efik eki Tatli

ALIEN IN TRANSITION AS A REFLECTION OF CAPITALIST

TOTALITARIANISM

Originally published in Reartikulacija, no. 3 (Reartikulacija, Ljubljana, 2008), edited by Marina

Grini

Some time ago, a few members of the Austrian transvestite band Menstruation
Monsters were attacked in front of a Zagreb nightclub after holding a concert there.
The attackers cursed them and shouted that they did not need any fags/gays in their
town, along with other offensive statements related to the sexual identity of the band
members. Although at first glance this situation might look like a classical
homophobic attack, in fact, it reflects a much deeper problem that spreads far beyond
the boundaries of sexually based violence. This incident reflects not only a social
pattern in which post-socialist society, through xeno-/homophobia, makes relative the
effects of the newly imposed class order brought on by the transition to capitalism,
but primarily reflects the very diabolical nature of perceptions of difference in
neoliberal capitalism, where difference is allowed to exist as such only when it is,
paradoxically, not a difference at all. In a situation where the once-existing Second
World has vanished into a void somewhere amid the dominant capitalist First World,
the West, and the Third World, a resource of rich battlefront territories, it is exactly
the concept of difference that has become subversive for the very core of the Western
neoliberal global capitalist system, which ultimately sees itself as a haven for
differences. Hence, this void created between the worlds is not a mere gap, not a
potentiality to be solved by economic means, as we are informed by mainstream
media, but a potentiality that could unmask the very nature of democracy that is
conditioned and framed by liberal capitalism and its demonic free market.

The Void

Lets take a brief look into a proper context in which the figure of an alien could be
explained. When we look at the void, we are in fact watching a process, which is
trying to cover the void, to monopolize it, to transcend it. Transcending this void in
Eastern and Southeastern Europe is known as a process of transition, that is, a
transition exclusively directed towards neoliberal capitalism, a process that asks for
political and military integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions and, above all, the
imposition of the free market as a default step for the transition to be finalized.
However, as globalization as a process of a void transcendence on a global level is
revealed primarily as a globalization of capital of freedom of movement for capital,
not for people it easily turns itself upside down into a re-articulation of the notion of
freedom within democracy itself; it is important to say that the void stages itself as a
traumatic point through which the articulation of Other (not First) world countries is
already planned in the first place. Hence, this is the manner in which neoliberal
capitalism makes us pay for its war for the imposition of post-ideological contexts
into both worlds (First and not First); the consequence of this process is the
production of a paradigmatic figure, which simultaneously lives in both worlds, the
figure of a stranger, immigrant or alien. This figure is produced because of capital
spreading to new physical territories; an immigrant, after multinational corporations
take over her/his local economical environment, has to act, and starts to break out and
ignite political conflict, precisely the opposite of what liberal capitalism desires. This
figure creates a context in which forms of life themselves start to create political
conflict.

To undertake a deeper look into this figure, we have to refer to Giorgio Agambens
forms of life. Bare life is life in itself, a pure medium of life that resembles todays
immigrant or alien, also known in Greek as Zoe. Bare life is not an a priori racial
category, although it is burdened with racist dogma. As an example, bare life is the
life of an African or Asian immigrant, a Mexican worker in Arizona, all those killed
in Iraq by the occupation forces, homosexuals in Poland, Frenchmen of African
descent in France, Serbians or Bosnians in Croatia or both, Croatians and Roma
peoples in Slovenia or Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians in Serbia, etc.
However, it is also a white Western European during an anti-globalization riot, that is,
anybody not fitting into a widely accepted form of sovereignty. Bare life is to be
understood under the name of Homo Sacer, a figure in the position of, as Agamben
says, the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice.1

On the other hand, we have life with style, also known in Greek as Bios, that is life
usually from the First World of capital; I might add, life produced by the sovereignty
of capital; this is not a life with humanist or political backgrounds. Bios, life with
style, is exactly that, life with a style, an a-racial and non-political category included
in the process of production, not only in the meaning of a commodity, but as a result
of the production of sovereignty of capital itself whether it rapes in Iraq, accepts
parliamentary elections as ultimate democratic practice, or just ignorantly lives its life
creating its own commodity. The alien occurs exactly between these two forms of life
bare life and life with style or modal life. As bare life can become the object of
violence without sanction, it becomes a certain model of violence, which does not
contribute to the sovereignty that generates the violence. Modal life (bios), on the
other hand, is also an object of violence, but violence that does contribute to the
sovereignty from which it emerged. A banal example is, ten dead immigrants do not
mean anything, but 10 dead soldiers do. The alien, however, is on the crossroads, and
he or she can choose only the modality of violence that will be brought upon him/her.
To clarify this, lets take a look in context. In times when the idiotic end of
ideology is heralded by mainstream media, and when all of society has become a
factory (Antonio Negri), only a momentum of interaction between forms of life can
be seen as relevant and socially dynamic.

