Greece: A Short Voyage to the Land of Ourselves

by | 10 Jan 2011

The days of December 2008 seemed like a long, extremely long moment of rupture that shattered deeply and entirely our normality. We saw in front of us the possibility of things happening: thousands of people taking to the streets every day, writing hundreds of protests, occupying public buildings and interrupting theatre and music spectacles, performing severe acts of civil unrest and violent rioting that shattered spaces and symbols, which had been taken for firm and eternal realities. We shared space and anger and became engaged into a common fate. For a few days we saw our life as it is and we even saw ourselves taking part in it. And, then, this new world passed away and those days were followed by these days, and now we barely remember the images we created and lived in during December.

For instance, we saw the Athens Christmas tree, the ‘tallest and most beautifully lit up tree in all Europe’, standing in the Syntagma Square as every year. But this time it was guarded by heavily armed police forces in order to hold back angry citizens from burning it down or throwing rubbish against it. We realized, then, that the police was not guarding the tree. It was protecting us from facing the image of our reality denaturalized. We could now see what this represented and who we, who were besieging it, were, we could see the order of things naked, the terms of the game unmasked and instantly reverted.

A massive student protest was handled as a problem of ‘order’ by police forces; the rage of thousands of citizens was labeled as violence and extremism, social conflict was trivialized as irrational, and we, protesting, became the outcasts and were thrown out of the urban frame. Police repression, on the other hand, along with the brutal treatment of immigrants, a failing educational system and rising unemployment, degenerated institutions, injustice and corruption, inexistent social security, and rising economic crisis, all those were perfectly legitimated, presented as ‘common sense’, the pillars of our living democratic experience. The blissfully illuminated tree became a battlefield of stones and meanings. Collective action versus lawful peacefulness, nihilism versus democracy, citizens versus police and institutions, evil versus good.

Hopefully, however, the order of things was soon restored and a vicious crisis erupted. Now, while everything is collapsing, this absurd reality remains intact, anyone resisting is against common sense and beyond the law, and he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just…1Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. Or, in the words of Philip Roth, ‘My father chooses resistance, Rabbi Bengelsdorf chooses collaboration, and Uncle Monty chooses himself’, in Plot Against America, London, Random House, 2004, p 180–181 If that is the frame of understanding, then, what is to be done? What is to be said? What was said, what was done back then, in December 2008? …

*****

A) Those Days (December in Our Lives)

… Well, nothing, really.

1) Landing while Creating our Land…

We interrupt live state TV news broadcast and silently raise a banner to silence this representation of reality.2http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PK9lpMk7fiY&eurl, 16.12.2008, 15.12 am We call people to stop being viewers, to step out of their homes, to take to the streets, to resist. The black and white banner that some of us held for 80 seconds articulated no claim, no plan, and no certainty. No indication where to go, what to do, at what time, with who and for what. Against the anxiety to explain, against the guilt of failing to predict and foretell, to plan and rationalize and fit in, to summarize and nicely narrate violence and the common, we opposed our living thrill of collective and direct action against an absurd but confident reality and said nothing, really.

All different, All Together

Because, at the moment, we did not ask ourselves who were all those people next to us. We just knew those were our comrades, the thousands of frustrated secondary education and university students, unemployed graduates and employed boys and girls of the 600 Euros’ generation, and, then, the leftists and the anarchists, of course, it was them, but they seemed so many, didn’t’ they? But we could also see some pensioners, and for the first time immigrants being in the streets next to all of us, and, then, some middle-aged couples, they must have been parents anxious about their kids, or simply people fed up with everything, it was also the lady who cleans your office and the guy who works in the bank opposite your school, and this old woman on the balcony shouting against the cops, it was everybody, wasn’t’ it? During the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the looting, while shouting slogans and writing texts, attacking policemen, throwing stones, burning and disrupting circulation, during every single moment we felt part of a collective that did not have to ask its members anything more than them being there, because it was themselves and all together who actually were the event. And this was massive, extraordinary, beyond imagination, and, at the same time, the only thing that made sense.

