return to the practices of the Spanish executive, elections and
public affairs in state administration were subordinated to political
strategies that sought to strengthen the PP’s power. For example, due to this
majority rule, the executive powers delayed their presentation of the state
budget until the regional elections in Andalusia were held, which prolonged
disclosure of the party’s austerity plans until after the votes were counted.
So, too, did the party begin to formulate its design to restructure state
public administration to its advantage by bolstering the competencies of the
provincial Diputaciones, where its
affiliates currently hold some seventy percent of party-appointed seats.[18]
By May 2012, the spokesperson for Coalición Canaria, Ana Oramas, had made
public her reported encounter two years earlier with the present Finance
Minister Cristóbal Montoro (PP), who had pressed her to vote against the PSOE’s
austerity measures at that time, even as Spain ran the certain risk of a
European bailout if Parliament could not reach an agreement. Oramas quoted
Montoro’s appeal for her support, “Let Spain collapse and we’ll raise it up
again.”[19]
State fiscal solvency itself, in other words, served as a high-stakes political
strategy of negotiation. As Bob Jessop argues on Poulantzas’s notion of
“strategic selectivity,” practices of authoritarian statism seek out allegiance
to the aims and ends of power, rewarding some and limiting others, thus
reproducing the identity of power relations within a given structure: “given
that the state is a social relation (or, better, that state power is a
form-determined condensation of forces in struggle), the significance of
particular strategies pursued by particular agents will vary with the nature of
the state. Different types of state and political regime selectively reward
different types of actors and strategies,” while other actors struggle to
distance themselves from these aims (62).[20] In
her public statement that marks a distance from this high-stakes politicking,
Oramas reported that at that crucial moment, “the Popular Party chose at that
time to try to topple the Government,”[21] which
tended to confirm publicly what was already evident: the conservative right’s strategies
aimed to garner allies for a destructive blockade of the opposition to it,
despite great stakes for the solvency of the Spanish state itself, in a play to
bolster its partisan power.
When challenged publicly,
the party has tended to present a unified discourse—again, across local,
regional, and national levels of state politics—that decries its mandate as
justified by the popular will expressed in ballot boxes in the elections. There
exists, in other words, no disputable horizon beyond the “will” of a party that
recasts its political legitimacy, however undemocratic its practice or design,
as the very “will of the People.” For, not even the social clamor that demands
explanations and greater transparency has provoked institutional reflection on
this wholesale partisan mandate. Rather, the party’s representatives, again across
local, regional, and national levels, resort to citing its popular support from
a “silent majority” of constituents. The imagined sovereignty of the People
whom in theory the state represents is continuously re-imagined, selectively
and strategically to a given circumstance, in order to legitimize government
actions and decisions in its name, at times even abandoning its premise
altogether in the dictation of measures taken “with no choice.” Thus, discourse forms
one part of the legible sign of this exceptionalism exposed for its
contradictions, even as the democratic procedures of the state are conserved
and followed in practice, giving the appearance of politics as usual. Yet, it
is within the networked spheres of privileged political and private interests,
and the impunities and protections provided to them, where the orchestration of
selective flows of information and restrictions to it, the circumvention of the
law by selective enforcement and simulated repeal, and the aleatory
micro-maneuvers of the state in its management of these crises, expose new
practices and forms of authoritarianism that become legible as a state of
exception despite their articulation as a pandemonium of contradictory
strategies of state rule and the illusory effect of democracy they provide.
[1] Antoni
Gutiérrez-Rubí, “Sin preguntas, sin ruedas, sin Debate” Blog Macropolítica El País 21 June 2012 http://blogs.elpais.com/micropolitica/2012/06/sin-preguntas-sin-ruedas-sin-debate.html
[2] This language was used prior to the
campaign for the 2011 General Elections and continued throughout: http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20110730/cospedal-mayoria-espanoles-respira-aliviada-adelanto-electoral/451059.shtml See also, http://www.larazon.es/detalle_hemeroteca/noticias/LA_RAZON_387087/3700-mentiras-y-facturas-sin-pagar-herencia-socialista
[3] See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Chicago
& London: U of Chicago P, 1996.