It is the friction, a constant interaction but never a collision among these

paradigmatic forms of life along the sides of the void that represents todays social
dynamics. This friction is a mere compensation for the social order which does not
want to recognize that its decay is due to the lack of ethics of liberal capitalism, for in
the final analysis it is the very neoliberal capitalist ethics that prevents social issues
from becoming a political factor while organizing it as a pathetic collective of
subjectivities caught in a struggle for individual positioning within the mentioned
friction. These same subjectivities, of course, desperately protect their positions by
defending these same ethics from their exposition as ideology. Their trauma is that the

1
Agamben, according to Festus, in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1998), p. 48.
same could be exposed as trauma. As Lacan used to say, trauma does not cheat, but
the problem is that trauma lacks. This trauma of the exposition of trauma,
paraphrasing Agamben, The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an
absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally
expresses precisely both lifes subjection to a power over death and lifes irreparable
exposure in the relation of abandonment.2

It is exactly the relationship of stigmatization over bare life and modal life that is
aggressively imposed today by neoliberal capitalist sovereign monopoly over the
definition of life itself as the only political process or conflict. This process is a
process that consists of paradigms, or practices, if you want, of exclusion and
inclusion. Meaning, life with style is not by default included into the production
matrix of capital, nor is bare life by default excluded, but the positioning of both
depends on acceptance of the same relationship to stigmatization by an object of
exploitation itself. This means that neither bare life nor modal life, life with style,
position themselves as political subjects, but as objects of stigmatization.

As an example, if we go back to the story from the beginning of this chapter, we see
that the southeast European subject (in Croatia) as an object of capitalist exploitation,
or as a subjectivity that wants to become the same object, reacts toward the foreign
body of a transvestite. Transvestite is not a bare life, although it is not completely life
with style either. Meaning, its political potential exists between these two biosocial
extremes. This figure in the transitional state of Croatia is recognized by a
homophobe as a threat not because it, as transvestite, does not represent some political
option, but because it indirectly does. As Croatia is a country that desperately wants
to represent itself as a country with Western values, it is at the same time a country
whose dominant sentiment is burdened with very strong religious dogma, archaic
social values and strong xenophobic sentiment, where being a Westerner, within such
an arrangement, turns out to be quite painful. The gesture of the attackers is therefore
an illustration of resentment as an ambivalent feeling where an object of adoration is
simultaneously adored and hated; in the case of West, it is adored, but simultaneously
hated as well, because of the archaic sentiments preventing the embrace of the
heritage of the West in its totality. To be fully clear, the perception of the West by a
dominant sentiment in the transitional state is also a perception of a West that
supports the homophobic, in general, discriminatory phantasm of the West. This
attack occurs not only as a compensation for the trauma one experiences in a country
that freed itself from under one master state socialism only to find itself in the
jaws of another, but something much more dangerous capitalism (in which the
figure of the attacker fails to become bios), but also as a result of the refusal to
acknowledge the meaninglessness of this passage a lact.

On the one hand, the attackers subjectivity, as a proper illustration of the dominant
social pattern in Croatia, still relies heavily on conservative religious dogma that
desperately wants to perceive itself as a nation of Western culture, but still cannot
accept what it sees too much of in the West, because Western decadence would
presumably destroy the countrys tradition. On the other hand, the perceived West as
the First World that will impose segregation and market-based discrimination is,
however, warmly welcomed. As Nietzsche would say, this subjectivity does not act, it

2
Ibid., p. 53.
reacts as an object of resentment towards its phantasm of the First World, attacking
the very figure which is in the West neither excluded bare life nor the fully integrated
bios, but it is the relation subsumed under the object of stigmatization, that is itself an
alien in the West. It reacts precisely the way the West would, but usually does not
have to, as the West already has a surplus of the form of bare life that is the pathetic
position of Eastern Europes societies that crave to become bios, to become fully
integrated, as a matrix of exploitation by Western liberal capitalism. The role of the
homophobic attacker from Zagreb is therefore similar to the role of the Pakistani
secret service, which Americans let interrogate (read: torture) captured Iraqi
insurgents.