Before December, each one of us belonged to a certain group, had a role, a function, a place, and all of those well defined parts formed an ensemble that also arranged things around into common and private, visible and the invisible, permissible and unthinkable, where properties, responsibilities, opinions and disputes were ascribed to specific socio economic or age groups. This way of counting at the same time implied the ways available for being, doing and saying and their appropriate limits. But once taking to the streets, we had no need to include ourselves within any group, to go closer to the ones resembling to us more in terms of skin colour, income, dress code, or ideology, no need to explain, or even imply who we are. No one was representative of any group, but everyone was represented; nothing of what we asked for could be articulated in the language of political demands, but everything was said. Our need for belonging somewhere that had made us part of a whole dissolved in a few seconds and we immediately stopped feeling dispersed and alone. We formed neighbourhood assemblies, primary unions, and groups of solidarity along with people we would have never imagined standing next to us. Being different was not a reason to depend on others and stay separate, but to mount a multiple collective not reducible to the strands that brought us together. By living an egalitarian moment, we changed in one night the terms of inclusion and exclusion. We were transformed from invisible solitary figures rambling around in our urban misery into political subjects that managed to challenge not the solutions that had to be applied to a situation, but the situation itself.

New Spaces

And then, there was nothing to say, because at the moment we did not ask ourselves where to go, with whom and what for. We just couldn’t but take to the streets with other people, even if there was no fixed meeting, no prearranged destination, no gathering point. We just felt impelled to start marching with our classmates towards the nearest police station, destroy the bank machine outside our office, smash the CCTV camera placed above our car, shout against the policeman standing every night at the corner of our home, remain immobile in the middle of the avenue when police forces were ordering us to move away, paint the ugly wall next to our friends’ house in colours that did not match and not to feel repelled by the sight of those cars in flame, even in our small cities, where we were not anonymous. We just had to talk to people from our neighbourhood we have never spoken to, to those young parents that live next door, to the maths student that rents the house in the corner and the lady that used to be a famous actress, speak with urgency about what is to be done, about this park that is about to be demolished and that abandoned public building outside which homeless people are sleeping, and break the door and intrude and feel responsible and start writing a text and create a web page and send mails and receive others from other places and communicate with everyone in the city and be part of them and all of them part of us. All of a sudden, we were there, next to other people, and it was the only thing that could have ever happened.

Before December, each one of us lived in one place and worked in another and we were all divided in groups that formed clear networks of representation that would address themselves to other groups higher in hierarchy that would decide when to vote, where to demonstrate, and how schools, workplaces, malls and bars, airports and supermarkets will be distributed around the country. This urban arrangement ascribed places to regular possibilities and prohibited others, structured our movement in a legal way, and placed surveillance mechanisms to protect our cities that were all the more besieged from individuals in need of drugs, money to survive, a place to stay, or a country to live in. But once taking to the streets and feeling parts of a living community of people, we couldn’t do but occupy our cities in a different way. This experience of socialization could not fit in our offices and TV screens, coffee shops, shopping avenues and securitised square metres designed for our living. Our coming together spoiled violently the facades of all those urban places that actually cancel our possibility of interaction and chain us to the role of the non citizen; it gave instantly birth, instead, to self organised groups, non-hierarchical gatherings, community events, fluid networks of people and horizontal counter information, a multiplicity of small new personal relations of trust, commitment and direct action that had to invent new localities so as to materialise and develop. During the days of December, we did not transform the spaces given to us, but we created new ones, where we could also let ourselves be created.

Stateless Words and Actions

And there was nothing to say, after all, because at the moment we did not ask ourselves what to do, what to ask and from whom, who led us and why exactly we were doing what we were doing. There was no way to predict or classify this fluid and violent wave of people, no political organization to lead the mobilization, no uniform ideology to set its tone, or a political demand to put forward so as to be negotiated or rejected by the government. Our sole reaction was this sense of bewilderment of being together in the streets and urging to do and write thousands of meaningful things that made no sense to them. We saw ourselves acting in a way we could not imagine, we became illegal, inaudible, inacceptable, ineligible, ferocious and wonderful. It was not despair or disillusionment- we were never allowed to believe in something after all. It was acting beyond ourselves and what has made us so far understand the world around us. During those days we experienced the feeling of our coming together, of fighting for and not against, and for the first time we could make a difference. Everything was possible, as it should have ever been.

