Syntagma, Butler and the Power of the Performative

Judith Butler asks: What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of
presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject
reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to
those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies. Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination. In order for Syntagma to operate as a space of change and defiance; it stands that the people must adopt new strategies of change in their own agency in order to move away from the interpollative cult of contestation; In such a mass grouping of actors it is difficult to envisage from which exchange? what meeting? where would the development of a singularity of 'free flowing' agency come from?

"We are here / we are everywhere /we are an image from the future". 

To the spectator or audience this performative of collective desire seems to offer exactly this.A free flowing signifier of apolitical agency. Rather than anti- government and anti- neo liberal heroic tactics, the personal performative in this mise en scene opens the possiblity for continuous actor to actor creativity, a singularity of multiplicity in itself, vitalized through the daily acts and the actions of the everyday actors in their field of everyday operations.

What if there was no end?

An identity injunction hovers over Athens:” Gender, Democracy, Social harmony, Unity, Ethics and all the other huge structural state organs reeking of death for years have layed out their desperate arms. In today’s neo nihilistic repetitive, irrational, ultra-modern world, it’s easy to forget what inspiring actors human beings can be. If I empower myself to change and work on creative solutions together with others, perhaps through this collective singular exchange, P2P, a larger change is possible.


Ennoia Neoptolomous