Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis 9781138237773

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Critical Times in Greece

This volume brings together new anthropological research on the recent crisis in Greece and provides valuable ethnographic explorations of a period of radical social change. With contributions from scholars based both in Greece and abroad, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism, new forms of resistance to crisis, and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece’s history, and will be of great interest to readers interested in the social, political, and economic developments in Europe. It is the first collection to ethnographically explore this period of radical social change and its impact on anthropological understanding of Greece, and Europe overall. Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor at Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he holds the Chair in Social Anthropology. In 2017 he was awarded the VIDI Innovative Research Grant for his project Infra-Demos, studying participatory infrastructures in Greece. Georgios Agelopoulos is Associate Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has carried out research in Greece and the Balkans since the 1980s and is part of the Europewide project ‘Framing Financial Crisis and Protest’.

Routledge Studies in Anthropology

44 Critical Times in Greece Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis Edited by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos 43 Distortion Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic Edited by Nigel Rapport 42 Meaning and Significance in Human Engagement A Cognitive Approach to Culture David B. Kronenfeld 41 Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South The Human Consequences of Piracy in China and Brazil Rosana Pinheiro-Machado 40 Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal Laura L. Cochrane 39 On Knowing Humanity Insights from Theology for Anthropology Edited by Eloise Meneses and David Bronkema 38 Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound Edited by Christine Guillebaud 37 Meeting Ethnography Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance Edited by Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall 36 Truth, Intentionality and Evidence Anthropological Approaches to Crime Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den

Critical Times in Greece Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis

Edited by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-23777-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-29903-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Florence Production Ltd., Stoodleigh, Devon

Contents

Notes on the editors and contributors Acknowledgements Introduction De te fabula narratur? Ethnography of and during the Greek crisis

viii x

1

DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU, GEORGIOS AGELOPOULOS AND GIORGOS POULIMENAKOS

PART I

The state 1 States of emergency, modes of emergence: critical enactments of ‘the people’ in times of crisis

13 15

ATHENA ATHANASIOU

2 Free money, spoiled recipients: the capitalist crisis as a moral question among Greek technocrats

32

DIMITRIOS GKINTIDIS

3 Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece

45

YANNIS KALLIANOS

PART II

The nation 4 Far-right extremism in the city of Athens during the Greek crisis

57 59

TRYFON BAMPILIS

5 Death in the Greek territorial and symbolic borders: anti-immigrant action for policing the crisis GIORGOS TSIMOURIS AND ROLAND S. MOORE

73

vi Contents 6 The concealed and the revealed: looking to the hidden bounty of the land in crisis times

86

DAVID SUTTON

7 Crisis within a crisis? Foreigners in Athens and traces of transnational relations and separations

102

SARAH GREEN

PART III

Subjectivities 8 Greek depression: uses of mental health discourse from the economy to the psyche

117 119

ANNA APOSTOLIDOU

9 New-poor: the Being, the Phenomenon, and the Becoming in ‘Greek Crisis’

132

NENI PANOURGIÁ

10 Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens

148

ANDREAS CHATZIDAKIS

11 The CV industry: the construction of the Self as an active and flexible citizen

160

ELENI PAPAGAROUFALI

PART IV

Confronting crisis

171

12 Hetero-utopias: squatting and spatial materialities of resistance in Athens at times of crisis

173

GIORGOS POULIMENAKOS AND DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU

13 Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus: migrant deportability and the radicalisation of solidarity

188

KATERINA ROZAKOU

14 The future of solidarity: food cooperativism as labour

202

THEODOROS RAKOPOULOS

15 Put the blame on potatoes: power relations and the trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis GEORGIOS AGELOPOULOS

217

Contents vii Afterword Pragmatism against austerity: Greek society, politics and ethnography in times of trouble

227

EVTHYMIOS PAPATAXIARCHIS

Bibliography Index

248 277

Notes on the editors and contributors

The editors Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor at the Vrije University Amsterdam, where he holds the Chair in Social Anthropology. In 2017 he was awarded the VIDI Innovative Research Grant for his project Infra-Demos, studying participatory infrastructures in Greece. In 2012 he was awarded an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant for his project Crisis-scapes which studied urban spaces and crisis in Greece. His books include The Road (2016), Crisis-scapes (2014), Roads and Anthropology (2012, 2014) and Revolt and Crisis in Greece (2011). He has taught anthropology at Sussex University (2009–2015) and at UCL (2007–2008) and he has held Visiting and Honorary positions at CUNY Graduate Center, University of Princeton and UCL Material Culture section. He studied anthropology at UCL (PhD), the University of Amsterdam and Panteion University, Athens. Georgios Agelopoulos is Associate Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki. He has carried out research in Greece and the Balkans since the 1980s on issues related to ethnicity and nationalism, migrants and refugees and the history of Balkan ethnography. He has taught at Cambridge University (1994–1995), Panteion University, Athens (1999–2003), Graz University (2008), Nicosia University (2010– 2011) and the University of Macedonia (2003–2013). He has co-edited the three volumes of Balkan Border Crossings (2014, 2011, 2008) and Identities in Macedonia (1997). He studied anthropology and sociology at Cambridge (PhD), St Andrews and Panteion University, Athens.

The contributors Anna Apostolidou is Researcher at Hellenic Open University, Greece. Athena Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. Tryfon Bampilis is the Social and Political Sciences coordinator of the Dutch Institute of Athens, Greece.

Notes on the editors and contributors ix Andreas Chatzidakis is Lecturer in Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London, UK. Dimitrios Gkintidis is an independent scholar. He was formerly a researcher at the University of Princeton, USA, University of Oxford, UK, and the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Bulgaria. Sarah Green is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Helsinki University, Finland. Yannis Kallianos is Visiting Researcher at Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Roland S. Moore is Senior Researcher at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, Berkeley, USA. Neni Panourgiá is Visiting Professor New School for Social Research, New York, USA. Eleni Papagaroufali is Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Evthymios Papataxiarchis is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aegean, Mytilini, Greece. Giorgos Poulimenakos is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Theordoros Rakopoulos is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. Katerina Rozakou is Researcher at the Institute of Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. David Sutton is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at South Illinois University, USA. Giorgos Tsimouris is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens, Greece.

Acknowledgements

This book started as an idea in 2014. Since then many things have happened in the arena of Greek and European politics that affected us but that have also affected our actual lives. Rage, disappointment, exhaustion, enthusiasm and determination are only some of the feelings we experienced during that period, and we reacted very differently to many events around us, but also in similar ways to others. This book is the result of 17 years of political disagreements, friendship, thoughts, empirical research and readings, but also of a very compressed historical period, a time that is very critical and requires critique. We owe many thanks to all the authors involved in this effort. Moreover, this volume owes much to the critical comments of many friends and colleagues. The discussions we had with Evthymios Papataxiarchis, Alexandra Bakalaki, Dimitra Gefou Madianou, Dimitra Kofti, Giorgos Poulimenakos, Antonis Alexandridis, Anna Giulia Delapupa, Anna Christofidi and other colleagues inspired and guided us. The completion of this volume would not have been possible without the support of those closest to us: Anna, Lucas and Toni, Sofia, Niki and Vassiliki are well aware that working on the Greek crisis required their additional contribution to the everyday predicaments of everyday life in crisis-held Greece and beyond.

Introduction De te fabula narratur? Ethnography of and during the Greek crisis Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgios Agelopoulos and Giorgos Poulimenakos

The discourse of the Greek crisis has captured the attention of worldwide audiences, initiated theoretical and political discussions and reinforced ethnographic interest in southern Europe. The 2015 electoral victories of SYRIZA, the political turnovers of 2016 and the refugee movements in the southeast Mediterranean have re-established Greece at the centre of the political debates in Europe and beyond (Badiou et al. 2013, Douzinas 2013, Galbraith 2016, Misik 2016). The social transformations taking place in Greece have become the main focus of attention within this renewed interest in the country. This book is an attempt to provide a concrete and collective contribution based on ethnographic works and critical anthropological approaches at a time when a host of new researchers1 have turned their attention to Greece, asking questions, and those who have worked for many years on the country inevitably seek to re-shape their research toward the study of the crisis.2 This situation creates the need to elaborate the context of such studies beyond the paradigmatic contribution of anthropological discourse to all the heated debates. The aim of this book is to provide a qualitatively different approach from that of the international media discourse, one which is empathetic and in solidarity with the dynamics and the everyday life of the structurally excluded, the weak and the victims of the crisis or the ones who decide to resist it, muted or not. Ethnographically documenting the social transformations taking place in Greece does not provide per se an analytical discourse. To develop such an analytical discourse, we need to overcome three theoretical and methodological obstacles. The first obstacle refers to the tendency to identify the crisis either through its physical manifestations in everyday life (unemployment, braindrain, suicides, poverty, etc.) or its supposed causes (neoliberalism, capitalism, the Greek paradox, etc.). This confusion creates important difficulties regarding our ability to communicate the crisis both inside and outside academia. In order to cope with this problem, the authors of this volume have agreed, following Roitman (2013), to differentiate between ethnographic narrations (‘first order observations’) and explanatory statements (‘second order observations’). The term crisis is used in this volume as a Weberian ideal type (Gedankenbilder). The second obstacle is a version of

2 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos anthropological advocacy. It relates to the tendency of most ethnographers to focus on those who suffer and resist in the context of the crisis. Such an approach neglects the experiences of those who take advantage of the crisis.3 To overcome this obstacle, a number of papers included in this volume give light to the practices of those who find themselves in a better position due to the crisis. The third obstacle refers to the teleology of some approaches to the Greek crisis. These approaches are more evident in international media coverage than in the academic domain.4 Teleology becomes evident in this discourse when, for example, journalists and scholars address the question: ‘Was the Greek crisis unavoidable?’5 Such a question most often leads to the search for a structural causality between the past, the present, and even the future. This version of a Greek ‘original sin’ points exclusively to continuities. To bypass this obstacle, authors of this volume have used ethnographic data to acknowledge the upgrading of the present and the future vis-à-vis the past. Perceiving the Greek crisis as one of the many episodes of capitalist structural adjustments may end up ignoring its qualitative differences. Thus, it may prohibit us from conceptualizing the multiple experiences of the changes taking place in the current sociopolitical context. To overcome such a predicament the current volume aims to contribute beyond the ethnographic difference and toward a critical theoretical understanding of the dynamics taking place during the last two decades in Greece and beyond. The purpose is to go a step further from a simple critique of neoliberalism or the difference between local vs global understandings of phenomena. Moreover, one of the main purposes is to examine the impact of the crisis-discourse on anthropological understandings of Greece and vice versa. This understanding presents both continuities and discontinuities. Although the authors of this volume focus primarily on the present, we are highly critical of all approaches that argue the creation of an entirely new social, economic and political context during the last decade in Greece. While acknowledging the important transformations, we agree with those who point out the existence of the current dynamics since the late 1990s (Dalakoglou and Vradis 2011, Herzfeld 2011 and 2016b, Papataxiarchis 2005 and 2009, Rozakou 2012, Voutira 2016). This point is further investigated by Evthymios Papataxiarchis in the final chapter, the Afterword, of this volume. The chapters of this volume provide the reader with multiple understandings of the socio-economic and political transformations taking place in Greece. They are relevant to a variety of issues which predominate in the recent anthropological theoretical debates such as moral economy, precarity, provisioning, anthropology and activism. The chapters are organized in four parts examining transformations evident at the structural level, transformations experienced as praxis, and both together. A closer look at the chapters provides a better understanding of this arrangement. The first three chapters shift attention to the crisis as a mode of governance and assess the strategic changes in the neoliberal state’s modalities of

