In the framework of this examination of the affective apparatuses that make “crisis” intelligible and its governmental management acceptable, we used a repository of ethnographic material in order to ground these apparatuses on the collective sense of self, nation and belonging that produces the human debris of “crisis”. We followed subjects with disabilities and chronic diseases who depend for their survival on the welfare state benefits, we discussed the police enterprises for “cleansing” Athens from undocumented immigrants (operation “Xenios Zeus”) and substance-users (operation “Thetis”) by instating them in detention centers-camps, we explored ethnocentrism through xenophobic attacks against immigrants; we examined the state’s involvement in the slave-like conditions of undocumented immigrant work, and lastly, we focused on the wide-scale expansion of homelessness, the demonization of local activism by the mass media and the everyday attacks on immigrants, gays, anarchists, leftists and academics by the neo-Nazi groups. Such ethnographic examples represent multiple aspects of our research focus. They point to subjects whose lives have always been in a state of precarity, in the sense that they (permanently, momentary or occasionally) occupy spaces of subjection and abjection; spaces that are reactivated by the neo-liberal politics of austerity and dispossession.
In order to better situate ourselves vis-à-vis the field of our focused interest, we had come up with a multi-sited research methodology. In addition to conducting interviews with a broad network of doctors, patients, of the healthcare landscape, we also attended academic events, conferences and several workgroups, we took part in demonstrations and activist actions, we collected visual material, newspaper articles and photos, and we followed-up broadcast, social media posts and discussions. In all, we explored the most intense aspects and events of this turbulent field, focusing on the ways in which precarity and livability are distributed and regulated.
A brief genealogy of the Greek “state of emergency” may give us the opportunity to understand how the “crisis” is not a starting point for the production of precarity, exclusion or marginality, but rather the “critical event” which opens and legitimizes the possibility of neoliberal governance (see Das 1995). In other words, we tried to explore how the “crisis” is the biopolitical tool that allows the transformation of the political impossible into a new possibility and “opportunity”. This becomes even more obvious when one examines the public landscape of emergency that is under a crucial process of restructuring right now in Greece: the Greek welfare state, which has been stigmatized as a source of corruption, social indifference and inefficiency and it was always in a “state of crisis”.
In fact, through this methodology we tried to examine how the political question of a public health care system based on solidarity and equity was posed after the fall of the junta in 1974 and the institution of parliamentary democracy or the so-called “Metapolitefsi”, since ‘80’s and how during that time of political transition, the question of public medical care could be posed as a common sense, a possible political claim, a possibility which arose only after a long history of exclusive medical system and a restricted access since 19th century. [1]
