State interventions in public space in Athens and the mediatization of the crisis: Sustaining the unsustainable using precarity as a tool

Abstract

The article argues that since December 2008, the continuous presence in public space in Athens and the spectacular mediatization in news reports, of various forms of the so-called anomie, as well as (since 2012) of its spectacular and violent repression by the police, were instrumentalized by the Greek austerity government in an attempt to enhance and manipulate already existing feelings of precarity among the population. Organized police operations in public space were turned into ‘media events’. Specifically, ‘affective precarity’ is considered as a way of demobilizing precarity as a politically and economically operative concept. The article adopts Lauren Berlant’s analysis of the relation between precarity and the austerity state.