Introduction 3 power as they are located in the realms of brutal repression, the production of neoliberal subjectivities and discourses of legitimation, while at the same time arguing for the possibilities of resistance and counter-subjectifications. Athanasiou argues that neoliberal governmentality, simultaneously discursive and practical, does does not merely entail market domination over impoverished and economically dispossessed subjects, by narrating moments of state and parastate violence during the Greek crisis he explains how through the state of crisis a governmentality emerges that aims at rendering different social subjects (classed, gendered, racial subjects) invisible, vulnerable, assailable and deprived of any sense of material or moral security, creating therefore a totalized neoliberal discourse that produces different disposable others. At the same time though, Athanasiou explains how the dissemination of this totalizing-through-difference mode of power results in the agonistic emergence of a field of resistance throughout the public space that consists of bodies-in-solidarity who protect each other’s vulnerability and at the same time maintain their plurality. According to Athanasiou, the crisis always entails in advance a crisis in the premises that formulate subjectivities in a given historical moment, since it is that which pushes the subjects in the margins of their physical and moral existence. It is in this liminal moment though that agonistic subjectivities emerge as they recognize the need for solidarity and collective action. The question for Athanasiou is how those subjects-in-crisis will not be soaked by a nationalist-base monolithic social subject as ‘the people’, which resists neoliberalism by invoking a previous normal/disciplined condition, but will resist the ‘crisis’ by expanding it to the level of a constant critique. In his chapter Gkintidis presents ethnographic data from his research among Greek technocrats involved with the European Union either academically and/or politically. Gkintidis is interested in analyzing discourses of power and financial resources disseminated by such agents regarding the relationship between Greece and the EU, especially after Greece entered the ‘debt crisis’. He shows how the flow of the so-called developmental funds from the Union to Greece, already in place since the 1980s, has created a moral framework under which antagonistic and power relations are assessed. The funds are perceived by the technocrats as ‘gifts’ or ‘aid’ that helped Greece break away from its Balkanic past and enter the ‘elite club’ of Europe, implying a disinterested act on behalf of the Union and a respective moral obligation on behalf of Greece. Thus when the crisis has hit Europe, this almost anthropomorphic EU, as someone who acted with ‘good intentions’ in the past, appears to merely ask for reciprocity. In this sense the neoliberal reforms and the austerity measures facing Greece are a moral obligation that the Greeks have to fulfill, and any discontent has to be considered as ingratitude. Gkintidis notes that this scheme leads not only to enhancing EU hegemony but engineers the totality of Greek politics, as it also constructs what is, and mainly what is not, considered as politics. Drawing on a huge tradition from early anthropological accounts on how the circulation of materialities create

4 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos asymmetrical social relations to Lazzarato’s ‘indebted man’ as the neoliberal governance technique par excellence, Gkintidis’ case study informs the reader of how a set of allegedly rational institutions, practices and discourses are premised on moral claims and social relations between anthropomorphic entities. The neoliberal state remains under scrutiny as Kallianos makes his own contribution in the disclosure of contemporary modes of governance and legitimation tactics in times of crisis. Kallianos is interested in how the Greek state is claiming legitimacy in times when its authority is widely contested or, in Gramscian terms, is under organic crisis. In accordance with Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou’s argument, Kallianos notes that far from being absent, in a process of social transition to a neoliberal regime the state must actively recodify its governance mechanisms and locate them in the epicenter of people’s everyday life for the neoliberal economic and political reality to be established. In order for such a huge intervention to take place, new tactics of legitimation must be deployed. Legitimation here is not referring to the typical, juridical right of the state to intervene, but rather to a process that correlates its interventions with the production of socially and culturally meaningful synapses in the minds of the people. The author argues that in order for the state to proceed to a series of moves that not only ‘make sense’ but are also considered as necessary, a whole ‘symbolic universe’, namely a system that connects various discourses in a meta-narrative of the need to exit the crisis, must be constructed. Under this symbolic universe of the crisis, every social and political practice of discontent, as for example a strike, is simultaneously a priori and a posteriori evaluated in relation to the proclaimed goal and thus is not only criminalized in the typical juridical sense but, more importantly, is delegitimized. The key element in this process is the discourse of uncertainty. Uncertainty, in the sense of the unpredictability and the always imminent ‘worse’ that surrounds the crisis, has been widely used by the state’s discourse to make the goal ‘to exit the crisis’ more urgently and thus make possible a series of interventions at the juridical, social and subjective levels. In this way the state is morally confirmed as the only legitimate power to act. The next four chapters (by Bampilis, Tsimouris and Moore, Sutton and Green) establish an ethnographic understanding of state structures. This allows a closer look at the representations and the experiences of the nation. One of the most disturbing features of the sociopolitical transformations in Greece is the significant rise of the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, not only in absolute numbers in the elections but more importantly as a hegemonic current among the afflicted strata. Bampilis stresses the importance of qualitative research in our effort to understand the phenomenon, always in combination with the undoubtedly important structural-economic reasons that during the crisis have pushed people away from a center-centric political system. Bampilis is specifically interested in the way that political influence is gained through the performative action of Golden Dawn’s members in the

Introduction 5 Athenian public space. The author adduces specific events throughout recent years in which the neo-Nazis have intervened in an almost ritualized way in the public space in order to simultaneously construct and confirm a series of ‘immoral’, ‘impure’ and ‘dangerous’ events, behaviors and subjects that supposedly are endemic in modern Greek society and therefore legitimize their political presence. For example, in neighborhoods such as Kypseli and Patisia in which ethnic diversity predominates, the organized, performative presence of Golden Dawn aims at publicly creating clear-cut differences between the Greeks and the ‘others’ and provoking emotions regarding who is to blame for everything that goes wrong with the country. Bampilis’ chapter is a great reminder of the performative rather than the intellectual nature of ideological dissemination and the way emotions and culture tend to mobilize people in times of social change. Working on a similar agenda, Tsimouris and Moore (Chapter 5) discuss the intensification of anti-migrant policies as aspects of the authoritarian distillation of the neoliberal context. Here the authors proceed to an anthropological questioning of the border, revealing its nature as a political tool that crosses the entirety of the geographical and social space, producing lives that matter and lives that do not, and managing the grouping of the populations. Tsimouris and Moore are interested in bringing to the surface the experiences of the people trying to get into Europe through Greek borders as they are imprinted in social media and Internet blogs. Through the accounts of the immigrants it is becoming evident that the borders are not just geographical ‘moments’ that one crosses, but are attached to or fused with the very corporeal dimension of the immigrants. Since the distinctions, the exclusions and the accessibility are becoming possible through racial, bodily trails, one can say that the borders are always on the move, together with the immigrants. In times of crisis, borders function as heterotopias of death, to recall Foucault who signified the territorial spaces that remain – along with other inflicted social subjects – as indigenous lower strata under constant segregation due to social inequalities. Being faithful to the critical spirit of this volume, this introduction could not ignore the fact that most of the contributions here, as well as the majority of ongoing research into crisis-ridden Greece, focuses on the capital, Athens. While Athens is becoming a kind of ethnographic cliché, few data are available regarding the experience of the crisis in the countryside or in smaller middle-class cities scattered all around Greece. In the next chapter, David Sutton works toward addressing this gap. Sutton’s concern is to relate his ethnographic findings in the island of Kalymnos, regarding stories about concealed objects of value and hidden treasures, with hopes and rationales that surround the possibility of exiting the crisis through a more or less unexpected ‘finding’ and exploitation of hidden economic resources. As per Apostolidou, Sutton here also positions the reader to see beyond some of the seemingly irrational cultural and political beliefs and interpret them as cultural constants that help people to retain their identity in times of

6 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos neoliberal fluidity and uncertainty. Sutton argues that without sliding to an ontological culturalism, we should carefully consider the local perceptions and localized knowledge that link people with objects and the natural environment. In the Greek cultural context, hidden objects with economic or religious values seem to possess an agency to reveal or to conceal themselves from people, depending on the moral and social norms that the seekers have to abide by. Sutton notes that the discourses, of both the state and the people, that have appeared in the midst of the crisis regarding the possible existence of significant amounts of petrol and natural gas below the Aegean, follow the same cultural patterns. Therefore, for Sutton there is not a clearcut, ontological distinction between folklore stories of local legends and the way people perceive and act on matters of international economy and relations, but that in fact the two can coexist. Sutton’s call for attention against ontological culturalism is also shared by Sarah Green in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 7). Green explores the ways contemporary migration to the city of Athens is shaped and experienced through transnational relations and political affiliations to Greece with other parts of the world. Green explains that the presence of a non-Greek person in Greece by itself does not say much about the way this person is perceived by the locals or how the person experiences his/her own presence in a particular time. This becomes evident as Green presents a historical account of how foreigners were perceived in different times in modern Greek history. For example, the concept of the ‘immigrant’ with all its negative connotations was only created in the early 1990s in the context of seismic changes that took place in Greece’s neighboring countries due to the fall of Communist regimes and the consequent massive migration of people to Greece. In accordance with the EU directives at the time, Greece adopted a legal framework to deal with the phenomenon which was mainly based on the security doctrine designed by the EU, creating therefore the figure of the immigrant as a potential threat needing constant surveillance. This perception, according to Green’s account, was unimaginable in Greece during the 1960s when non-Greeks were perceived as just foreigners who for various reasons were living in the country and were mostly unnoticeable both by the state and the locals. As is evident, extra-territorial forces and transnational political allegiances play significant roles in how foreign subjects are construed in certain times. With these points in mind, Green argues that today’s influx of immigrants and refugees is depicted by the hegemonic discourse and the people as a crisis, and moreover a crisis within the ongoing financial crisis, more because of transnational political decisions that left Greece alone to deal with the issue and less because of the absolute volume of the incoming people. The next four chapters deal with constructions of the self and the individual. In Chapter 8, Apostolidou focuses on the widely discussed correlation between the economic crisis and its repercussions and increasing rates of mental disorders within the Greek population. While research in the fields

Introduction 7 of psychiatry and psychology have indeed confirmed such a correlation, Apostolidou adds an anthropological perspective to the phenomenon, tracing how the scientific discourse of mental health is grounded at the level of popular experience and how it functions in the everyday comprehension of life during the crisis. Apostolidou argues that the recourse of the people to the description of their condition in terms of mental health entails a source of agency that allows them to retain an indirect subversive positionality and a sense of distinct identity in times of neocolonial interventions. Processes such as self-stereotyping in terms of a positive ‘madness’ in the nature/culture of the Greeks that value a risky freedom more than a rational but uxorious life, or the construction of ostensibly irrational conspiracy theories provide a socially meaningful terrain in which people can remain empowered in an affective imaginary. Therefore, although discourses that pathologize social subjects or practices are usually considered as being in the service of the dominant power, a careful ethnographic assessment reveals the active negotiation of the dissemination of mental health terms in everyday life in an effort to construct their individual and social beings in times of crisis. Through the use of dense ethnographic and biographic text Panourgiá (Chapter 9) attempts an exploration of the increasing impoverishment that a great proportion of the population has encountered during the Greek crisis. Her case study follows the life of a particular individual through the years of crisis, documenting the dramatic fallout from the systemic collapse of the Greek socio-economic compromise in the life of her informant as he becomes neo-poor. ‘Neo’, in neo-poor may imply a rapid descent from a middle-class social status to the raw struggle for biological survival, but for Panourgiá it does not comprise either a rupture with a previous condition nor a distinct ontology. This is not because the lives of the people have not significantly changed, but rather because a compromise is (was) nothing but a fine line which millions of psyches in Greece are constantly crossing back and forth, like quanta in a capitalist universe that occupy more than one place and await the crucial intervention that will determine their fate. Panourgiá’s story, like a Levi-Straussian myth, can also be read backwards. Precarious employment, undocumented labour, ‘flexicurity’, all elements in the story that are detached from time, these are not the ‘privilege’ of the crisis nor the ‘good times’ that preceded it, but rather consist of the noumenon, drawing here from Kant, the thing itself that is concealed when narrating a linear story. Panourgiá argues that the crisis does not create but rather reveals. She invites us to think beyond such fixed, ontological categories as poor/non-poor or events or ruptures. The phenomenon, for Panourgiá, consists of the direct repercussions of the crisis in the life of the subject that appear through a historical void, accessible in the experience but blind to the structural supervision of the dialectics of the capital: every moment in the relational biography of the wage worker with the capital is present in today’s condition. Becoming poor is becoming the end of that which was always-already included in the beginning. As Marx made clear in Capital volume one, the

8 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos proletariat is always-already a precariat. In this sense, Panourgiá is right to warn us to leave aside any certainty as to ‘who is what when and why’. Chapter 10 also discusses the construction of the self. However, the focus is on the relationship between the self, consumption and the development of respective geographies. Chatzidakis assesses the sociocultural and political antagonisms in the capital of Athens through the prism of consumption in time and space. He proceeds to a periodization of recent Athenian history in terms of the rise and fall of consumerism and explains how a Westernimported consumption ethos to a great extent structured the experience of how the people lived (in) the city and understood it. Athens, as a consumer city in the making back in the early 1990s and the so-called golden era of Greek developmental capitalism, saw unprecedented change in its urban landscape with shopping malls, gentrification projects and modern recreational centers carving a Western metropolis out of a Balkan quasi-traditional city. In a dialectical relationship with the remaking of the urban space, new subjectivities emerged as did a sense of class division mostly based on consumer choice rather than the realm of production. Chatzidakis then argues that the main political, antagonistic tendency of that middle-class consumption dream and the neoliberal turn in general has also been articulated in socio-spatial terms, as a counter-paradigm of life in the city. The author introduces the readers to the neighborhood of Exarcheia, a district in the city center that for complex historical reasons is presented as a ‘heterotopia of resistance’ due to the anti-capitalist practices taking place there. Exarcheia hosts many initiatives for alternative transactions, consumption and sociality, creating as a result a built environment, in Heideggerian terms, of a glimpse of a life beyond capitalism. As the story covers the present day it becomes clear that due to the immense decline in people’s purchasing power that often reaches levels of impoverishment, Athens is turning into a failed consumer city. Chatzidakis argues that consumption is to a great extent depoliti-cized as it now refers to basic needs, and political antagonisms are now expressed more through the concept of solidarity. As neo-Nazis and the state produce their own politics around the concept, e.g. Golden Dawn’s soup kitchens are ‘only for Greeks’, new questions arise regarding how solidarity is expressed materially and how it divides social subjects, groups, and politics. This development poses a challenge for progressive social forces that had based their vision of an alternative way of life in the critique of consumption and have had to reorient their social intervention in terms of an everyday struggle for survival. Papagaroufali’s analysis (Chapter 11) points out the increasing number of Greek students trying to ‘fill up’ their CVs by participating in as many different academic ‘actions’ and initiatives as possible (European and international educational programs, conferences, workshops, seminars, etc.). According to Papagaroufali, this CV industry has emerged and intensified over the last decade. This is a process indirectly but firmly connected with the imposition of a neoliberal political and economic model that, along with