Before December, we knew it already, no one was to be trusted, politics was corrupted, things were getting irreversibly worse each time and there was nothing to do about it. But then, we took to the streets, we found each other, and there was actually no need to read what other people wrote and do what other people had arranged to do and wait for others to think what we want, no need to articulate demands and ask for marginal benefits so as they could understand, no need to adopt argumentative strategies and representative ethics so as to reach a rational consensus, no need to have a meaning within this frame, because we had no need of this frame, we created our own meanings. Our relating with each other in an equal way, and the spaces, words and actions we formed rejected common sense, because they were not just directed against the state; this was a politics of resistance and solidarity that was bluntly stateless.

For a few days we set on a voyage to a land where we felt confused and maybe uncomfortable, where we were all different, but all together. The moments of this brief encounter form the story of December, a story that could not have been predicted and cannot be unravelled. The before and after became indistinguishable, the effects caused causes and put together words, images, places and people so as to produce this true utopia, this utopian reality, a living madness, the wordless evidence of the thing given in itself, the exact coincidence of word and thing.

2) Foreigners to Our Land

Journalists, politicians, intellectuals, academics and citizens attempted to identify the groups that participated in those moments of revolt, relate the events both to local and international contexts and trace the reasons explaining them.3See Panagiotis Sotiris, Reading revolt as deviance: Greek Intellectuals and the December 2008 revolt of the Greek Youth, Paper to be presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, Mytilene, Lesvos, 2010, Akis Gavriilides, Oi Kathigites tou Tipota, i Anti Eksegersi os Politiki Epistimi, Theseis, 113, October-December 2010, Dossier: December: Gia tin Proza tis Antieksegersis, 13–14 December 2009, http://radicaldesire.blogspot.com

a) There were some, certainly not the majority, who tried to understand and come to terms with the events, or even, express solidarity with the protesters. Attempting something close to social analysis, academics and researchers insisted on the conditions of globalization and neoliberalism that produce rising inequalities, crisis of values and youth insecurity, while others attributed the causes to fallacies of the Greek state-corruption and political clientelism, an underdeveloped civil society, problems in the educational establishment, crisis of the institutions and loss of state legitimacy.4For instance, Nikos Mouzelis, Koinoniki Ekrixi kai Koinonia ton Politon’ (Social Explosion and Civil Society), To Vima, 21 December 2008, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=46&ct=72&artId=241057&dt=21/12/2008, Giannis Papatheodorou, ‘To Symptoma kai i Krisi’ (The Symptom and the Crisis), Nea Estia, 1819, pp. 285–293, 2009, Giannis Voulgaris, ‘I Orgi tis Animporias’ (The Rage of Impotence), Ta Nea, 11 December 2008, http://www.tanea.gr/default.asp?pid=10&ct=13&artID=4491662, or Nikos Alivizatos, ‘I Proklisi tis Vias. Mia Itta ton Metarrythmiston’ (The Challenge of Violence: a Defeat of the Reformers), Nea Estia, 1819, pp 196-201, 2009 There were others, who aided by social movement theory, looked for the organizational basis and membership of the protest events, and for any predetermined strategies that would possibly aim at the expansion of the political context or the institutionalization of the movement itself.5For instance, the Contentious Politics Circle that organized a related conference in Athens in December 2009, see http://contentiouspoliticscircle.blogspot.com Departing from December, some foresaw the ‘end of politics’ brought by mass individualism and nihilism and gave up their analysis; some others, led by revolutionary emotionalism, did exactly the same, but this time in the name of this sublime Event that will itself automatically lead to change and to the ‘return of politics’.6See Stelios Ramfos, ‘To Miden san Makavrios Epithanatios Rogxos’ (Zero as a Long Death Rattle), Kathimerini, 14 December 2008, http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_2_14/12/2008_296051 and D. Tzanakopoulos, (Secretary of the non communist left party youth section), ‘O Thermos Dekemvris’ (The hot December), Theseis, 106, Jan–March 2009, p 22

