governmentality – To Archeio

Austerity Discourses in “Der Spiegel” Journal, 2009–2014

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:54 +0000

This article looks at the ways mainstream media discuss austerity and its failure to reach its
proclaimed goals, to reduce public debt and to boost productivity in the heavily indebted countries of
the Eurozone’s periphery. This study analyzed Der Spiegel’s articles presenting the crisis and austerity in Europe, focusing on the Greek case, from 2009 until 2014. A thematic analysis was developed in
the study a broad corpus of articles, focusing on the main ideas they unfold. Deploying critical political
economy literature, critical cultural theory and critical media studies literature, the article criticizes the
neoliberal hegemony of the EU’s crisis politics and foregrounds the role of mainstream media, including progressivist or objectivist ones such as Spiegel, in the reproduction of neoliberal ideas that expand far beyond the crisis, to produce the institutions, social relations, beliefs and subjectivities for a
post-crisis configuration of capitalism. The article concludes that Spiegel, like other mainstream media,
produce a biopolitical policing of the crisis’ exceptionalized subjects (the citizens of indebted countries)
and the implementation of crisis-politics by creating a public “structure of feeling” related to the hegemonic crisis’ rationales. These rationales are further connected to the development of the new neoliberal subjectivity, which is an objective of the crisis-reforms, such as austerity regimes. In effect, mainstream media discourses reproduce the hegemonic frames of the

Diagnosing Europe: Greece, Macedonia, and the meaning of crisis

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000

Accounts of crisis in Europe have proliferated since late 2009. This article investigates the relationship between the diagnosis of crisis and the cohesion and enlargement of the ‘Eu- ropean project’ in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article adopts Michel Foucault’s understanding of diagnosis as a strategic activity of language in order to re-construct the diagnostic discourse in relation to ongoing events in Greece and the Republic of Mace- donia. Diagnostic practice produces accounts of crisis that are clinical, moralising, and pre- scriptive, affixing meanings to complex and overdetermined events in order that they can be acted upon. Diagnoses of the crises in Greece and Macedonia converge in their iden- tification of political and cultural features of the national political economy in need of ex- pert correction. The diagnosis of crisis emerges as an essential feature of European Union governmentality, which functions to delimit the bounds of political contestation in times of uncertainty and upheaval in favor of technocratic interventions.

Governmentalities of Urban Crises in Inner-city Athens, Greece

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:42 +0000

Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.