Another example of being the locus of fundamental contradictions (from which

transitional societies suffer from) may be found in some reactions by Croat citizens to
Steven Spielbergs film Schindlers List. When it was aired on Croatian national TV
for the first time a couple of years ago, a number of citizens started to call the TV
station complaining about the subtitles, which were in Serbian and not in the Croatian
language. Although there are only minor differences between the two languages, it is
bizarre that someone wants to see a movie about racial and ethnic extermination while
simultaneously complaining about a couple of different words coming from the
language of another ethnic group. It is the very present sentiment, which accepts a
cultural product just because it comes from the First World, and at the same time,
aggressively reacts to what is a denkverbot (forbidden thinking) for the First World.

Therefore, the attackers gesture is, mutatis mutandis, the very role of post-socialist
Eastern European society, but is also the role of the First World itself, in the process
of rationalization of a new master signifier, the ethics of liberal capitalism. As
Marina Grini noted, the role of this subject is dual; it is an ontological totality in the
absolute narrowing of subjectivity and a break-up of the subject with reality.3 Here we
come across the analogy, also presented by Grini, in which, like in a Hollywood
movie, a protagonist after an action scene that has made a mess on the worktable,
instead of precisely cleaning the table, erases and destroys everything in an act
popularly known as cleansing the terrain.4

Eastern European bare life, craving to become bios, to become the object of capitalist
exploitation, therefore positions itself towards the very void that separates the two
worlds and towards the very life that represents this same void, the life of an alien. In
this manner, these not fully included subjectivities of Eastern Europeans relate to the
non-proclaimed liberal capitalist ideology where, precisely because the same is not
proclaimed as such, it reacts, cleanses the terrain against those who are perceived
by the same ideology as a non-productive part of the First World matrix, as in this
case, a transvestite. Bare life in transition to bios cleanses the terrain for its master
so the master does not have to do it. In this process, southeast European bare life
positions itself voluntary as Europes surplus after which it targets not only its
presumed cause of being bare life, but also attacks the presumed lack of the First
World it craves.

3
Marina Grini, Re-politicizing art, theory, representation and new media technology, Schriften der
Akademie der bildenden Knste Wien, Vienna, Vol. 6 (Schlebrgge.Editor, Vienna, 2008).
4
Ibid.
Speaking of a void, we now see that the relationship of the dominant First World
ethics towards an alien which is pathetically mimicked by southeast European
satellite states is in fact a First World relationship towards the void where it does
not overcome the emptiness of a void, but makes it more bearable. The position of
southeast European subjectivity towards the alien, as a figure of the void, does indeed
resemble a role created by Tom Waits (acting as Renfield) in Coppolas movie
Dracula from 1992. Tom Waits as Renfield, the hapless slave of Dracula, who
miserably sits in a dungeon where he eats insects and bugs, eats life and everything in
order to please his master, who has promised to make him immortal, a vampire.
Interestingly enough, it should be pointed out that todays southeast European nations
refer to socialism as the dungeon of nations, the prison of nations. Southeast
European subjectivity eats the dignity of a life (as an insect) and represents the void
as a consequence of globalization of capital, so that its new master, capitalism the
vampire accepts it as an equal, but in nothing else other than in devouring the life of
those that do not fit into the liberal capitalist definition of life. This is an example of
the southeast European perception of a stranger where the stranger is produced
because of an inability to accept new class antagonism and market-based segregation.
The sadistic relationship towards aliens (others) functions as a perverted dislocation
of trauma from class to the register of cultural differences. Here is the point wherein
the Eastern European transition unmasks itself as only a transition toward the
cannibalistic capitalist machine, and not toward any romanticized version of
democracy.

Democracy as Ideology

Democracy that is brought up in such a context by the same liberal capitalism is not
its mask, but a diabolical shadow, a killer clown, that ultimately makes relative the
effects of capital by precisely imposing the relationship of stigmatization as the
relationship in which human rights violations, in order to protect democracy, becomes
a norm. It does not matter if we are talking about communists, transvestites, gays or,
as it always turns out, Jews. (As Croatians first president Franjo Tudjman, in the
process of establishing democracy in Croatia, once proudly stated, he is happy his
wife is not a Serb or a Jew.) As Alain Badiou claims, democracy is a norm encrypted
into the relationship of subjects towards the liberal state. In the context of Croatia,
democracy is a norm encrypted into the freedom of a subject allowed to act against a
presumed enemy of an object of its discriminatory phantasm. The object of this
phantasm is, of course, freedom, but no other freedom than the one of sadistically
acting against those who do not share the same phantasm. In the same way, bare life
becomes life with style when it attacks the object that separates the bare from bios.
However, the predicament of democracy as a system of equality and individual
responsibility implies the inclusion of an alien into it, partially, though what has to be
left out is the recognition of included difference as a difference. Even if the neoliberal
regime officially insists that the other should stay different, it segregates it
immediately if it sees it as authentically different, and encourages the difference only
if it is already part of the segregated difference. This is excellently presented through
the ideological bulletin board: the movie industry.