All these explanations insisted on the centrality of politics and saw December as a movement meant to mobilize part of the population that felt more or less socially excluded. By confirming already existing inequalities, however, they proved unable to go any further than constantly rediscovering them.7Whether the educational establishment, for instance, leads to the reproduction of inequality or to a possible reduction of inequality, in any case the effect is the same, in Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, pp vii–xxiii, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991 This world is unequal, but this is an intangible given. It is as if those interpretations called people to provide capitalism and existing state structures a radical and more humanistic content.

b) But, then, there were those who stated in a much more vociferous way that what took place in the streets of the country during December was certainly not a ‘revolt’, but something that paved the way to more violence and illegality. Protesters, each one led by different motivations, had nothing in particular to say or to ask for. Their anger was short-lived and did not reflect or give birth to anything new. In any case, things went back to normal immediately afterwards. As for the youngsters performing ‘a chain of irrational and openly anomic’ acts of violence, those felt legitimated by a public discourse of resistance against authority that has become justified, if not glorified, in the country since 1975. This was not a social movement, not an insurrection of the youth, not even a reflection of any deeper social, political or ideological causes; it was only a culture of violence that the state proved incapable of dealing with. It comes as no surprise then that Greece remains as a pre-modern, primordial and underdeveloped country.8Main exponents of this perspective still are Stathis Kalyvas, ‘I koultoúra tis Metapoliteusis’ (The culture of the metapolitefsi), Kathimerini 14 December 2008, http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_2_14/12/2008_296059,  ‘…kai ti den itan’ (…and what it was not), To Vima 6 December 2009, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=2&ct=114&artid=303459&dt=06/12/2009, and Nikos Maratzidis, ‘Farce grecque : bilan d’une fausse révolte’, Le Monde 28 April 2009 http://lexandcity.blogspot.com/2009/04/2008-monde.html, both in ‘Ta Dekembriana os farsa’, (The December events as farce), To Vima 21 December 2008, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=46&ct=72&artId=241058&dt=21/12/2008 ‘, see also Ilias Kanellis, ‘I Koultoura tou Dekembri’ (The December culture), Athens Review of Books 3, 2009, http://www.booksreview.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=66:2009-12-23-12-57-03&catid=39:-3-2009-&Itemid=55 What was repeatedly asked for was zero tolerance to all forms of violence, nihilism and abuse so as to maintain regime normality. As a result, consensus, law and order, as well as the Athens Christmas tree, must be safeguarded and the cities cleansed from trash, vandalisms and extremisms.

c) At the same time, demos and riots became obviously front news for every single newspaper, TV or radio station in the country. Media coverage stated that this was one of the most massive events taking place in the country, in which not the ‘usual suspects’, but much broader groups of people participated. The pattern used so as to treat those ‘unique’ events, however, was the same as always: everything was framed around the issue of ‘violence’, as conducted by both police and protesters; no attempt was made whatsoever to understand why did those protests take place at this specific moment and at the streets, why did they embrace so many and so different people and took this form and such an intensity. Media attention was directed towards the teenagers protesting; those young people bearing no conflictual or politically charged memory could easily appear as innocent and, thus, the only true political subjects of a world in disarray.9The same seems to apply to the public narratives referring to the fall of the Junta, which is attributed consensually to the young generation of the time, while the participation of other groups is usually silenced Vivid images of the city in flames and of citizens being beaten by security forces generated an urgent need to protect the country both from an abusive state power and from anarchist violent practices. Social tensions were obscured, neutralized and depoliticized so as to let the national community emerge as a suffering body, united in its need to resist ‘violence’ of all sorts.

The analyses offered by state representatives, public intellectuals and the media attempted to link in a linear way the events so as to reach a point where relation of cause and effect is clear enough to explain them. In this way, they failed to offer an understanding of what happened. They managed, however, step by step to strip this voyage of ours from its content; we were told we were not there, because we were too many and disperse to be seen; we were denied a vital space, because we burnt down what could possibly make sense; we were given no political role in the game, because we did not play according to the rules. In pronouncing December as nonexistent, or as a failed appointment this exhaustive series of possible explanations managed to come to terms not with the dynamics and the contradictions of the events per se, but with preconceived realities already at hand. Most analyses were rational, confident and often aggressive, others paternalistic but also nervous to explain, while there were some benevolent or even comprehensive. But, at the very end, this ‘prose of counter insurgency’10Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Subaltern Studies ??, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1983 was fearful of December as something it could not grasp and that that was not supposed to have happened, as something that was an exception to the rule.