Introduction 9 the high unemployment rate it has created, have simultaneously promoted an ‘entrepreneurial ethos’. Based on what Bourdieu has labeled ‘the rhetorical illusion of biography’, Papagaroufali argues that writing a CV represents a claim to the illusion of ‘self’ that is cohesive and impervious to conflicting relations and structural constraints. This necessity for a totally new form of self-representation or self-archiving, a necessity which is increasingly enforced (although welcome), seems to take the age-old ‘natural’ linear-evolutionary narration of life (from the self’s narrated past toward its present) as obsolete, as ‘a waste of time’. Today, because of the current financial problems that have hit Greek families, all those who ‘fill up’ their CVs appear to continue to consent to, and invest in, the fictive promises of a ‘good life’, self-continuity and cohesion. Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou’s chapter (Chapter 12) focuses on the paradigmatic shift of the state’s repressive strategy concerning squatted public buildings that are used as self-organized social-cultural-political centers by the antagonist movement in Athens – the authors emphasize the cruciality of material space in the formation of resistant or terrorized subjects during extreme neoliberalism. They study K*VOX, a squat that still stands in the Athenian cityscape after the operational raid and eviction of the most prominent and active squats by the police in 2013. In this case study Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou show how under conditions of extreme fragmentation of the social nexus due to neoliberal policies of individualization and precarious labour privatizations, the reformulation of collective subjects can be facilitated by spaces, the material and symbolic boundaries which can themselves be collectively shaped by the various subjects that concentrate in or around them, as well as provide antagonistic models for the remaining space. The strategic move for the state, the ethnographers argue, is not to face an already formed resistance but to intervene in the very prerequisite of it, namely the loci in which people can meet. In contrast with ‘common wisdom’, the state under neoliberalism is not only not rolling back, but is actively pursuing individualization of the people, by targeting space as the sine qua non of any collective activity. The rise of the far right in Greece goes hand-in-hand with a general intensification of anti-migrant policies and the rise of racist discourses and practices on behalf of the state. In Chapter 13 Rozakou explores the dialects between the construction of a hostile status for increasing numbers of immigrants that have entered Greece in recent years and the rise and dissemination of grassroots solidarity politics. State-organized operations, such as ‘Xenios Zeus’, named after the Ancient Greek god Zeus and ironically referring to the Greek cultural context of hospitality, involved the creation of detention centers and the general criminalization and desocialization of social subjects during the 2013–2014 period. At the same time the pro-immigrant movements in Greece widely adopted the term solidarians (αλληλέγγυοι) to refer to themselves and their activities in helping immigrants gain human and social status not only in legal and moral terms but also by creating spaces in which

10 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos immigrants can socialize and interact with the locals as human beings. Rozakou, like Rakopoulos in his chapter, is interested in the particular terms that notions such as as ‘solidarity’ and ‘solidarians’ are taking in the specific socio-historical Greek context and how they relate to the more general processes of social transformation. Rozakou traces the contemporary meaning of the concepts to the cumulative experience of antagonistic moments in the last few years not only in pro-migration struggles but also other cases of anti-state mobilizations. The emergence of material structures of solidarity in the form of social centers which make possible the resocialization of ‘bare lives’ has helped in the proliferation of a sense of sociality that has taken an antagonistic form and emerged as the antidote to the disintegration of the Greek social fabric in times of extreme neoliberalism. In other words, Rozakou argues that solidarity is creating new forms of sociality and vice versa. This pattern of sociality is also addressed by Rakopoulos (Chapter 14). While Panourgiá shows how elements of the past haunt the present lives of people, Rakopoulos documents projections of a different and probably optimistic future in current actions. Grassroots economic activities as responses to the direct threat to people’s reproduction in the context of severe austerity have met with significant popularity during the crisis. In his chapter Rakopoulos investigates a particular informal, anti-middleman food distribution organization located in Thessaloniki. Such self-organized initiatives are part of a wider movement in Greece that have been branded as ‘social and solidarity economy’ ranging from time-banks and social infirmaries to self-organized factories that were abandoned by the capitalist owners in the midst of the recession. In his attempt to put ‘social’, ‘solidarity’, and ‘economy’ under common anthropological scrutiny, Rakopoulos argues that the dialectic combination of the meaning of those concepts take, in particular, a sociogeographic context of the Greek crisis and can allow us to hear the undercurrents of a new understanding of labor that is slowly constructed among the participants in such networks. Rakopoulos illustrates how deep ethnography can provide a better grasp of the concept of solidarity, which in its abstract, common-sense, interpretation usually departs from recognition of the participants’ activities as labor as it is mostly related to volunteerism. While engaging in the distribution of foodstuffs directly from the farmers to their community and therefore helping people meet basic needs at a lower cost, the ethnographer argues that the participants envision their activity not only as helping, but as the framework of a whole new infrastructure of economy that can be based on cooperatives. As a result, they perceive the effort they put into mobilizing and synchronizing the people as a productive force, merging the social, the economic and the political in a horizon of radical social change. Similarly to Rakopoulos, Agelopoulos’ contribution (Chapter 15) deals with self-organized markets without brokers and new solidarity networks that aim to cover human needs outside the established paradigm. More

Introduction 11 widely, a new moral economy of crisis has been shaped in recent years in Greece. He argues that the flows of currency and produce in the city have transformed radically, transforming urban conditions and functions both spatially and socially. His paper, based on autoethnographic accounts, is an attempt to discuss the so-called ‘potato movement’ in Greece, a key moment in the development of a social and solidarity economy in the country. The analysis approaches solidarity economy initiatives not from the view of those who support them, as Rakopoulos does, but from the view of those who oppose them. Finally, Papataxiarchis’ afterword is an attempt to present the relationship between austerity and pragmatism based on a review of anthropological studies conducted in the last decade in Greece. His contribution contextualizes all the chapters of this volume in wider anthropological debates. In order to make sense of what is happening in Greece, Papataxiarchis questions the analytical value of terms such as ‘resistance’, ‘solidarity’, ‘neoliberalism’, and ‘crisis.’ In search of new terminology, he introduces the term ‘trouble.’ Trouble is perceived as a deconstructive force and a generative power. The notion of ‘trouble’ avoids emic/etic confusion and allows us to systematically grasp the rich semantic terrain of the emic vocabulary of the ‘crisis.’ His main argument is that ‘trouble was around for a long time and that it preceded the crisis.’ The current crisis is the spread of the trouble that was long suspended in the sphere of the informal, the upgrading of trouble as an all-pervasive factor in the decomposition and/or reconfiguration of mainstream, official political and economic forms and the generation of new ones. Although one could claim that the choice of the term ‘trouble’ may be potentially too soft for the tragic dimensions of the crisis – for example if one thinks the British government's use of the term for the war in Northern Ireland – still Papataxiarchis does point out the multiple perspectives of developments in Greece. He distinguishes between two schools of anthropological thought: the short-term approach, which focuses on the present and leans towards exceptionalism, and the long-term approach, which puts the current Greek predicament in a historical context and is open to comparativism. On completion of this volume, the reader will be in possession of clear answers to some popular questions regarding the socio-economic and political transformations taking place in Greece. As already pointed out, the authors of this volume do not wish to engage in discussing ‘Greece as an exemption’, the ‘failures of modernization’, or the ‘malfunction of neo-liberal capitalism’ in the country. For us, the crisis is neither a decisive change nor a condition (Vigh 2008). It is a moment which both creates and reveals. The very notion of crisis needs to be understood with its ancient Greek meaning: as both an unstable context and a process depicting assessments on the context itself. As a result, the ethnographic study of the Greek crisis brings messages referring to other people and other places: De te fabula narratur?

12 Poulimenakos, Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

See Cabot 2014, 2016a, 2016b, Douzina-Bakalaki 2016, Kalanztis 2015, Knight 2013, Kosmatopoulos 2014, Rakopoulos 2014a, 2014b, 2016, Rozakou 2012, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, Stavrides 2012, Streinzer 2016. See Agelopoulos 2015, Astrinaki 2009, Athanasiou 2012, Bakalaki 2016, Dalakoglou 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, Dalakoglou and Kallianos 2014, Dalakoglou et al. 2014, Herzfeld 2011, 2016a, 2016b, Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016, Kirtsoglou 2013, Kozaitis 2015, Papailias 2011a, Papataxiarchis 2009, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, Spyridakis 2012, Theodossopoulos 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011, Voutira 2016. As Kosmatopoulos, following Bloor (1991), argues, ‘the failure of some is the profit of others’ (2014: 481). See Tsakalakis 2016, Scherzer 2014 and Tzogopoulos 2013 for a critical approach of such media stereotypes. Another way to paraphrase this question is by looking to ‘what went wrong?’. Such queries produce a narration of the Greek crisis most often focused at ‘the malfunction of modernization in post-1974 Greece’. Such an approach is evident in the works of Kirtsoglou 2013, Lapavitsas 2010, Laskos and Tsakalotos 2013, Mitsopoulos and Pelagidis 2011, Papaconstantinou 2016, Scherzer 2014, Theodossopoulos 2013, 2014a, Triandafyllidou et al. 2013.

Part I

The state

1

States of emergency, modes of emergence Critical enactments of ‘the people’ in times of crisis Athena Athanasiou

Whither the demos of democracy? States of crisis and ‘the people’ The state of crisis as a mode of neoliberal governmentality raises difficult questions about the links between capitalism and democracy, precariousness and action, critique and subjectivation, as well as dispossession and popular sovereignty. More specifically, it compels a consideration of how precariousness might shape political action and how dispossession might become the occasion for reimagined critical intimacies and reactivated performative contestation. It is such an array of questions that animates this text. Current regimes of neoliberal governing through crisis management bring forth the (economized, but also gendered, sexed, and racialized) subject as a performative political arena of vulnerability and precariousness. They also bring forth the ways in which subjects are interpellated into crisis politics as subjects of vulnerability and precariousness. In this context of crisis discourse, new configurations of crisis and critique are emerging with reference to questions of what counts as crisis and how critical responses are articulated. In other words, the question of thinking critically in times of crisis emerges and persists in complicated ways. This question(ing) involves also taking into consideration that critique is alwaysalready in crisis, as it pertains to interrogating the terms which determine what counts as an ontological claim. Thus, critique is about provoking crisis to established truth claims, including the truth claims of crisis. At the same time, this questioning involves reflection on conflicted temporalities of crisis: what matters as crisis, when and for whom; and what emerges as resistant. In light of this questioning, this chapter explores the possibility of figuring a break with the present order(ing) of things, by asking what it is that mobilizes radical social imagination in these times of neoliberal governmentality. This ‘break’ with the logics and logistics of crisis is about an interrupted and undecidable attentiveness, or a spacing, which inscribes an openness-to-come; and which constantly pushes toward the not-yet-here.