As Marina Grini noted regarding Ridleys Scott movie Alien, the human-beast
relationship is allowed only when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is revealed as being
half-human, a hybrid, not a human being.5 Are we not witness to this kind of
ideological background in todays democracies, which are only framed by the
utilitarian context and objectified functioning of the law? French government recently
proposed that immigrant families with visa applications for entering France undergo
DNA testing to prove that the application is genuine. Although the tests will not be
compulsory, it is highly likely that immigrants who reject the DNA testing will be
rejected as well.6

What can we learn from this practice besides that it is highly hypocritical? By
indirectly forcing an alien (the figure that exposes the void) to undergo DNA tests, the
regime firstly creates a biologically determined segregation and, secondly, it reminds
the native alien of his Third World roots, by letting it know that it supports its
integration in this relationship of stigmatization, but with the presupposition that the
alien accepts fully this relation as well. This is not about the clash of civilization,
the clash functions only as a device for rationalizing the effects of globalization.
This DNA example is very much in line with Etienne Balibars notion of meta-
racism, where meta-racism is acceptance of the other, but with the presupposition
that she or he stays far enough away so as not to endanger the commodity of a bios
(of a white man, if you want). When we mention France, the problem with the French
suburb riots is therefore the problem of an alien par excellence, because
fundamentally, the clash was not generated by religious dogma, but was the result of
market-based segregation of a certain population that failed to become included into
the capitalist relationship of stigmatization. The fact that this population is excluded
from French society made them a political factor, and this is what the regime finds
disturbing. Neoliberal capitalist ideology therefore transcends the form of old racist
categorization with the recognition of bare life as difference only when it tries to
become bios, if not, then it treats it as an alien toward which it will act in a totalitarian
manner. As Alain Badiou said, I will accept your difference only if you become me.
Bare life therefore CAN become different, but an alien cannot.

As argued by Agamben, The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted

through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of
the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between
sacrifice and homicide.7

This claim does not primarily refer to institutionalized religion as such, but to a
predicament of neoliberal culture where God is the commodity. In addition, Agamben
adds that Homo Sacer is an object of intense violence that transcends the sphere of
law and the sphere of sacrifice. As such, as an object of intense violence, Homo Sacer
still does not reveal itself as an alien, as a stranger; it only does so when it refuses to
accept the relationship of stigmatization, whatever religion it belongs to. If we look at
the latest number of dead in Iraq, it is not an exaggeration to say that the whole nation
could be named as Homo Sacer, though they are not aliens. They are not sacrificed to
democracy in whose name they were killed, but on the contrary, those who killed
them have been sacrificed to democracy in order that bare life being killed accepts

5
Marina Grini, Estetika kibersvijeta i uinci derealizacije (Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, Centar za
kulturu i komunikaciju Konica, Sarajevo, 2005), p. 79.
6
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2169068,00.html
7
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press,
Stanford California, 1998), p. 53.
this same democracy. In this context, we can state that the emancipation of African
Americans started the moment they were co-opted for the American Civil War. To
summarize, bare life that can be killed but cannot be sacrificed is not precisely an
alien. Bare life is not by default excluded from society in the form of
racial/sexual/economic or cultural segregation and neither is bios by default, included.
Even worse, bare life is gradually being included while bios remains included in the
capitalist matrix, with both subjected to stigmatization and subjected to becoming an
alien if they start to make their agenda political, i.e., if they claim political power,
which is not within the ruling discourse of the liberal capitalist ideology. Hence, the
alien in transition to bios OR to bare life desiring to become bios, ceases to be an
alien. The alien who wants to be included loses its political agenda and gets its
inclusion, but only as an apolitical commodity, which bios already takes as its primal
feature. Emancipation unfortunately turns out to be in such a case nothing else but a
demand for inclusion into the same ideology. Therefore, the process of emancipation
in the context of culture, that is the neoliberal capitalist ideology, makes this process
visible.