*****

B) These Days (Our Life after December)

3) Departing from their Land of Crisis

 The King is Naked!

It was soon revealed, however, that it was not the exception to the rule that was to be fear of, but the rule itself.The months following December a violent crisis, first financial and then all encompassing, surfaced and shattered all certainty and arrogance of the system. The two major political parties of the country, the right-wing and the socialist one, had been attempting to construct during the last 20 years a central space beyond ideologies, where politics is performed by sceptical liberals and responsible technocrats. This consensual universe was supposed to appease grievances and exclude conflicts. It had been gradually pushing to the margins, however, a growing majority of people who could no longer expect their incorporation or representation within its limits. The so far latent social antagonisms were revealed and became polarized, while their negotiation through established institutions was unmasked as a dead end endeavour. The political establishment started to tremble and collapse, as also did any alternative or dissenting options within its context, either in their reformist or leftist political form. And while social fabric is being torn apart in the country, massive numbers of immigrants and refugees are waiting beyond or within its borders so as to be either naturalized or repatriated, while neither can happen. Cities around the country are being besieged throughout the last 10 years by a highly increasing number of individuals in need; their disquieting presence has unsettled transport and education habits, workplace environments, housing and urban normality. This has become an everyday reality that now directly relates with the overall deformation of the given frame of life, as all the more people can no longer be represented within it.

It was revealed, thus, that there was no life after December, because it was our own life that brought about December.People all over the country started realizing that the different their anxieties may be, their problem is common-the unequal way structures have been erected around them- and cannot be tackled anymore through politics as usual. Citizens emerge not as divided into different parts but as one group submitted to an institutional structure and power

Occupation of the opera building that took place in Dec 2008. These are actually musicians that started playing and marching. It was quite an experience.

distribution that threatens their existence in different ways. Due to this crisis of representation, every opinion, criticism or protest directly challenges the core issue of power and gets instantly politicised. There is no longer space left for a common place student or anti racist mobilization to develop or for a syndicalist demand to put forward; track drivers blocking avenues and workers fired from publishing houses, contractual employees of the ministry of culture occupying the Acropolis and basket ball players on strike, all those groups have single issue claims that unavoidably acquire broad political connotations and challenge the overall framework in an explicit way. Meanwhile, the cities are inundated by growing numbers of asylum seekers, homeless people, drug addicts and many more individuals that simply do not fit in revealing the unequal way the state has defined up to now the spaces assigned to its citizens. Interrupting the normal flow and spatial arrangement of things, people start getting self organized along with those around them, by occupying public spaces, mounting community events and forming neighbourhood assemblies. Local communities which had been erased of any political content since the very foundation of the Greek state, appear now as an alternative political agent.

In the months following December, we, along with many people next to us, have started to acknowledge the surplus refugees we ourselves are in our country,11Agamben, Giorgio, ‘We Refugees.’, Symposium, 49, 2, Summer, 1995, pp 119 in our towns and districts, and while the structures sustaining the world around us remain still intact, we gradually become radically predisposed to understanding ourselves beyond their cognitive frame.

Dismantling Opposition

In striping the system of its normality and legibility, this crisis made what we experienced throughout December all the more visible and Real. And for this reason, our words and actions became dangerous for the maintenance of a system feeling insecure.