[4] Javier
Pérez Royo, “Estado de excepción parlamentario” El País 6 July 2012 http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2012/07/06/actualidad/1341595862_758523.html
and his Op-Ed “Estado de Excepción” El
País 4 Feb. 2012 http://elpais.com/diario/2012/02/04/espana/1328310006_850215.html
[5] Elsewhere, I argue that the exclusion of the social body from political participation, engineered in the dictatorship, bears a phantastmatic form in the early years of democracy, which can be read in photographic production from these years. See Snyder, "Ghostly Subjectivities" in Toward a Cultural Archive of the Movida: Back to the Future, William Nichols and Rosi Song, eds., Plymouth, UK, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013, 307-32.
[6] “Franco es la
ley precisamente porque él es la suspensión de la ley que aplica a aquellos a
su alrededor pero no a sí mismo o a los que son como él. Esto es, él es el
estado de excepción puesto que mientras aplica la ley él está excluido de su
entramado, de su territorio de funcionamiento,” as a sovereign power that
defines and is always already excluded from the law he mandates (“Historia a
contrapelo” 48). For Moreiras-Menor, the historicist point of view that upholds
the model Transition to democracy as a sign of progress, “no ha sido capaz de
tomar en cuenta los fascismos subyacentes (neo-fascismos) que todavía forman
parte de nuestra vida cotidiana en el mundo contemporáneo” (La estela del tiempo, 124). See
Moreiras-Menor, “Historia a contrapelo: Estado de Excepción y
temporalidad en la Transición española,” Quimera
279 (Feb 2007) 46-50. See also,
Moreiras-Menor, La estela del tiempo.
[7] Paradoxically, however, this
circumstance implies a crisis for the state, for the greater its retreat from
democratic forms and procedures, the greater difficulties it faces in
legitimating its field of possible action as democratic. Selective impunity, in
other words, proves a delicate balance for the powerful, at once consolidating
relations of power while undermining their legitimacy, thereby opening up
greater room for maneuver in opposition to them, even within the state. After
all, as Foucault reminds his readers, no relation of power is ever absolute or
total.
[8] Nicos Poulantzas, “The
Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State” in The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State, Ed. James
Martin, London & New York, Verso, 2008, 294-322.
[9] For a review of Poulantzas’s
work in relation to a tradition of Marxist criticism, see Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, Stanley Aronowitz and
Peter Pratsis, eds., Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 2002, 105-42.
[10] Nicos Poulantzas, “Towards a Relational
Theory of Power?” in State, Power,
Socialism, London & New York, Verso, 2000, 146-53.
[11] Bob Jessop, “Globalization and the
National State,” Paradigm Lost: State
Theory Reconsidered, Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Pratsis, eds.,
Minneapolis, U of Minneapolis P, 2002, 185-220.
[12] Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place, University
Park, PA, Pennsylvania State UP, 1990.
[13] María
Fabra “El Constitucional se reafirma en la compatibilidad de la militancia de
Cobos” El País 2 Oct 2013 http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2013/10/02/actualidad/1380717905_793817.html
[14]
Poulantzas
[15] Respectively,
José Luis
Agudo, Xabier Fortes, Toni Garrido, Alicia G. Montano, Fran Llorente, Juan
Ramón Lucas, and Ana Pastor, to name a few.
[16] See Hooper, The New Spaniards,
“New Waves: TV and Radio” and G. Montano, La manipulación en television.
[17] Andreas Kalyvas, “The
Stateless Theory: Poulantzas’s Challenge to Postmodernism” in Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered,
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Pratsis, eds., Minneapolis, U of Minneapolis P,
2002, 105-42.
[19] Pilar
Santos “Montoro reconoce que le dijo a una diputada de CC: ‘Que caiga España, que
ya la levantaremos nosotros’” El
Periódico.com 19 July 2012 http://www.elperiodico.com/es/noticias/politica/montoro-palabras-diputada-espana-caiga-levantemos-2106068
[20] Bob Jessop, “The Strategic
Selectivity of the State: Reflections on a Theme of Poulantzas,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 25.1-2 (1999):
41-77.
[21] El País Madrid “Montoro me dijo: ‘Que caiga España que ya la levantaremos nosotros’” 31
May 2012. Web. http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2012/05/31/actualidad/1338484360_581201.html
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