Emancipation is Discrimination

Neoliberal capitalism as a totalitarian system starts to unmask itself when it starts to

represent bare life as a value, as a commodity, and confirms its inclusion (an alien is a
life form that cannot be presented as commodity). It does so in the field that is
currently its most potent territory of capitalist colonization, or the field of culture. We
could say that the alien is a life form un-presentable as a value or a commodity. If
we take a look at what happened to the perception of major emancipation movements,
we see that instead of political agendas, only life as form of life, as a cultural object,
not as a political subject, has been emancipated. We do not witness a re-articulation of
Martin Luther Kings politics as a tool for emancipation, but, as is the case in the
Kevin Hill TV show, a figure of an African-American who is a successful lawyer, has
a gay friend, hosts cool parties in his fancy apartment and fights for corporate justice.
That is a banal example of how bare life by itself accepts being turned into bios, under
the parole of a successful emancipation, not to mention the decay of the hip-hop
culture that from a politically motivated agenda in the late 1980s has turned itself into
a preposterous celebration of the consumer life style. The First Worlds demand from
all those who want to be included in it is to abort every political agenda that was not
born within the ruling capitalist neoliberal discourse. Instant emancipation as another
name for inclusion of bare life, and prosecuted aliens, does not however include
authentic cultural difference(s) that could result in politically articulated demands, but
includes only such differences that serve to present democracy as a tolerant social
system.

Therefore, an alien as a bare life that has not been included, must be recoded,
converted into a differential that should serve as a position through which not only the
sovereignty of a state will reaffirm itself, but through which the sovereignty of capital
will reconfirm itself as an incessantly hungry matrix in search of new boundaries to
be conquered. An example of such a process is the British toy company that produces
toys of bacteria of Ebola, HIV and similar microbes (that, of course, represent the
perception of Africans, Arabs, Orientals, Jews and others in Europe) and serves as a
perfect illustration that capitalist totalitarianism must first redesign the other to
make it acceptable and not threatening. It literally produces a foreign body as a toy, an
object of pleasure, an object of enjoyment that is in stark contradiction to those
already included.

In the void space in between worlds, political conflict has been abolished in the name
of culture, in the name of a territory in which sterile practices of pursuing life styles
and their exposition to others as an ideology becomes socialized at such a level that it
becomes its only politics. In the context of pop culture, we could just look at popular
TV shows like Sex and the City. This series that exploits the nature of relations in
spaces between parties, sex and buying Manolo Blahniks shoes, rapes the notion of
individuality by praising individual action as a nihilist reaction to un-formal demand.
In other words, it monopolizes the definition of individuality, integrates it into the
norm and then celebrates the norm as norm destruction. By doing so, the character of
Carrie Bradshaw is far more dangerous than Bush, Angela Merkel, Sarkozy and Blair
all put together. What does it have to do with the notion of a stranger? Well, it is an
illustration or representation of a demand liberal capitalism makes on bare life: for it
to be coded into the matrix as subjectivity and then to delegate the definition of that
subjectivity to the objective matrix of the hyper-capitalist immaterial factory, a
factory for the production of nothing.

As Hegel claimed, the universal will goes into itself and is a single, individual will
to which universal law and work stand opposed. But this individual consciousness is
no less directly conscious of itself as universal will; it is aware that its object is a law
given by that will and a work accomplished by it; therefore, in passing over into
action and in creating objectivity, it is doing nothing individual, but carrying out the
laws and functions of the state.8

Therefore, bare life, while still excluded from the capitalist production matrix, is a
zero phase of life with style; bare life can become bios, can be included only by
rejecting its political agenda. If it does not want to, or does not recognize the choice
which-is-not-a-choice-at-all then it becomes an alien, foreign body that by exposing
the nature of the void between the two worlds exposes the very ethics of both worlds.
It is the friction among these two (bios or bare life), under which bare life should
become bios, that allows capitalism to impose the monopoly over the definition of
life. Therefore, emancipation, as we can see, has become a discriminatory practice
when it operates through total submission of bare life to bios, where subjectivity will
be nothing else but a reflection of perversion of the system to which it has invested its
subjectivity. An alien is an alien because it refuses to do so. Gayatri Spivaks
notorious claim that the exclusion of the other from Europe is very important as
production of the European epistemic regimes is based on the subaltern that cannot
speak, should be upgraded with the claim that the other can speak, but all it can say
is yes. This is the spiritus movens of the First World as well as the core of
democracy itself. What should be done? Bare life should not become bios, but instead
it should become an alien, a creature of conflict, by organizing its own political
agenda, by not letting the liberal capitalist establishment act in its place.

8
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977), p. 358.
Original G.W.F. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes, (Jubilaumsausgabe. Hrsg. V. G. Lasson, 2.
Durchgesehene Auflage, Leipzig, 1921).