In the late modern conduct of things, conflict is pronounced finished, or impossible, and departs from politics in the name of rationally achieved consensus. Any dissenting voice or communitarian attempt that shatters this contract appears as a relic from the past, or a temporary regression, so as to remain fragmented. But antagonisms and inequalities do not vanish and when conflict returns, as it recently did in a vulgar way in Greece, it can only be understood as radical evil and take the form of irrational violence or intolerance of the culturally different. The only alternative way left to represent and understand non capitalist resistance, thus, is to squeeze it to the margins and equate it with the label ‘extremism’; devoid of political content, this can be equally filled in with racist attacks, religious fundamentalism, or ultra right wing violence. Such pre political violence can be fought only through repression, by introducing laws against ‘extremism’,12See for instance the ‘Fight against Extremism: Achievements, Deficiencies and Failures’ voted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on October 5, 2010, in which racist violence, religious fundamentalism, the movement against globalization and protests against repression (mentioning the case of demonstrations in Greece in 2009) are all labelled as ‘extremism’, for full text http://assembly.coe.int/Mainf.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc10/EDOC12265.htm allowing for more police impunity, augmenting security forces and surveillance mechanisms around the country, and criminalizing critical thinking and hitherto permissible protest activities, as syndicalist protests and demos. At the level of public opinion, state and media discourse violently attack on a daily basis protest mobilizations in an attempt to discredit and cancel radical action and collective ethics as a political option. Power mechanisms must become more authoritarian so as to purge extremist forces and prevent the financial, institutional and moral collapse of the country.

For the present order of things to be maintained, however, power has also to respond somehow to the actual problems of the people suffocating within its contextual constraints. In any case, that is how capitalism managed to face the radical critique at the end of the 1960s and 1970s. Demands for autonomy and liberation of creativity, critique of hierarchy and bureaucracy, these were oppositional themes articulated during the ‘May events’ that the system managed to recuperate. By mobilizing already existing protests whose legitimacy was guaranteed, opposition was disarmed, initiative regained and a new dynamism discovered.13Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London-New York, Verso, 2005 In today’s crisis, the critique of the state as an apparatus of domination and oppression is gradually becoming a legitimate discourse written and heard and communicated by many. Moreover, the demands for decentralization and self organization emerge as a sound alternative against institutions that are corrupted and politicians who fail in making our lives any better. From right and ultra right wing parties, socialist spokesmen and NGOs, to mainstream newspapers, free press, arty fanzines and TV talk shows, public discourse gives birth to a new citizenship culture; while the boat is sinking, you must take things into your hands and do not expect anything from the state, defy governments and politics, mobilize beyond public institutions, challenge them by believing in yourself and friends, stop criticizing the others, ‘do it yourself’, make your neighbourhoods look more clean and safer, organize your own staff, disgrace old style ideologies, scientific analyses and revolutionary promises, act now, look alternative, be disobedient, be marginal.14In Greece, for instance, the ultra right wing parliamentary party incites citizens to take the law at their hands and organize local assemblies so as to ‘clean’ districts from homeless refugees, the Prime Minister congratulates youth NGOs that decide to mobilize on their own initiative so as to make, for instance, their neighbourhoods greener, TV shows wonder whether living in communitarian style occupations is the solution to these individualistic times of ours and well known fashion companies persuade consumers that buying their products is so cool that ‘Governments will hate you’.

So, while direct action and political protests are persecuted and stigmatized at the level of political and social demands, at the same time anti authoritarianism becomes lifestyle in everyday culture endorsed and promoted by authorities themselves.

If that is the brave new world of wild possibilities and mortal challenges, then, what is to be said? What is to be done?

 4) Ourselves Becoming Foreigners to our Land

During December, After was turned into the Now and we were faced, as they were, with the Real. For years we, the anarchist, anti authoritarian or libertarian movement, had been talking and shouting, irrationally acting and passionately believing in self organized communities of people and imaginative creativity in human relationships, in unmediated participation and committed action in everyday life, in decentralization and re occupation of vital urban spaces, in emancipation and solidarity, in violent resistance and never-ending revolt. It was due to our radical critique of everyday life that we had been cruelly criticised, marginalised and persecuted for a long time and at every moment, it was due to our radical actions that we had been left alone. And, then, December erupted. There it was, reality denouncing the vanity of words and just what the words led us to expect. Beyond the analysis of the oppression or the feelings of duty towards the oppressed, there it was. The signs by which a gaze comes to recognize reality as exemplary of the idea and the idea comes to incarnate itself in a living landscape, the lines and shadows of which created a new imaginary for a world hitherto without images.