16 Athanasiou In this sense, I suggest that we consider Judith Butler’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s well-known essay, ‘What is Critique?’ Both texts pose the question of critique with reference to forces of subjectivation, self-formation, and desubjugation. Foucault writes: ‘Critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially ensure the desubjugation [désassujettissement] of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (Foucault 1997: 47). And Judith Butler responds thus: But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint. (Butler 2001) To echo Butler’s formulation, I would like to argue that what is at stake in current regimes of crisis is precisely a contested domain where subjects ‘risk their deformation as subjects,’ ‘occupy ontologically insecure positions,’ and, at the same time, ‘yield artistry from constraint.’ In this chapter, I propose to explore current neoliberal governmentality as a distinct assemblage of power, knowledge, and subjectivation. Neoliberal governments use the ever-present emergency of crisis, with all its accompanying affective apparatuses of fear and insecurity, in order to legitimize the necessity to take action in the direction of managing uncertainty and establishing a new and secure normality. Crisis necessitates the realism of constant management – both preemptive and reparative. Anti-neoliberal politics, however, reclaims action not in terms of a return to ‘normality’ but rather as an occasion of bringing the seemingly settled social intelligibility of what matters as ‘normality’ to creative crisis. My purpose here is to unravel the affective and corporeal qualities of such critical action as desubjugation. To pose the question of desubjugation today is to engage with genres of crisis and critique that inflect critical political subjectivities in our late capitalist times. So I am interested here in the performative contestation at the heart of loss (loss of public education and health, loss of work, loss of housing, loss of rights, loss of dignity, loss of democracy): in other words, the emergent – always emergent – processes by which embodied subjects, simultaneously produced and foreclosed via multiple regulatory schemas, return to the space of their erasure and in varied contexts of unevenly distributed affectability. In reflecting on agonistic democratic subjectivity as a performative resource for political engagement and contestation, I seek to attend to the plurality, undecidability, and decent redness of ‘the people’: what Ernesto

States of emergency, modes of emergence 17 Laclau defines as ‘the specific subject of politics’ (Laclau 2001: 3). This is the subject that the antidemocratic force of neoliberalism works to hollow out. In Wendy Brown’s terms, neoliberal governance eviscerates, or swallows, the very space of the demos, the democratic space in which people assemble to articulate common claims of freedom, equality, and justice. Citizenship is being simply relegated to the medium through which the market administers public life and ‘human capital.’ In her latest book, where she examines challenges for democracy generated by neoliberal governance and austerity politics, Brown argues that the values of democracy are undermined today not only by the unfettered power of finance capital and by extreme economic inequality, but also by a normative economic mode of reason and governance that ‘undoes’ the constituent terms of democracy – freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty (Brown 2015).1 In texts ensuing from the speech she delivered at Occupy Wall Street in October 2012, Judith Butler has explored the phrase ‘we, the people’ as an illocution, that is, as an utterance which provokes action: a speech act fundamentally related to the physicality of bodies actively making their appearance in the public. Either as anti-neoliberal protesters, or as transgender in a transphobic environment, or as criminalized sans-papiers, these assembled bodies, vulnerable but also dissenting, enact a form of political exposition (Butler 2013). In Butler’s thought, the assembled bodies come to be through their political exposition and action in the public; at the same time, their exposition yields, or makes possible, a call to action. In this context, political subjectivity is not understood as grounded in a pre-existing solid foundation of the self, but rather as brought about through collective political action and relational exposition related to the physical emergence of assembled bodies. ‘Modes of subjection or subjectivation,’ to use Foucault’s phrase, take place through performative contingency rather than ontological solidity, and it involves, as Foucault has shown, the desubjugation of the subject within a politics of truth within which norms circumscribe the human in its fraught relation with the political. In this vein, I would like here to consider the political performativity of ‘the people’ – through configurations of differentiated plurality and dissipative ephemerality rather than through conceptions of a unitary body politic. In tracing the condition of possibility for the ‘we, the people,’ my reflections gesture in the direction of its performative implications, and not in the direction of defining the proper subject of politics. In this sense, my conception of ‘the people’ as resolutely political and radically democratic is partly and inconsistently consonant with what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the part that has no part,’ or those who have no share in the ‘distribution/partition of the sensible,’ or, as he differently puts it, the count of the uncounted/unaccounted-for (le compte des incomptés) (Rancière 1999). The ‘improper property’ of the part without part stages a post-foundational configuration of the political subject (1999: 13). There can be nothing essential, fully self-formed, or individualistically possessive about this

18 Athanasiou (im)propriety. The latter is not rooted in the Kantian autonomous self; and there can be no enactment of it outside of a mode of subjectivation that allows, compels, and delimits the formation of the subject. As Butler has insightfully made clear, critique involves ‘the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation’ by enacting, again and again, the question: ‘Who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life?’ (Butler 2001). And so instead of a clear-cut division between those who have and those who have no place in the given order of distribution, I am more interested in mapping out the political performativity of departing, imparting, and partaking as a tenuous assemblage of possibilities for belonging and, at the same time, taking a critical distance from particular injurious conditions and established realms of intelligibility that have brought the subject into being. It is precisely this reflexive poiesis of ‘the people’ as non-identical to itself that might bring forward reordering of established intelligibility (rather than as asking for a share in it).

Biopolitics and governmentality of crisis The current regimes of crisis provide the grounds for a critical re-engagement with, and a critical reimagining of, who counts as part of the public; how the political is performed; how and where it ‘takes place’; what qualifies as political subjectivity, and how it is gendered, racialized, and classed; and how bodies are subjugated and desubjugated in these times of neoliberal governmentality and precarization. Emerging critical gestures of relationality and collective exposure raise the question of the polis as a multivalent question of be-longing and un-belonging: who belongs and who does not belong? On what condition and at what cost? Which bodies are rendered visible and whose voices can be possibly heard and publicly registered as audible? In this context, new and unforeseeable modes of refiguring the subject and the political emerge. Rather than a pristine place of liberatory agency, ‘the people’ emerge as a performative event of critical agency, which is enacted by/through assembled bodies and their collective stasis and agonism. It is precisely this collective agonism, which Chantal Mouffe takes to be ‘the very condition of a vibrant democracy’ (Mouffe 2005: 126),2 that creates space for the eventness of non-corporate, non-commodified relationality in the polis, in the face of losing a place, a home, a community, the right to assemble, hope, or one’s means of livelihood. And it is this collective agonism that reaffirms the unconditionality of a public hospital, a music scene, a public broadcaster, a park, a school, a theater space. The state of crisis, where people are differentially faced with economic dispossession, the political violence of authoritarianism, and a state of deadly living, has inspired a philosophical and political critique of neoliberalism based on a theoretical reconsideration of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, especially its emphasis on making live and letting die. But how might we rethink biopolitics as a performative resource for agonistic political engage-

States of emergency, modes of emergence 19 ment and contestation? How might we think together a politics of emergency and a politics of emergence? This question connects up with the way in which Bonnie Honig defines ‘emergency politics’ broadly to include the dimensions of possibility for radical democratic politics in emergency settings (Honig 2009). As ‘crisis’ becomes a complex assemblage of power relations which both manage life and expose to death, the ‘state of exception,’ which is usually deployed to signify the element of emergency at the heart of the normative administrative discourses of crisis, proves to be not exceptional but rather ordinary, systematic, canonical, and foundational. The normative terms of subjectivity emerging from such a configuration are defined by exclusionary norms of gender, capital, and nation – norms which take place in the thick of the ordinary. It is through such pervasive, (un)exceptional forces of power and subjectivation that crisis becomes the production of life and death as economic and political currency, as an economic and political ontology of life and death itself. In the analytics of biopower developed by Michel Foucault, if sovereignty seeks to rule on death, biopolitics is about administering ‘life’ through managing surplus populations. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault suggests that liberalism is the paradigmatic mode of governmentality for the exercise of biopolitics. Liberal forms of governing, contrary to the policelike political doctrines of raison d’état, entail a limiting of the power of the state. The role of the state and state institutions is to ensure and safeguard the pervasive functions of the market. As Foucault writes: ‘One must govern for the market, not because of the market’ (1979: 121). Neoliberal governance for the ‘free markets’ entails the upward redistribution of wealth and thus demands the dispossession of bodies, spaces, rights, common resources, and livelihoods. For the free market and consumer fantasies and profits to be enjoyed by some, others must be rendered cheap reserve labor – utterly exploitable, dispensable, and disposable. The accumulation of wealth enabled by the expansion of the ‘free market’ not only necessarily implies and precipitates but also obscures normalized cultures of social suffering, abjection, and exclusion. In this context, one must account for and critically engage the significant trajectories in Foucault’s method from the introduction of the concept as an aspect of his engagement with the problem of sexuality in The History of Sexuality (1976) and, especially, from a more totalizing treatment of biopolitics as a modern configuration of power in Society Must Be Defended (1976) to the lectures of 1978 (Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics), where different co-present modes, structures, and techniques of power (i.e. the disciplinary, the juridical, security, population) are presented in their hierarchical correlations, re-articulations, and transformations. In Security, Territory, Population, biopolitics is interrelated with questions of governmentality (the linking of governing [‘gouverner’] and modes of thought [‘mentalité’] and what Foucault calls ‘apparatuses of

20 Athanasiou security’); in fact, biopolitics tends to be analytically displaced by the idea of ‘governing’ and the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed. In this text, Foucault addresses the ‘pre-eminence over all other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call “government’’’ (Foucault 2010 [1979]: 108). In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault seems to deploy governmentality to signify power relations in general. In this text, he continues to pursue the theme of a governmental rationality which seeks maximum effectiveness (in mastering life) by governing less, and focuses on a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality, including the role of neoliberalism in twentieth-century politics. So in order to deal with the multiplicity of directions in Foucault’s work on biopolitics and his closely connected discussions of governmentality, it is important to account for the ways in which biopolitics, in the form of a crisis-oriented normalization, gives the ground for today’s re-articulation and re-configuration of governmentality. This perspective runs counter to a teleological conceptualization of governmentality as a form of rule which gradually displaces those technologies of power, namely sovereignty and discipline, that are considered archaic, more ‘repressive,’ ‘authoritarian,’ ‘irrational,’ and ‘uneconomic’ than governmental technologies. In this light, neoliberal rationalities and techniques of power involve an articulation between ‘productive’ and ‘destructive’ aspects of power, discipline and freedom, choice and competition, authoritarianism and self-determination, subjectivation and subjection. The current crisis of late capitalism, as allowed to happen and become ordinary by neoliberal governmentality in order to turn into an object of management through ‘reforms,’ puts into crisis the bipolar conceptualization of the relation between the liberal-capitalist spirit of ‘good life’ and the neoliberal management of crisis. It enables a rethinking of capitalism through the very heterogeneous forces of its own becoming. Neoliberal governmentality denotes an authoritative apparatus of producing dispensable and disposable populations, and, at the same time, producing and demarcating the normative codes of the human by regulating the (economic) vitality, affectivity, potentiality, embodiment, vulnerability, and livability of subjects. Within the purview of this governmentality, the biopolitical imaginary and administration of life and death is reinvented, revitalized, and reconfigured, as resources and vulnerability are differently and unevenly distributed among different bodies – differently economized, racialized, and gendered bodies. Thus, in the Greek neoliberal context of plurality of power technologies, steep economic disparities, and deprivation, the normalization of poverty and the widespread condition of precarity are combined with, and supplemented by, various forms of securitization, such as tightened migration policies, the abjection of undocumented immigrants, as well as an intensified politics of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Economic hardship and austerity measures required under the bailout, loss of jobs, pay cuts, disposable labor,

States of emergency, modes of emergence 21 unemployment, pension reductions, poverty, evictions, loss of dignity, and the dissolution of the public healthcare system are attended by an overall authoritarianism: emergency legislation is deployed to curtail rights; a citizenship law repeals citizenship rights for second-generation migrants and increases the number of years of residence and schooling that the children of immigrants need to prove before they are eligible to apply for citizenship; governmental invocation of an emergency law and the ‘threat of civil disorder’ forces strikers back to work; the Health Minister targets HIVpositive women as a ‘public health bomb’; and the police detain trans people in order to ‘clean and beautify the city.’ However, while politics is displaced by the morality of securitization and people are forcefully relegated to disposable bodies with no rights, new modes of agonistic embodied citizenship have been emerging, through which challenges to the market logic have been posed. In the context of an ongoing ‘debt crisis,’ an anti-austerity protest sphere formed in Greece, within and against a power regime that depletes certain livelihoods and subsumes all political discourse under the ‘unmarked universal’ of economic management. The neoliberal management of crisis has become an occasion for the ‘emergence’ of protesting assemblies despite and against such authoritarian regimes, despite and against police brutality and power abuses.

