ABSTRACT
While the previous chapters consider the means by which the environment manifests the imagery of crisis as it unfolds, this chapter engages more specifically with the manner in which individual bodies are likewise stigmatised by crisis. In political discourse, crisis is often characterised as contagion, in which the threat of spreading the ill effects such as deepening recession, growing poverty and the social deprivation that accompanies precarity justifies harsh measures to contain the problem. In many of the examples internationally of crisis-ridden nations, the threat of spill-over effects on neighbouring nations has justified the use of force, harsher measures and increased controls, particularly on borders. However, at the micro-level, there is also a sense that the conflation of crisis and contagion is performed on the body. It is not only a matter of engaging with how crisis and dispossession impact and influence the body in terms of health, for example. What is necessary is an understanding of the patterns of the embodiment of precarity. Relying on Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s (2013) characterisation of dispossession and Imogen Tyler’s characterisation of ‘revolting subjects’ (2013), this argument is considered through the visual sphere since there has been growing marginalisation of visibly ‘other’ bodies – in racial, ethnic and cultural terms. The examples I attend to concern how the visual serves as a disciplinary sphere. In other words, how costume, social performance and affiliations mark out certain bodies as hegemonic, with marginalised groups – in particular, migrants – visibly scored as dangerous, separate, and a ‘threat’ to the social corpus. The result, in Greece, has been an increase in threats, attacks and violence against minorities largely attributed to far-right extremists, but also legitimised by the failure of police to investigate. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ argument so central to sociology becomes evident in the hyper-performance of the statesanctioned discipline against minorities. Political philosopher Wendy Brown writes about walled states and the means by which the wall ostensibly performs the function of defining nation-state boundaries. One of her positions is that the concomitant policing of such boundaries is that it ‘react[s] to transnational, rather than international relations’ (2010: 21), and that the target of force is against individuals or ‘non-state transnational actors’ (2010: 21). This ostensibly means that the focus of defence is the body of
the individual who transgresses the border, the fence or the coast without permission, rather than being a matter of states relating to states. However, although walls and borders function to mark out nation states, her proposal is that we view walls or boundaries as more than simply reflecting a mentality of ‘us’ and ‘them’. It is more likely that there is an ‘increasingly blurred distinction between the inside and the outside of the nation itself ’ (2010: 25). In this view, the erosion between disciplinary functions of the state (and the collusion between the military and the police and, in the Greek case, the armed members of Golden Dawn, for example) signifies the diffuseness of the boundary. She continues:
as responses to contested and eroding state sovereignty, the new walls project an image of sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation that are at the same time undercut by their existence and also by their functional inefficacy. Not withstanding their strikingly physicalist and obdurate dimensions, the new walls often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict.