After December, we were faced, as they were, with what we had been aspiring for so long. And what we did at this liminal point is that we went back to normal. This is not because the post December realities disillusioned our expectations; it is because we started gradually to link the landscape we had experienced with our habits of belief, because we persisted in our gaze and reworked the way we knew all along to put together words and images. After all, all those people around us were not critical enough, they did not have the experience and radicalism required to persist and the courage and commitment to go on, some of them had made compromises we detest and opted for ways of life we had been fighting against, the majority of them participates, after all, in the system we mean to demolish. Things did not happen as they should and will not develop as they must, because, at the very end, them, and the others, cannot understand what is going on and what we have been doing for so long. And we already knew they would not.

And so, we gradually lost what had bounded us together with the rest of the people and we returned to the place we had always been. We kept on mounting individualized struggles that did not manage to touch upon overall political and economic conditions, when we had to relate to new realities and re invent our tactics; we kept on even believing in manifestos for the reorganization of society that failed to relate to society itself, when we had to communicate our principles and relate with people around us and never end up forming relations. We kept on rediscovering inequalities andnever stopped speaking about an omnipotent present that contains no positivity other than an imagined negation and failed to convince ourselves and the others that we can do something more than be defeated. We started again to direct all our energy in fighting against the cops and the state reoccupying the role of the marginalized and socially excluded that the system itself has prepared for us, a space reserved also for extremists and fascists working along with the state. Wedestroyed and acted in symmetry with our repressors, when we had to move beyond the frame set by them. We kept on proclaiming self organization and decentralization as our goals, when we had to make them our presupposition. We thought they did not see us, when they were already absorbing our critique and effacing our political agency. We vociferously shouted our being against the system, when we had to create and reinforce non capitalist, non hierarchical, free and equal relationships and multiply our stateless spaces and practices. We distrusted everybody, when we had to be in solidarity with everyone.

But we did not really care; we were used to being in the margin, after all. We believed that December and ourselves were both an exception to the rule.

Remember, Remember, the 6th of December!

But December emerged not because of us. Throughout those days we discovered ways to imply, to bewilder, and to be part of a whole, not to put in words, not to fit into words, ways to choose the margin and act in the centre, not to catechize, to lead or to offer a p
aradigm, but to (re) open the eternally open and live area of possibilities exactly because we were next to all the others, to be equal and to feel free. Those days revealed that in an unjust universe the repressed learn to communicate without speaking, to step forward without moving, to resist without resisting. This eternal present showed us the path towards a land not of fear and problems to be resolved, but of collective illusions to be realized. December, far from being an exception, contained the only normality that makes our living possible. Under our gaze, to the rhythm of our steps, the images of the new world came into being and passed away.

These days, when all that is solid melts into air and they are afraid more than ever, we must remember how it was to link the partial with the general struggle, to be no longer invisible but fatally ready to win everything without losing nothing, to speak and act in our own words and spaces of trust, commitment, and equality, to relate endlessly and directly with each other, to create and experience our stateless selves and collectives. It is now that we must remember how it was to set out on this voyage of moments never to return, hanging until the final leap on the improbability and unpredictability of an encounter ‘the union of a long sentence with a bit of reality that is not’. Local and contingent, mad and real, this land of ourselves is on the point of disappearing and, thus, perhaps also on the point of reappearing.

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This text appears in ‘Between a Present yet to Go and a Future yet to Come: Revolt, Crisis and Emergent Potentialities from Greece, edited by A. Vradis and D. Dalakoglou (forthcoming, March 2011). The title and parts of it (in italics) are due to Jacques Ranciere’s introduction to the Short Voyage to the Land of the People, Stanford, 2003.