Precarious intensities: gendered bodies on the streets and squares of Greece Neoliberalism is not just a mode of capitalist financialization in the strict sense, but rather a more encompassing regime of neoconservative governmentality, which regulates the terms of livability by unevenly distributing resources and vulnerability among different bodies – differently racialized, gendered, and classed bodies. It includes particular modalities of power, subjectivation, governance, self-governance, and self-formation. Such modalities take the interwoven forms of biopolitical (self-)management, self-interested and competitive individualization, securitization, responsibilization, a reconfigured relation between public and private, and a particular logic of economy and the market. The tension between, on the one side, the differential distribution and regulation of the terms of precariousness as an instrument of neoliberal governmentality and, on the other side, the struggle to reclaim the terms of a livable life without erasing vulnerability is precisely what I would like to call ‘precarious intensity.’ Precarious intensity implies an agonistic (instead of antagonistic) way of attending to vulnerability; an agonistic engagement which often takes place within a contested public space, or within a contested realm of embodying public space. The massive spread of induced precarity inaugurated a period of intense collective mobilization in Greece. Calls for ‘real democracy’ (as opposed to market democracy) have been emphatically articulated in the context of the anti-precarity movements, which draw upon the transnational European

22 Athanasiou precarious mobilizations organized under EuroMayDay since the early 2000s. Despite authoritative efforts to produce a monolithic narrative of crisis without alternatives and without heterodoxies, people have been seeking to counteract the sense of helplessness through engaging in a plurality of projects of protest and solidarity. What emerged as the connective tissue among several of these agonistic political enactments is the desire to defend the democracy that has been gained through past anti-authoritarian, antidictatorial movements (i.e. in Greece and Spain) and, simultaneously, the struggle for a democracy yet to be acquired and reclaimed from capitalism. During the spring and summer of 2011, thousands of people took to the streets in Athens and other major cities across the country, in mass rallies, occupations, and assemblies, displacing the conditions of urban livability within and against the exigencies of global capital. Tremendous crowds of citizens from all neighborhoods of Athens poured into Syntagma Square (Constitution Square), the most prominent public space opposite Parliament, creating an open laboratory for political imagination, and a space for reclaiming democracy from corporate power (Douzinas 2013). During the occupation, several police raids occurred, demonstrations escalated in response to state violence and authoritarianism, protesters were injured in resisting eviction, solidarity protests against police brutality took place, and a government dissolved. On June 28, 2011, amid major protests, the second austerity package was passed with a marginal majority. The previous day, Greek unions had begun a strike in protest of the deteriorating economic situation and the impoverishment of public welfare institutions. On the day of the demonstrations, the police attempted to evacuate the square of protesters, by throwing stun grenades and making extensive use of tear-gas – even inside the Syntagma metro station. The protests went on in a thick, toxic cloud formed by tear gas and other carcinogenic chemical substances. Every time the suffocating tear gas swept over the square, the crowd retreated slowly, waiting for the gas to blow away. As soon as the gas dispersed, the demonstrators moved forward again, in peaceful perseverance. Wearing surgical masks, scarves, goggles, and, occasionally, gas masks to endure tear gas, applying soda pop to each other’s faces to deal with the chemical cloud, protesters defended collective precariousness – not only their own, but everyone’s (Kambouri and Hatzopoulos 2011). Exposed to state violence, the protesters employed diverse tactics of activist corporeality: chanting, raising one’s voice, standing/sitting silently, forming and breaking blockades, and, above all, persisting together in public – in the urban street (Butler 2013). Despite the different modalities of precarious living, a range of spaces of resistance and protest emerges, enacting a possibility for solidarity based on complexities which cannot be captured by an identitarian or communitarian logic. While most were afflicted by the crisis, and although an educated, young middle class was particularly represented in the square assemblies, participating actors differed in the minutiae of their social situation, coping

States of emergency, modes of emergence 23 strategies, and narratives of blame, thus creating a plural embodied space of discontent. This contingent and tenuously constituted formation of publicly exposed corporeality, in all its passionate and vulnerable intensities, and in all its incalculable potentialities and misfires, was predicated upon a trans-subjective, compassionate, broadly shared sense of vulnerability to the injuries of injustice. Vulnerability, in this context, does not denote individual passivity but rather the abiding potentiality of being affected, both in the sense of susceptibility to regimes of power and of relational openness to others: shared and yet socially positioned and unequally distributed (Butler 2004). The relational congregating of the protesters gave a cue to self-reflect the foreclosures on which the space of the polis (including the space of protest) is constituted. Does this ‘taking place’ of protest effectively work to reentrench conventional ordinances of placedness, or does it displace existing categorical schemes of sociality – be it economic, national, gender, or sexual? As a multilayered sense of loss forms the basis for the contentious intimacy of practicing resistance, what modes of belonging does this shared ethicopolitical sensibility entail and preclude? The feminist and queer collectivity called ‘Purple Bench – Gender Group at Syntagma,’ which took part in people’s assemblies, released statements counselling against the idealizing invocations of ancient Greek democracy as an antidote to the contemporary neoliberal political order and alerting people to the patriarchal and autochthonic nature of the classical Athenian polis, which excluded women, foreigners, and slaves. Such feminist critique alerted to the nuanced complexities permeating the demarcations and pretensions of belonging through which embodied topographies of the social plurality come into being, even on the occasion of concerted protest. Hence, gendered bodies – in all their contingent and aleatory tonalities of doing and undoing gender – emerge in the protest sphere to challenge existing regulatory terms of social intelligibility, including those of gendering as a mode of living in late liberal biopower. When these gendered bodies come into play in protesting neoliberalism, they do not create a utopian communitarian space of protest. Rather, they simultaneously reclaim the community and destabilize its grounding and totalizing myths, most notably its masculine and bourgeois exclusive power structures. In enacting a provisional and tenuous community of those without community, and in seeking to reconstruct a space for those who have lost their place in the world, they redistribute the terms of what counts as grounded belonging according to both global capitalist strategies and hegemonic communitarian masculinities. This destabilizing effect of feminist struggles on normative ideals of community does not merely entail questioning women’s subordinate status in the established public sphere but also, and most significantly, unsettling the power structures through which gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation mutually determine the conditions of forming, and belonging to, the public sphere. Such allied feminist, anti-neoliberal, and anti-racist struggles delineate

24 Athanasiou the ways in which neoliberalism is a gendered configuration of power, both in terms of enhancing gender inequalities in the allocation of livelihood resources and in terms of entrenching neoconservative, sexist, and heteronormative assumptions of the political. In responding to the current crisis, a range of LGBTQ activisms in Athens and other cities of Greece trouble the commonsensical presumption that homophobia is a ‘secondary issue’ and the struggle against it a distraction from the ‘truly political’ anti-austerity agenda. A few days before the 6th Athens Pride, in 2008, a neo-fascist newspaper published a piece on their website directly threatening the Pride with physical violence. The neo-fascists had taken issue with that year’s Pride poster, which criticized, in camp humor, the heteronormative embodiment of the national public sphere, by featuring an evzone (light infantry) in the traditional kilt-like Greek male attire (fustanella) worn by the fighters of the Greek War of Independence and nowadays by ceremonial guards, with the superimposed slogan ‘we are everywhere.’ Three years afterwards, in 2011, the Athens Pride parade marched to Syntagma and converged with the protesters at the square, signaling an opposition to nationalists and outright fascists who attempted to appropriate the protests at the outset, but were too busy during the days of occupation prosecuting immigrants all over Athens. The crossing of Athens’ gay pride parade through the square inserted a decentering difference into the very territorialization of the protest; it queered, even provisionally, its conceits of heroic masculine defiance and minoritized the universalizing pretensions of the embodied space of conviviality.

Neo-Nazism and far-right politics When it comes to bodies on the streets, however, it is critical that we bear in mind that it is not only the Left that is taking to the streets today in Europe but also, occasionally, segments of the Right and even of the far Right. With the neo-Nazi party rising rapidly in popularity for its anti-immigrant stance, the Greek government enforces tightened immigration policies, including roundups, detentions, and deportations of undocumented migrants. Alongside anti-immigrant hostility, anti-feminism is also crucially deployed as a mobilizing force by the ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi agenda, which interpellates women back home as ‘mothers of the nation.’ According to the profoundly essentialized and normative constructions of masculinities and femininities lying at the core of far-right and neo-Nazi politics, women who have abortions, feminists, LGBTQ people, HIV-positive people, and immigrants, are all considered social abnormalities, biological deviations, and national enemies, and hence are designated dangerous and disposable bodies. Neo-Nazi agenda, converging with the neoliberal market economy, hinges upon a biopolitical logi(sti)cs of human disposability. Exploiting the erosion of welfare systems, members of Golden Dawn, men and women, organize

States of emergency, modes of emergence 25 ‘Greek-only’ food giveaways and blood donations exclusively for ‘ethnic Greeks.’ In October 2012, Golden Dawn members, headed by MPs and accompanied by angry para-religious crowds, gathered outside the Hitirio Theatre in downtown Athens protesting against the staging of a theatrical play, preventing the audience from entering the theatre, shouting anti-gay and antiimmigrant slurs, chanting religious psalms, tearing down the show posters, and threatening the director. Artists’ organizations, anti-fascist citizens and left-wing MPs gathered in front of the theatre in support of the performance and against censorship. After a few nights of Golden Dawn terror, the play was canceled. Under the rubric of an increasingly privatized conception of care, various conservative discourses – such as religious, neoliberal, nationalist, and farright – promote women’s return to their ‘natural’ domestic place, maternal duty, and caring labor for those who are ill, young, or elderly. In adopting an anti-establishment attitude, far-right gender politics poses as an opposition to the ‘mainstream emancipation’ discourses and advocates heteronormative family values in the name of familial cohesion in insecure times.

Gendered and racialized enactments of/exposures to precarity The minutiae of collectively defending vulnerability against market-oriented governmentality emerged in protest actions related to two crucial episodes in the genealogy of violence exercised on gendered bodies, including protesting gendered bodies on the streets and squares, in the context of crisis. These two critical events in the recent genealogy of ‘becoming precarious,’ which I explore in more detail here, opened spaces for an ethico-political critique of gendered, racial, classed, and biopolitical (de-)subjectivation which sustains what Elizabeth Povinelli has called ‘economies of abandonment’ (Povinelli 2011). Focusing on questions of endurance, potentiality, and abandonment in late liberal socio-politics, Povinelli asks: How do specific arrangements of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance make affectively and cognitively sensible and practical, late liberal distributions of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion across social difference? Given these arrangements, what are the conditions in which new forms of social life emerge? (2011: 5) The first episode worked as one of the precursors to the current crisis but also to challenges to neoliberal log(ist)ics in Greece. As she was going home after work on December 23, 2008, Kostadinka Kuneva, a Bulgarian migrant woman who was working as a cleaner for the public transportation system of Athens municipality, was attacked by two unidentified men who ambushed

26 Athanasiou her outside her home and threw sulphuric acid in her face, forcing it down her throat. She was working for a subcontracting company that hired out workers, mostly migrant women, and she had received death threats over her activities as a trade unionist, which included fighting to improve working conditions for subcontracted cleaners. The attack against Kuneva sparked an unprecedented movement of solidarity and protest by feminist, anti-racist, and left-wing collectivities. Through different means of collective action, ranging from mass demonstrations to fundraising concerts, the mobilization sought to open a public discussion of the wider social, economic, and political conditions that made the attack possible. A few weeks after the attack, police used tear gas in downtown Athens to disperse a public protest against the government’s toleration of (and complicity with) systematic violations of labor legislation regarding cleaners’ salaries, health insurance, and work conditions. That event exposed the intersecting powers of racialization and feminization that have historically structured the condition of ‘becoming precarious.’ Before being recognized as a generalized consequence of neoliberal policies of austerity, precarity had been already established (albeit not recognized) as a profoundly gendered and racialized mode of pariah economy and differential exposure to injurability. This precarity, which has notoriously marked the working conditions of migrant women flexibly and cheaply employed mainly as housemaids and cleaners in the global postindustrial capitalist market of late liberal modernity, has been systematically naturalized and gone unnoticed. In light of notorious depreciation of care work, as it is gendered, racialized, and transnationally distributed today, demonstrations in solidarity of Kuneva created the space for reimagining the possibility of coalition on the basis of differential precarization.

