Deadlocks Or Breackthroughs. Tracing The Movement Of Indignacion

15. 11. 2011, Conrad Lluis Martell

Deadlocks or Breakthroughs?

Tracing the Movement of Indignación

Abstract

In the light of severe crises and stark politicizations, Spain stands, yet again, on the bridge between the European and Arab juncture. The movement of indignación (indignation) questions Spain’s state of affairs and brings manifold demands to the fore. In the presentarticle, I trace the pathways of Spain’s wave of protests. My guiding thesis is that Spain exhibits a sui generis laboratory that interlaces two parallel developments: on the one hand, the current politicization conveys a threefold crisis of Spain’s political system, neo-liberalism and Left forces. On the other hand, the movement of indignación – putting forward a subversive populist strategy – renewspleads for a sovereign ‘people’ that query the status quo from within. To flesh out these processes, I advance a particular theoretical approach, whose concepts, inherited from Marxism and post-structuralism, are grouped around the intuition (what is not to say a full-fledged approach) of an ‘ironic historicism’. In addition to describing the current state of affairs of this ‘Spanish Labyrinth’, Ioutline its historical roots, thus sticking to a genealogical reading of Spain’s current situation.


Key words


hegemony, ideology, Marxism, neo-liberalism, populism, social movements, social theory, Spain





















A hurricane of farcicality, everywhere and in every form, is atpresent raging over the lands of Europe. (…) The only efforts that are being made are to escape from our real destiny, to blind ourselves to its evidence, to be deaf of its deep appeal, to avoid facing up to what has to be. We are living in a comic fashion, all the more comic the more apparently tragic is the mask adopted.
(José Ortega y Gasset, 1994, 105)We are sleeping on a volcano. Do you not see that the earth trembles anew? A wind of revolution blows. The storm is on the horizon (Alexis de Tocqueville, 1996, 9)


I. Introduction


The two leitmotifs of the present article have been cut out from their original historical context. The former quotation, from Ortega, was written in the anxious inter-war periodand aimed at a general diagnosis of its zeitgeist (Tuñón de Lara, 1973) whereas the latter, from Tocqueville, refers back to the bourgeois revolutions of 1848. All the same, if read in a naive and decontextualized way, the quotations could well express our contemporary state of affairs. On the southern side of the Mediterranean, the Arab Spring stands up for core democratic ideals: liberty andequality. In this and in its passionate, collective enthusiasm, the Arab Spring resembles the European revolutions of the 19th century envisaged by Tocqueville. Standing in stark contrast, Ortega saw the Europe of the 1920s in the midst of a decline that spread over political, economic and social realms. In a certain way, Ortega’s observations could also pinpoint our contemporary state of affairs(Buarque, 2011). Where is fervour for the European project, liberal ideals or a lifestyle revolving around flexibility in labour and cocooning in leisure? If seen from a pessimistic viewpoint, Ortega’s dictum could hold true yet again. In Western Europe, the long-standing ideas of the past have become fragile, whereas visionary or normative perspectives are rare to find.
However, we should becareful about these all too monolithic judgements. Amongst the myriad of events of 2011, the sudden political awakening of Spanish ‘people’ seems particularly remarkable, as it clearly lies crossways between the fervent Arab uprisings (Anderson, 2011, 5-15) and the European disheartenment. On the one hand, the economic crisis has turned Spain, a European Eldorado during the late 1990s and early...