Becoming Precarious in the Age of Neoliberal Biopolitics

by Leandros Kyriakopoulos, Theodosia Marinoudi, and Erasmia Samikou

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Conducting our research project in Greece in these times of crisis gives us the all-depressing advantage of working with a vast array of thematic issues and fieldwork occurrences. Despite the abundance of research questions one might raise concerning the current actualization of European debt-crisis in Greece, there is something very specific that we want to share as a thematic focus of our study in this dystopian landscape of “crisis”: a formation of affect. By permeating a thick assemblage of discourses, political decisions, legislatures, embodiments and common sense reasoning, this formation produces and determines the lives that need and deserve protection from the pernicious effects of crisis. In other words, we focus on a question concerning regimes of truth, political injunctions, and forces of subjugation that determine whose life is livable and, more precisely, whose is not. This question, in a sense, deals with the ongoing dispossessions that have occurred in the context of crisis, on a subjective as well as inter-subjective and collective level. We will attempt to illustrate the ways in which such dispossessions result from a neoliberal governance wherein the apparatus of security plays a prominent role. The production of unlivable lives, insecure and dangerous, becomes a vehicle, and, in fact, an affective formation, through which neoliberal politics of crisis-management seek to gain some legitimacy and efficacy. In this context, crisis-management is, above all, a production of a certain order of intelligibility, one which constitutively involves the regulation of human vulnerability and precarity.

In order to elaborate on this line of questioning, we deploy, as a starting point, the recent enforcement of the regulation on transmission of infectious diseases. This particular regulation applies to HIV among the “priority groups” of sex workers, intravenous drug users, homeless people and undocumented immigrants. It was introduced earlier this year, but repealed shortly after due to incongruity with international guidelines on HIV testing and protection of human rights. The most disturbing example of the enforcement of this regulation, which triggered a storm of protests and dissent, was the detainment and HIV testing of several foreign women suspected of being illegal sex workers. Of those taken into custody, 27 were imprisoned their identities and HIV status subsequently published on the police website and several mass media outlets. Suggestively, the re-enforcement of a once stigmatized regulation came along with the praises by the German government (as a paternal figure par excellence of the European Union), which applauded the Ministry of Health’s determination for acting in the interest of “public health” and in the direction of much-awaited “reforms.” We will use this event as a point of entry in our attempt to shed light on the multiple dissociations, exclusions and abjections upon which the “new” affect of belonging is premised.

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The video above by Reel News looks at immigrant life in Greece. Refugees trying to reach safety in Europe get stuck in Greece: Once in Europe, they have to remain in the country they first arrived in. They speak about lack of basic support like housing, clothing and food and daily racist abuse. Not only by fascists like Golden Dawn, but also ordinary Greek citizens – and the police.

On the 18th of July 2013, a police operation supported by ambulance vehicles of the city of Thessaloniki targeted trans people for prosecution. The transsexuals laid down on the streets in an act of protest and civic disobedience.
On the 18th of July 2013, a police operation supported by ambulance vehicles of the city of Thessaloniki targeted trans people for prosecution. The transsexuals laid down on the streets in an act of protest and civic disobedience.


Injured immigrants who worked at the strawberry farms of the Peloponnese. They were shot by their employers after asking to be paid (their salaries were six months late). Of the 200 workers who voiced their demands, 29 were shot, with seven of them having severe chest injuries. After the incidents, these farms have continued conducting business as usual.  Injured immigrants who worked at the strawberry farms of the Peloponnese. They were shot by their employers after asking to be paid (their salaries were six months late). Of the 200 workers who voiced their demands, 29 were shot, with seven of them having severe chest injuries. These farms have continued conducting business as usual.  Amateur photographs of neo-Nazi attacks on immigrants in the region of Agios Panteleimonas, central Athens.  Amateur photographs of neo-Nazi attacks on immigrants in the region of Agios Panteleimonas, central Athens.

We seek to put forth a critical analysis of the rapidly changing Greek welfare state throughout the last four decades. Asking the question of what if the Greek health care system was “always” in a state of crisis, long overdue for reform (not in the sense of neoliberal shrinkage of the public space) – much before the official announcement of the Greek debt crisis in 2009.- and through those years known to the Greek public sphere as Metapolitefsi (where Greece has dedicated itself to the vision of the EU). With this question we seek to ground the dominant neoliberal narratives on the incrimination of the “previous”, prior to crisis, status quo. Therefore, employing this brief genealogy of the welfare state since 1974, we try to historicize today’s implicit and explicit political rhetoric on the viability of the body; on recognition of suffering. It is in this manner that we wish to examine the debt crisis as a primary neoliberal tool for social and economic redistribution.; as an opportunity for strengthening the privatization processes and state reforms with all the “inevitable” by-products of inequality, exclusion and marginality. We chose to focus on vulnerabilities in the years of crisis, drawing primarily on the problematics of biopolitics/necropolitics, neoliberal governance, medical anthropology and anthropology of social suffering. Through this conceptual assemblage, we will dwell on the “common sense” order that makes the detachment from the life of abjected Others possible.

The "cleansing" of open markets by the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn.” Targets of these attacks were shops and stands owned by immigrants.   The "cleansing" of open markets by the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn.” Targets of these attacks were shops and stands owned by immigrants.

In the framework of this examination of the affective apparatuses that make crisis intelligible and its governmental management acceptable, we use 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. Thus, we follow subjects with disabilities and chronic diseases who – in order to survive – depend on welfare state benefits; we discuss the police enterprises for “cleansing” Athens from the undocumented immigrants (“Xenios Zeus”) and substance-users (“Thetis”) by putting them in detention centers-camps; we ask about society’s tolerance of xenophobic attacks against immigrants; we examine the state’s involvement in the slave-like conditions of undocumented immigrant work; and lastly, we are interested in the wide-scale expansion of homelessness, the demonization of local activism by the media, and the everyday attacks on immigrants, gays, artists, leftists and academics by the neo-Nazi group. Such ethnographic examples represent multiple aspects of our research focus. More specifically, they point to subjects whose lives have always been in a state of precarity, in the sense that they occupy – permanently, momentary or occasionally – a space of subjection and abjection; such spaces are reactivated by the neoliberal politics of austerity and dispossession.

Using the Greek flag as a baton. Most of the neo-Nazi activities are tolerated by the police.   Using the Greek flag as a baton. Most of the neo-Nazi activities are tolerated by the police.   Images from the police operation “Xenios Zeus”  Images from the police operation “Xenios Zeus”

As it can be easily assumed, discourses about the economic debt crisis in Greece have dominated everyday life. In order to better situate ourselves vis-à-vis the field of our research, we came up with a multi-sited research methodology. In addition to conducting interviews with healthcare employees and patients, we attended academic events, conferences and several workgroups, and have taken part in demonstrations and activist actions. We also collected visual material, newspaper articles and photos, followed-up on broadcast, social media posts and discussions. Overall, we explore the most intense aspects and events of this turbulent field, focusing on the ways in which precarity and livability are distributed and regulated.

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Suggested Readings
Butler, Judith and Athanasiou, Athena. Dispossession: The performative in the political, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Das, Veena. Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary, California: University of California Press, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. The birth of biopolitics: Collège de France Course Lectures 1978-1979. translated by Graham Burchell, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. Translated by A.M. Berrett, Janet Roitman and Murray Last, Steven Rendall, California: University of California Press, 2001.
Taussig, Michael. The magic of the state. New York: Routledge, 1997.