Neoliberal biopolitics: securitizing the ‘infected nation’ The second critical moment in the genealogy of the Greek crisis and its gendered discontents evoked the abjected figure of the ‘HIV-positive foreigner woman’ as an apparatus of securitization in times of precipitous cuts to health care programs. On December 15, 2011, the Greek Minister of Health had stated that HIV-infected female migrant sex workers should be deported from the country, because ‘the infection passes from the undocumented migrant women to the Greek male customer, into the Greek family.’ In May 2012, a few days ahead of the national legislative election and amid opinion polls showing a sharp decline in support for the two major parties (right-wing New Democracy and social-democratic PASOK) while support for the leftwing SYRIZA party seemed to surge, Greek authorities announced the arrest of 17 HIV-positive women who allegedly worked illegally as sex workers, accusing them of ‘intentionally causing grievous bodily harm.’ Their names and photographs were published on the Greek Police website, in violation

States of emergency, modes of emergence 27 of human rights and medical confidentiality. The mug shots were accompanied by scaremongering stories about the ‘respectful Greek married family men’ who could have been infected. The decision to make public the photographs of the sex workers alleged to have tested positive for HIV fueled a public outcry especially among rights movements, feminist, and anti-racist groups. Both the Health Minister and Citizen Protection Minister (prominent members of the ‘national unity’ interim government) defended the decision, stating that the protection of public health overrides all other concerns. The ‘Feminist initiative for the elimination of violence against women’ condemned the discriminatory and humiliating way in which those female sex workers were treated as less than human by state authorities. The public demonstrations spurred by that governmental action illustrated the crucial affinity of the market economy to a subjectivating economy of the precarized body, exercised through power technologies of securitization and normalization.3 At a time of government cuts on public healthcare and services, including those related to HIV prevention and care, the Health Minister set the norms of technocratic therapeutics by targeting female sex workers as a ‘public health bomb,’ that is, as medicalized bodies to be monitored for the sake of the nation’s sanitation and safety. Neoliberal biopolitics entails producing superfluous figures denoted as ‘public enemy’ and shaming those classified as gendered and racialized pariahs of the political and moral economies of these late liberal times. The abject medicalized body of the alien woman, cast as dangerously precarious, becomes the instrumentalized vehicle for immunizing and securitizing the body politic in the neoliberal political imagination.

Emergency politics, emergent politics What all of these embodied, situated, and agonistic engagements with ‘crisis’ exemplify is that neoliberal capitalism interpellates us today, in a differential way, not only as classed subjects of market sovereignty, impoverished subjects of shame, and subjects of competitive economic struggle for survival, but also as precarized subjects of gendered and racial violence and injustice. In politically mobilizing their shared vulnerability, the protesters – as plural and critically dispossessed bodily enactments (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) – expose the multiple modes of foreclosure through which the nation-in-crisis imagines and immunizes its own terms of intimacy. At the same time, they performatively unsettle the gendered, classed, and racialized norms of admissibility through which the neoliberal and neoconservative nation-incrisis constitutes itself. In so doing, they call into question the matrices that prescribe the space of action and forestall or constrain the possibility of acting otherwise. Such corporeality of dissent signals a desire and possibility for alternative, embodied and embedded modes of becoming-with-one-another in reclaiming and changing the terms of gendered bodies and livable lives.

28 Athanasiou As crisis management turns into a crucial mode of neoliberal governance through a political and moral economy of life itself, at the same time, new radical movements are emerging in different parts of the world as well as different topologies where these movements are being performed. A political possibility of emerging and becoming otherwise emerges. Crisis becomes an arena in which different forms of publicness are enacted and negotiated. As emergent subjectivities, affective communities, and spaces of noncompliance take shape in various multilayered city-scapes of crisis, different modalities of civic protest address a range of concerns including austerity, the privatization and corporatization of public space, poverty, precarity, social injustice, and state authoritarianism. In this sense, as present neoliberal regimes are increasingly exposing people to death, through differential exposure to the injuries of poverty, demoralization, and racism, a performative politics of protest emerges, one which mobilizes the potentiality of transforming such injurious interpellations. Assembled bodies in the street, but also in various collectivities and networks of solidarity (often organized in ways alternative to the archetype of the heroic activist), reclaim the unconditionality of public space, demanding a democracy with demos, and enacting a demos with differences. Public space is thus enacted and reactivated as a register of the emergent – open to the plural contingencies of agonistic contention. The potential performative outcome of this opening is the actualization of the public as a means of embodying multiple modalities of dissident belonging rather than a closed and overarching arena of nationalist, heteronormative banality. Therefore, a question of how ‘the people’ might be reactivated as a possibility for democratic agonistic intimacy, beyond and against the normative matrices of nationalist and militarized belonging, is posed, again and again, in theory and in practice. ‘The people’ does not amount to the spatio-temporal coordinates of the nation-state, but rather creates the ongoing conditions for multiple, differing, and transversal forms of belonging. In other words, what is at stake is what kinds of imaginaries and subjects of a radical democratic politics would be prompted by this plurality of dispositions. The first left-wing government ever elected in a European Union member state after the landslide victory of the radical-left SYRIZA over the right-wing New Democracy and its partners of the neoliberal ‘extreme centre’ in the Greek legislative election of January 25, 2015 has been an emblematic event in this trajectory. It is the first government in Europe that threatens Europe’s neoliberal hegemony by seeking to end austerity, by refusing to extend the cycle of ‘bailout’ loans, and by creating new democratic configurations of political power. It entails opening up room for disagreement within the current orthodoxy of EU politics, and it brings about ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988) through which a shift takes place in the realms of how questions are to be asked, how reforms are to be conceptualized, how European politics are to be reconfigured, and how radical democratic change is to be mobilized.

States of emergency, modes of emergence 29 SYRIZA seeks to implement its progressive agenda amidst harsh attacks from the conservative post-democratic political and economic establishment, leading figures, neoliberal technocrats, and various elites within the EU. To offer just one instance of such harsh pressure, the German government official Hans-Peter Friedrich stated: ‘The Greeks have the right to vote for whom they want. We have the right to no longer finance Greek debt.’4 This statement encompasses the authoritarian spirit of postdemocracy: unequivocal subjection of democratic values and functions – such as popular sovereignty – to the interests of global capital. Rancière has aptly addressed postdemocracy as an inflection of liberal democracy that neutralizes the element of political antagonism: ‘Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimation of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests’ (Rancière 1998: 102). Indeed, the regulatory demarcation and management of the demos as a ‘part of those who have no part’ is at the heart of neoliberal governance, as a persistent conflict over the rights of undocumented immigrants, the status of second-generation immigrants, and the ongoing debates over expanding partnership and marriage rights to LGBTQ citizens. Certain aspects of the egalitarian agenda of SYRIZA are very likely to be resisted by its conservative government ally. The rather unavoidable (due to lack of alternative coalition partners5) and, indeed, uneasy coalition that SYRIZA formed with the small populist right-wing, anti-austerity party Independent Greeks (ANEL), instigates worries among progressive forces left of centre. For example, the declaration and determination of Tasia Christodoulopoulou, the Minister of Immigration Policy, that the government will draft a law to grant citizenship to immigrant children born or raised in Greece has been vehemently opposed by ANEL. Such tensions will most probably emerge with regard to legislative moves related to the separation of state and church, or when the government will draft a law to include same-sex couples in the domestic partnership status. SYRIZA as a unitary part was formed through a plural assemblage of political collectivities and social movements with a long history of struggles against capitalist injustice and corporate power, and also against nationalism, sexism, and homophobia. Its rise to power took place under the banner of dignity, social justice, and equality. And this is a momentous political event in itself, one that brings Europe’s neoliberal and post-democratic hegemony to critical crisis, by bringing politics back to the agenda. As Giorgos Katsambekis puts it: Thus, even if SYRIZA is defeated at the end, forced to comply with Europe’s inflexible neoliberal doxa, it has already achieved a first small victory: political disagreement, that is the very heart of democratic dialogue, has re-entered Europe’s protected and remote rooms of power. (Katsambekis 2015)

30 Athanasiou If the radical democratic project of SYRIZA is forced to failure, however, as is the aspiration of Europe’s current mainstream forces eager to confirm that ‘there is no alternative’ neoliberal doctrine, the way will be open not only for free market orthodoxy but also for the xenophobic, nationalist, extreme right-wing forces. The demos, or ‘the people,’ as the guiding concept and animating force of this government, is called upon to make sure that SYRIZA does not fail. The political articulation of the collective ‘we’ is enacted in the name of what Étienne Balibar defines equaliberty: as ‘nothing other than the demand for a popular sovereignty and autonomy without exclusion’ (Balibar 2004: 319). The figure of the emergent resonates with Jacques Derrida’s notion of arrivant, as a disposition to the other, and an openness to what lies outside of oneself. In this regard, it hints at the moment of the possibility of an impossibility: a radical transformation of the social and political (rather than merely economic) ontologies upon which the intelligibility of neoliberal governmentality is founded. As Derrida puts it, the ‘to-come’ suggests that democracy ‘will always remain aporetic in its structure’ (Derrida 2005: 86): always deferred and yet present as an iterative and disruptive potential in the here and now (Derrida 1994 [1993]). Taking up such a line of investigation would help make us attentive to the manifold, plural, and contradictory ways in which ‘emergence’ might signify and complicate the unexpected, the dissonant, and the subversive, and, at the same time, the open-ended and the self-reflective. Such conception of ‘emergence’ as an ongoing practice of radical indetermination might signpost possible ways in which ‘the people’ could be reclaimed by an aporetic poetics and thus be activated as a transformative critique of the fixed propriety inherent in states of emergency that structure and regulate our present condition of governmentalization.

Notes A part of this text has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 40, n. 1, Autumn 2014, under the title ‘Precarious Intensities: Gendered Bodies in the Streets and Squares of Greece.’ 1

2

3 4

The eclipse of homo politicus by the all-encompassing neoliberal figure of homo economicus, which Brown describes, resonates with Constantin Tsoukalas’s argument (2014). For a theorization of neoliberal reason through a Foucauldian frame, see also Athanasiou 2012. Mouffe’s thought on agonism and radical democracy is important to the thesis I am interested in putting forward here as it theorizes how the radical democratic ‘we’ is articulated and enacted not as a closed whole but as always unstable, differentiated and subject to its own limits and exclusions. See also Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis 2014. This point is further illustrated in Foucault 1979. See Patrick Donahue’s article at the Greek daily Kathimerini, ‘Tsipras win draws French congratulations, German threat’, January 26, 2015.

States of emergency, modes of emergence 31 5

SYRIZA received 36.3% of the vote and 149 out of 300 seats. On January 26, 2015, SYRIZA and Independent Greeks (ANEL) agreed to form a coalition government, with SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras becoming Prime Minister and ANEL leader Panos Kammenos filling the Ministry of Defense.

2

Free money, spoiled recipients The capitalist crisis as a moral question among Greek technocrats Dimitrios Gkintidis

Introduction1 My recent ethnographic work took place within the period from June 2012 to December 2014 and focused on a particular network of dominant social agents in Greece – technocrats and acknowledged EU specialists. These were for the most part scholars whose topics of interest and professional occupation cast them in the broadly defined category of European Studies scholars. At the same time, this field was not limited within academia, but rather relied on a particular flexibility and interchangeability of roles and positions; hence, many of them had held (or were still holding at the time of my research) advisory or more permanent positions in the Greek state, in the European Commission, or pro-EU think tanks.2 All in all, these agents could be seen as part of what a professor of European Studies humorously termed the field of ‘europology (ευρωλογία)’, a field which has been ‘neighbouring with journalism (since both feed on events), but also with political power (on a national or supranational-european level)’ (Pesmazoglou 2013: 26). This proximity to political power and debates is only logical, since europology is ‘called to propose, contribute in the making of policies, or, simply, decode what is going on (τα τεκταινόμενα) in Brussels’ (26). Such EU specialists came to stand as public mediators (and fervent supporters) of the project of European Integration, throughout Greece’s ‘European course’ over the last three decades.3 My interest in the worldview, discourses, and practices of such social agents grew since the outbreak of the ‘Greek debt crisis’. Indeed, the Greek rendering of the global capitalist crisis has had a clear European dimension from its very beginning, first of all due to the inclusion of the country in the wider institutional and economic framework of the European Union, as well as its participation in the European Monetary Union; the EU and the EMU have stood as enforcers of budgetary stability and radical anti-labor reforms since 2009, along with representatives of Greek capital and successive Greek governments. To a great extent, systemic debates over austerity or ‘neoliberal’ reforms have been unavoidably intertwined with the question of whether

Free money, spoiled recipients

33

Greece would abide by the strict budgetary clauses imposed by the European Monetary Union, as well as its legal obligations to various debtors. Furthermore, the possibility of a non-obedient Greece leaving or being expelled from the European Union has haunted most parties’ policies and platforms.4 Within this context, I was able to observe that early on many of these technocrats and EU specialists took up a public role through appearances in the media and conferences, or even through political engagement within existing parties or newly formed initiatives. These social agents – along with a wide array of intellectuals, media personae, businessmen, Greek and foreign politicians – enacted a discourse of generalized accountability – both legal and moral (also see Fourcade 2013, Streeck 2013). Their political stance was structured along some specific lines: reminding the national audience of the legal obligations of the Greek state to its creditors, while also pointing out the inclusion of Greece within a constellation of European states – from which Greeks had profited in the past. In fact, central in their discourse was a widespread reading of the trajectory of Greece–EU relations which emphasized the dependence of Greece on EU cohesion policies and budget transfers since the mid-1980s.5 This memory was perhaps best summarized in the words of a high-ranking official of the PASOK party in 2012, when he stated that ‘all these years the EU was distributing wealth and now that it’s distributing burdens it is not easy’ (Chrysochoidis in Iefimerida 2012). This reading implicitly pointed toward the idea of a European community which consisted of parties which shared solidarity and obligations – both in times of ‘prosperity’ and ‘crisis’. In this sense, next to debates over legal clauses or economic management, emerged an overall discourse of obligation and accountability, in which both past ‘aid’ and current ‘debts’ stood as alternating but constitutive parts. Such assumptions had indeed pervaded political debates over the last decades and the memory of ‘European money’ had stood as a central facet through which the project of European Integration – or ‘Europeanization’ (Borneman and Fowler 1997) – had been vernacularized both within the Greek state and among the wider national audience. This was often coupled with the ideas of beneficial dependence and foreign generosity, as well as the image of Greece being the ‘enfant gâté’ of Europe (e.g. Dalègre 2006: 188). This chapter will attempt to provide an overview of the trajectory of these social agents, their shifting representations and memories, as well as their positioning amidst the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis. In doing so, I will rely on material obtained through semi-directed interviews conducted with informants mostly in the city of Athens; in addition to that, my research has also included participant observation of relevant public and academic events in Greece and the UK, as well as research on published textual material. In the first part of the paper, I will address the interpretative conundrum that EU funds introduced among European Studies scholars over the last 30 years. Moral questions in regards to these funds are, I will suggest, inextricably intertwined with the increasing reformulation of materiality,

34 Gkintidis inequality, and capitalism in moral terms. Hence, in the second part of the paper, I will be interested in pointing out the growing circulation of moral questions in parallel to the increased pervasiveness of European ‘aid’.