  • 1
    Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. Or, in the words of Philip Roth, ‘My father chooses resistance, Rabbi Bengelsdorf chooses collaboration, and Uncle Monty chooses himself’, in Plot Against America, London, Random House, 2004, p 180–181
  • 2
  • 3
    See Panagiotis Sotiris, Reading revolt as deviance: Greek Intellectuals and the December 2008 revolt of the Greek Youth, Paper to be presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, Mytilene, Lesvos, 2010, Akis Gavriilides, Oi Kathigites tou Tipota, i Anti Eksegersi os Politiki Epistimi, Theseis, 113, October-December 2010, Dossier: December: Gia tin Proza tis Antieksegersis, 13–14 December 2009, http://radicaldesire.blogspot.com
  • 4
    For instance, Nikos Mouzelis, Koinoniki Ekrixi kai Koinonia ton Politon’ (Social Explosion and Civil Society), To Vima, 21 December 2008, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=46&ct=72&artId=241057&dt=21/12/2008, Giannis Papatheodorou, ‘To Symptoma kai i Krisi’ (The Symptom and the Crisis), Nea Estia, 1819, pp. 285–293, 2009, Giannis Voulgaris, ‘I Orgi tis Animporias’ (The Rage of Impotence), Ta Nea, 11 December 2008, http://www.tanea.gr/default.asp?pid=10&ct=13&artID=4491662, or Nikos Alivizatos, ‘I Proklisi tis Vias. Mia Itta ton Metarrythmiston’ (The Challenge of Violence: a Defeat of the Reformers), Nea Estia, 1819, pp 196-201, 2009
  • 5
    For instance, the Contentious Politics Circle that organized a related conference in Athens in December 2009, see http://contentiouspoliticscircle.blogspot.com
  • 6
    See Stelios Ramfos, ‘To Miden san Makavrios Epithanatios Rogxos’ (Zero as a Long Death Rattle), Kathimerini, 14 December 2008, http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_2_14/12/2008_296051 and D. Tzanakopoulos, (Secretary of the non communist left party youth section), ‘O Thermos Dekemvris’ (The hot December), Theseis, 106, Jan–March 2009, p 22
  • 7
    Whether the educational establishment, for instance, leads to the reproduction of inequality or to a possible reduction of inequality, in any case the effect is the same, in Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, pp vii–xxiii, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991
  • 8
    Main exponents of this perspective still are Stathis Kalyvas, ‘I koultoúra tis Metapoliteusis’ (The culture of the metapolitefsi), Kathimerini 14 December 2008, http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_2_14/12/2008_296059,  ‘…kai ti den itan’ (…and what it was not), To Vima 6 December 2009, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=2&ct=114&artid=303459&dt=06/12/2009, and Nikos Maratzidis, ‘Farce grecque : bilan d’une fausse révolte’, Le Monde 28 April 2009 http://lexandcity.blogspot.com/2009/04/2008-monde.html, both in ‘Ta Dekembriana os farsa’, (The December events as farce), To Vima 21 December 2008, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=46&ct=72&artId=241058&dt=21/12/2008 ‘, see also Ilias Kanellis, ‘I Koultoura tou Dekembri’ (The December culture), Athens Review of Books 3, 2009, http://www.booksreview.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=66:2009-12-23-12-57-03&catid=39:-3-2009-&Itemid=55
  • 9
    The same seems to apply to the public narratives referring to the fall of the Junta, which is attributed consensually to the young generation of the time, while the participation of other groups is usually silenced
  • 10
    Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Subaltern Studies ??, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1983
  • 11
    Agamben, Giorgio, ‘We Refugees.’, Symposium, 49, 2, Summer, 1995, pp 119
  • 12
    See for instance the ‘Fight against Extremism: Achievements, Deficiencies and Failures’ voted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on October 5, 2010, in which racist violence, religious fundamentalism, the movement against globalization and protests against repression (mentioning the case of demonstrations in Greece in 2009) are all labelled as ‘extremism’, for full text http://assembly.coe.int/Mainf.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc10/EDOC12265.htm
  • 13
    Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London-New York, Verso, 2005
  • 14
    In Greece, for instance, the ultra right wing parliamentary party incites citizens to take the law at their hands and organize local assemblies so as to ‘clean’ districts from homeless refugees, the Prime Minister congratulates youth NGOs that decide to mobilize on their own initiative so as to make, for instance, their neighbourhoods greener, TV shows wonder whether living in communitarian style occupations is the solution to these individualistic times of ours and well known fashion companies persuade consumers that buying their products is so cool that ‘Governments will hate you’.

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