What has the EU ever done for us? The circulation of ‘European money’ has been one of the most common arguments through which European Integration has been vindicated in Greece over the last decades. This refers not only to the strict realm of economic and political calculations, but also to the formulation of European Integration in terms of a morally governed process; within this line of thinking, the European project initially did not rely on a cynical balance of power, but primarily built on voluntarist actions that challenged the idea of a world of antagonistic social relations. The history of these funds has implied a series of questions; how and why this money, that seemingly did not involve any repayment on the part of Greece, came to be allocated? Was it a political ruse, an exchange of money-for-allegiance, a developmental tool, or just an act of goodwill – a sort of aid? Greek membership itself in 1981 in the then European Community had been framed in terms of such a questioning of cynical and interested politics; a widely shared idea was that the economic or political benefits that the small Greek economy and market represented for Western European industrial powers were unimportant. Within this line of thinking, Greece had not been introduced into ‘Europe’ because of the integration of European capitalism or Cold War strategies, but primarily in order for Greeks to prosper, join the European family, and overcome residues of ‘authoritarianism’; the ensuing funding policies of the European Community gradually came to stand as the most concrete argument for this linear narrative of European voluntarism and paternalism. At the same time, it defined the construction of class ‘others’ – generically referred to as ‘Greeks’ – in terms of a beneficiary society which had achieved prosperity in the 1990s and 2000s thanks to these European funds. In fact, since the manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece, European Studies scholars and technocrats have placed themselves at the forefront of defending the European project, and, next to economic or legal analyses, their action and discourse has largely reflected their belief in the morally benign foundation of the European Union. Throughout my fieldwork, typical paternalist imagery was often invoked as an argument for the justification of the Union’s policies and the delegitimation of popular protests against austerity measures; to a great extent, these commonsensical assumptions exceeded the confines of Greek politics. A (non-Greek) former Commission official, whom I had the opportunity to interview in 2013 in the UK, made it quite clear by using a very interesting example. When asked as to the overall impact of the funds, he added the particular political function they had, namely that they justified the Union’s policies among national populations. He mentioned a scene from the Monty Python film Life of Brian, where

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zealots asked themselves ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. The overall answer was not very matching to the zealot’s revolutionary effervescence, since the material and technological upgrading that Romans had eventually offered to them – e.g. in the form of aqueducts or roads – did point to a different, not-so-gloomy, past. This same scene was publicly put forth in a recent article by a Greek former Commission and national official in his effort to relay the positive impact of the European Union in Greece and other parts of the world, as well as to remind everyone of their obligation to contribute to the European project. The article was titled ‘What has the European Union ever done for us?’ (Kourkoulas 2015). As I came to realize, the idea of a relation of material benefits and political (or moral) obligations was something more than a mere rhetorical tactic occasionally addressed to euroskeptics or the national audience; it also seemed to reflect a series of commonsensical assumptions within this field. These assumptions pervaded workshops and public events; the idea of a past European generosity, most often termed as ‘solidarity’, appeared to hold the position of a constitutive moment for the field of ‘europology’. A strict typology of the native views of European funds among my interlocutors and informants is a complex task, since their accounts often contained alternating (and contradictory) elements. Further to that, I should point out that a feeling of uneasiness became apparent during many discussions, as soon as I and my informant would start discussing the exact economic nature of these funds; indeed, when asked directly about the eventual disinterested nature of this ‘money’, some would retract into more nuanced or more ‘utilitarian’ accounts, while the explicit enunciation of the term ‘gift’ bore negative connotations. Nevertheless, all informants would eventually have recourse to expressions such as ‘aid’, ‘free money’ (τζάμπα λεφτά), or money that was ‘given for free’ (μας τα χαρίσαν). The assumption of a particular anti-economic relation points to similar formulations and interpretative debates within the wider field of European studies and EU politics. In a sense, these funds have constituted a particular interpretative conundrum (Gkintidis 2014a). Indeed, it has not been ‘easy to explain these “side-payments” in rational economic terms’ (Allen 2000: 263). Therefore, the half-spoken fascination over the morally charged nature of this money and the mystification of these cohesion policies should probably be viewed not only as a ‘Greek’ mistranslation of otherwise clear-cut processes; in the very end, fluid and inconclusive as it might be, the half-spoken memory of foreign benevolence bore a broader political logic, which I will attempt to outline in the second part of this chapter.

‘Free money’ and the moral formulation of capitalist relations The social implications of EU funds in Greece are multileveled. Leaving aside the wider political economy of Greece–EU relations and the fact that in the very end these funds were certainly not ‘free’,6 their recurring framing

36 Gkintidis in terms of ‘aid’ raises some crucial analytical and political issues. The pervasiveness of these funds in various spheres of social action in Greece and elsewhere can be seen as having increased the symbolic (institutional) capital of the EU and Western European ‘donors’, as well as having naturalized the idea of an unavoidable Greek dependence on the EU’s materiality (Gkintidis 2014a). Following anthropological and sociological literature (Benthall 2012, Bourdieu 1997, Gray 2011, Hattori 2001, 2003a, 2003b, Schrift 1997, Stirrat and Henkel 1997), we can posit the study of these funds in line with such critical approaches toward ‘aid’ and ‘gifts’, and their hegemonic function. However, in this chapter, I will be more interested in highlighting a different implication, which nonetheless communicates and adds to the above-mentioned perspective. I am interested in pointing out that these funds and their emic construction in terms of ‘aid’ enhanced the formulation of both inter-state and domestic politics in terms of a moral relation. In using the term moral I opt for a flexible approach, based on the plasticity of emic ideas of morality (for a dynamic and flexible approach on morality, see Fassin 2012; also Heintz 2009); in any case, morality can be broadly defined as a particular reading of social relations along depoliticized dichotomies such as ‘good’/‘bad’ or ‘right’/‘wrong’. My interest in morality lies in its emergence as a universal framework for the rephrasing of asymmetrical social relations and the ensuing relegation of social inequality or the workings of capitalism itself into the sphere of (materially arbitrary) openended intentions. Therefore, I am firstly addressing the emergence of emic ideas of universal morality as an expansive model of social interpretation that engulfs dominant and dominated alike (Fassin 2011). The reframing of (vertical) relations of power into (horizontal) relations between morally bound and exchanging parties is perhaps one of the most important political functions of such a process. Secondly, the reformulation of politics and the economy in the whimsical terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ intentions, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parties, and the ensuing hermeneutics of materiality over the moral content of capitalist relations have further political and epistemological implications. They stand in contrast to structural readings of capitalism – either through a Marxist perspective or even a plain realpolitik one. In our case, this refers to the central place that the ideas of aid and disinterested action have held in the worldview and epistemology of Greek scholars and EU specialists. Fieldwork and discussions with my informants allowed me to broadly outline the shifting configurations of power and meaning within this particular field of action over the last 30 years. Its consolidation started taking place in the 1980s – along with the parallel emergence of a stratum of Greek EU officials and specialists on the EU.7 This field included social agents hailing from the liberal conservative tradition and affiliated with the right-wing party of Nea Dimokratia, which had been the main political advocate of European Integration until the early 1980s; it also included scholars who at the time endorsed Marxist-lite and/or center-periphery

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approaches. They were mostly related with the rising socialist party of PASOK. The latter party was originally critical of European Integration, through a center-periphery approach with rather patriotic overtones. Interestingly, it came to power in 1981, the same year that Greece officially entered the then European Community. In this context, it was called to deal with this new political and institutional reality as a government – a process which eventually led to the full endorsement of the European perspective from the mid-1980s. Besides the PASOK party’s repositioning, the withering away of ‘euroskepticism’ within Greek society has been accordingly correlated with the top-down circulation of European materiality, starting with the first ‘Delors package’ in 1988. This was emphasized in discussions with informants who in fact contrasted their own, truly felt, European vocation to the materialist motives of Greek society and, more generally, people with somewhat humbler backgrounds. It is true that most of my Athenian informants hailed from dominant class backgrounds and occasionally defined themselves as part of a ‘Greek cosmopolitan elite’ which had always endorsed a Western-oriented worldview and self-image. Nonetheless, at the same time, my research allowed me to grasp an overall process of change and repositioning for larger parts of the Greek political and administrative personnel during the 1980s – including some of my informants as well. The disillusionment of Greek euroskepticism (in its rather patriotic pro-capitalist version) and the rationalization of the European perspective were accordingly facilitated by the diffusion of these funds in various spheres of social action – with large infrastructural projects probably being the most obvious marker. Indeed, my informants’ accounts reflected a widespread collective memory of Greek beneficial dependence on the European Union’s funding policies and aimed at emphasizing the impact of these funds in the reconfiguration of Greek dispositions toward the European project. These accounts were very much in line with my observations from my previous fieldwork in the region of Evros (see Gkintidis 2014a). Along with other forms of cooperation (e.g. delegations, knowledge exchange), the circulation of the first EU funds were often correlated with the acceptance of a different, mutually beneficial relationship within the then novel European institutional framework. To the satisfaction of Greek conservatives, who had always been in favor of Greece’s European course, these funds seemed to be a confirmation of the European project’s benign foundations, in contrast to older ‘left-wing demonization’ or ‘conspiracy theories’. In the long run, the introduction of European funds in Greece was gradually perceived as having entailed a generalized state of prosperity and an increase in consumer expenses and infrastructural renovations throughout Greece. This was a deep conviction for every single one of my informants.8 EU funds had been a ‘ray of hope’, as a Commission official told me, which changed the lives of disenfranchised people who till then had nothing – even if in the long run EU funds and programs didn’t deliver as ‘planned’.

38 Gkintidis As I understood through my fieldwork, any occasional ‘zero-sum’ game perceptions eventually gave way to functionalist win–win readings of intraEuropean politics and economy. Indeed, besides a positive shift in regards to the EU, I believe that the construction of these funds in terms of aid went along with wider political and epistemological changes. This process did not only entail a generalization of pro-EU approaches among Greek administrative personnel and the Greek state; equally important, it signified a different reading of social relations (both intra-European and domestic). I suggest that the idea of beneficial EU funds largely signified a shift from a structural and antagonistic paradigm to an idealist liberal one. On an initial level, the idea that European funds were given as aid seemingly defied a worldview of competing European states. The ‘disarming’ nature of these funds stood in immediate opposition to a structural and power-centered approach of European politics. This was explicitly pointed out to me by a ministry advisor – a convinced liberal Athenian – who correlated the flow of these funds with the waning away of ‘structural approaches’ within the field of European studies. In fact, according to him, the conviction that European politics or capitalism were not about opposed interests and asymmetry, but could rather be a set of ‘win–win’ reciprocal relations was reinforced by this instance of European ‘aid’. Interestingly, a commonly shared assumption among my informants was the rejection of the notion that these budget transfers, or the project of European Integration itself, could have been part of strategies of power. Of course, the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis during my research had reactualized the cynical prevalence of material interests and hence made it quite difficult for my informants to easily elaborate on their past convictions; nonetheless, most of them assumed the particular disinterested nature of these funds and its argumentative value in discrediting antagonistic or realpolitik readings of the social world. Some more nuanced approaches acknowledged the multileveled intertwinement of interests and good intentions in the enactment of these policies. But still, the idea that these funds could have been part of any kind of political or economic ‘calculation’ and wider strategy – e.g. the integration of European capitalism in the Southern periphery amidst its longterm crisis – was scoffed at by most, as economically trivial, irrelevant, or ‘conspirationist’: ‘the Greek market? Big deal . . .’. A different suggestion, that these budget transfers could have initially resulted from a power play between Greece and its Western European counterparts, was similarly more or less downgraded. The idea of materiality being the outcome of a topdown voluntarism (e.g. from the EU to Greece, from a national state to its citizens, etc.) was a prevailing theme. In any case, this ‘anti-structural’ idiom of top-down generosity stood in direct opposition to an understanding of materiality and political gains as the outcome of labor, exploitation, and power struggles. The act of ‘giving’ transcended the ‘narrow’ framework of social antagonism. Accordingly, for those that had worked as advisors or representatives of the Greek government in European institutions, the

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memory of inter-state negotiations was an opportunity to reminisce not only about ‘tough bargains’, but also about a deeply felt notion of solidarity in meeting rooms and the council’s hallways that eventually bore its own logic and, as an academic-government advisor put it, ‘at some point exceeded the rationalistic model of negotiating’; according to a colleague of his, the particular case of Greek–EU relations even seemed to apply to a benevolent disposition, since Greece would somehow get more than ‘we would normally get, or than what the various algorithms that the European Commission used would come up with’. The long (though recently shaken) insistence of my informants on the EU’s voluntarism was telling of the ways through which they had come to envision social relations, progress, and history as an ahistorical narrative of good intentions. Far from ascribing a unidirectional causal relation – e.g. European cohesion policies themselves having simply entailed such and such change – I opt for a more dialectical approach; I would like to suggest that the ‘peculiar’ nature of European funds and their generalized circulation did fuel a peculiar questioning of previous political and epistemological paradigms, along with the increased symbolic domination of the ideas and the institutions of the European Union; nonetheless, the gradual construction of European money in terms of beneficial aid also addressed and matched the sensibilities, preoccupations, and class interests of these social agents. It was constitutive and indicative of their worldview – a changing worldview that is for those initially hailing from Marxist and/or center-periphery backgrounds and gradually adhering to a liberal functionalist paradigm.9 Within this line of thinking, social action and progress relied on acts and choices which did not necessarily address material interests or constraints; it reflected cultural, but also, increasingly, moral dispositions and intentions (good intentions, such as in the case of Europe), that defined each ‘party’s’ capacity or willingness to adhere to necessary rules. The open question of the moral content and intentionality of (asymmetrical) relations and actions constituted a new framework for understanding the social, in accordance to an increasingly contractual, perspective on politics.10 In this respect, the half-spoken assumptions of political voluntarism and top-down material benefits can be seen in accordance with a more general moral reformulation of politics and social relations among my informants, their colleagues, and possibly larger parts of the dominant political class. In fact, their implicit interest in the moral content of the European Union and its generosity did enhance the formulation of a similar, but much more explicit and uninhibited, questioning of the other end of this relation – the status of Greek society as a recipient society. As I had the chance to understand in various instances, this built among other things on the long tradition of Greek elite discourses regarding the problematic attitudes of Greeks; those discourses had always gone along with Eurocentric hierarchies, where ideas of foreign generosity were not absent (Herzfeld 1995, 2005). Indeed, references by my informants to the inherently problematic nature of Greek

40 Gkintidis society, coupled with occasional references to the ‘cultural residues’ of the Ottoman period through terms such as ‘rayas’, ‘karagiozis’, and ‘hadjiavatis’, made this continuity with older discourses quite clear.11 It also referred to a widespread Weberian-like reading of social dynamics in terms of a conflict between vectors of a ‘Western’ modernizing culture and vectors of an obsolete (‘Oriental’) underdog culture (Diamantouros 2000). Nonetheless, the issue of European funds seemed to crucially enhance this worldview not only in simple terms of enlightened elites and a backward populace, but also in terms of morally aware elites and a-moral (or morally deficient) class ‘others’. In fact, references to cultural determinism seemed to converge with a more flexible and agency-centered moral approach that put the lack of individual good faith, contractual rigor, and accountability at the forefront of social problems in Greece – largely in direct reference to the current state of the capitalist crisis. The moral ambivalence of Greeks led to the ‘failed’ implementation of European cohesion policies, which was attributed to endemic or acquired ‘laziness’, ‘short-sightedness’, ‘egoism’, and ‘greediness’, or, in more subtle terms, incompetence and corruption. In any case, the antistructural idea of ‘free money’ seemed to reinforce similarly anti-structural (moral) models for the analysis of capitalism and economic asymmetry that were based on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behavior. In fact, the notion of accountability was reinforced through the assumption that failed economic subjects had been provided ‘free money’ but still failed (or in fact, failed exactly because of this); accordingly, the insistence of Western European counterparts in promoting anti-labor reforms and capitalist restructuring was understood as a justified response to the long-term deficient behavior of Greeks – the main proof being that the latter had just squandered away the beneficial ‘free money’ of the EU. Interestingly, this state of generalized moral laxness was also indicated by some informants in that Greeks did not recognize that they had been helped in the past and were not willing to perceive the particularly morally charged nature of European money and European Integration. According to my informants, Greeks considered it simply as any other form of money, more or less like a ‘given (αυτονόητο)’, something that they were entitled to, or something that the European Union ‘was obligated to give them’. Even in cases where my informants recognized that Greeks had been affected by the circulation of this money, still it would be assumed that this did not refer to the ideational endorsement of the European vision, but rather to a short-sighted and temporary adherence that relied on the occasional flow of foreign money. This generalized ‘moral insensitivity’ and the negation of the ‘donor’s’ hard-earned symbolic capital was somewhat far from the truth, in the sense that for parts of Greek society the European Union had been indeed perceived as a donor (Gkintidis 2014a); I believe that this largely defined the hegemonic contours of capitalist restructuring and class domination, and accordingly fueled a generalized moral introspection as to each social agent’s accountability and obligations in regards to his/her economic

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conditions. Nonetheless, the elite appeal for an (even more) morally sensitive approach toward the European Union and its past beneficial policies was telling of the central emplacement of the moral ideas of aid, generosity, and obligation in the worldview of these dominant social agents. In this sense, my informants proved to be quite fervent Maussians. Their insistence on the intentionality and moral content of material relations became especially relevant during the conjuncture of the crisis – where the legitimation of harsh economic requirements and policies communicated with the collective memory of supposedly disinterested and beneficial actions. For my informants, the memory of a relation of beneficial dependence and solidarity seemed to enhance the urgency of respecting the increased moral premises of this relation; after all, a large part of their time and efforts came down to an overall apology of reciprocity. As one of them put it, ‘solidarity has its obligations’.

The ‘moral turn’ in a wider perspective In this chapter, I have tried to outline the central place that the idea of European developmental funds has held among Greek technocrats specialized in EU policies over the last 30 years. I suggested that the circulation of these funds did not only go in parallel with a positive repositioning toward the European Union, but also enhanced the consolidation of systemic political thought in terms of moral questions, accountability, and obligations. European money – and its implicit construction in terms of ‘free money’ or ‘aid’ – has been one of the main points through which the idea and argument of amoralism, corruption, and laxness (as causes of capitalist failure) have often been addressed in Greece – in close accordance to the decline of antagonistic readings of social reality and class relations. The action, discourse, and worldview of my informants allowed us to view these assumptions as particular to a set of social agents with a given role and position within the wider dominant political class in Greece; moreover, these assumptions could be related with a wider moral shift within Greek academia and politics, a constitutive part of which was the construction of Greeks as spoiled ‘free-riders’ (e.g. Tsoukalas 1995).12 The idea that Greeks relied and benefited from ‘easy money’ was accentuated in an unprecedented way through the generalized flow of European funds since the late 1980s and reflected a particular upgrading of discourses on moral deficit. In any case, one can discern the parallel course of this anti-structural/moral turn and the emerging liberal consensus in Greek politics since the late 1980s (Panayotopoulos 2001, Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris 2004). The course of European Integration enhanced this dynamic, through instituting an increasingly deregulated economic framework – in a peculiar parallel with ‘cohesion’ policies.13 In fact, the idea of ‘gifts’ did not solely address European integration, but also changes in the way domestic politics, the state, and class relations were formulated; this refers to the devalorization of social antagonism, the naturalization of capitalism, and the ensuing moral constitution

42 Gkintidis of the state as a donor and society as a recipient. Ideas of gift and generosity are a very eloquent metaphor of (and tool for) the reformulation of materiality, wealth, and politics as a contractual state of generosity and pending obligations. This function has rendered them particularly appropriate within a wider process of ‘moralization of politics’ (Fassin 2012: 10) amidst the global weakening of social antagonism, where inequality and antagonism are transformed into a question of proper equilibrium between nominally horizontal parties; in this sense, the circulation of ideas of gifts and good intentions is central in the ‘neoliberal’ landscape of obligations, accountabilities, and debt enforcement throughout post-1970s capitalism (also see Lazzarato 2012).14 The constitution of society as originally a beneficiary society – unworthy beneficiaries in an Eden of generous paternalism – is a crucial element for thinking and justifying anti-labor reforms in the times of crisis. In closing this chapter, I would like to stress that, while my ethnographic research focused on social agents who were predominantly affiliated with the established pro-austerity forces until 2015,15 later developments proved the relevance of these discourses among different bourgeois political forces in Greece – ‘pro’ and ‘anti’-austerity ones. This refers to the commonly shared commitment to the European project, and, on a different note, the assumption that Greek capitalism failed due to a series of problematic behaviors of both ‘elites’ and ‘citizens’. In the long term, the pro-capitalist grounds on which ‘anti-austerity’ politics had been built – most notably through the branding of the capitalist crisis as a ‘humanitarian’ one, the fustigation of dominant classes for being ‘inhumane’ or ‘greedy’, and the demand for more European solidarity – showed their limits; at the same time, they reflected the doxic understanding of progress and equality as an arbitrary matter of whimsical mutual intentions – in line with prevailing functionalist and anti-materialist paradigms. Hence, one is tempted to question moral readings of the capitalist crisis – either orthodoxic or heterodoxic ones. In the very end, appeals to universal moralities and solidarities contradict what history and social sciences have labored to prove: the truly humanist project of social equality cannot be the outcome of mutuality or reciprocity.

Notes 1 This chapter seeks to provide an overview of my recent ethnographic work in accordance with the specialized scope of the collective volume; the main themes hereby outlined have been previously elaborated upon in my contribution to the special section ‘Moral Economies in Crisis’ edited by Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta in the journal Anthropological Theory (Gkintidis 2016). In addition to a recent fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia (Spring 2015), my research was also supported by a Leventis Fellowship in Modern Greek Studies at SEESOX, University of Oxford (2012/2013), and a Seeger O’Boyle Fellowship at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University (2013/2014).

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2 In contrast to my previous ethnographic work among local elites in the border region of Evros (Gkintidis 2013, 2014a, 2014b), my recent research dealt with informants in Athens who held significant positions in national and European settings of policy-making. 3 The normative underpinnings of the overall field of European Studies, as well as its political orientations have been pointed out by Cris Shore (Shore 2000). 4 This dilemma first became explicit during the 2012 parliamentary elections, while it would frequently recur during the elections of January and September 2015, as well as in the period leading up to the much-publicized referendum of July 5, 2015. 5 The first instance of these policies were the 1985 Integrated Mediterranean Programs (IMPs), which were relatively limited in their scope and budget, but nonetheless pointed to the consolidation of the then European Community’s cohesion policies and Structural Funds in the years to come – most notably in the form of the Community Support Frameworks (CSFs) since 1988. These cohesion policies, which were initially associated with the presidency of Jacques Delors in the European Commission from 1985 to 1994 and were thus named ‘Delors packages’, consisted of developmental funds toward the least developed or ‘lagging regions’, meaning regions with a per capita GDP less than or close to the 75% of the Community’s average (Hooghe and Keating 1994: 377, also Mitsos 2001). Greece, which fell within this category as a whole, received a proportionally large share of this money, during the implementation of the 1st and 2nd Community Support Frameworks (1988–1993, 1994–1999). Moreover, from the early 1990s, European funding came to engulf Greek funding policies, thus defining the developmental and economic priorities of the Greek state itself. On the centrality of European funding policies in the Greek budget, see Andrikopoulou 1994, also Plaskovitis 1994, Georgantas and Psycharis 2000, Petrakos and Psycharis 2004. The impact of these new policies was indeed significant, especially during the 1990s, when net inflows from the Union’s budget stood for roughly 4% of the national GDP; after 1997–1998, they remained approximately within the range of 2 to 3%, until 2008 (Kazakos 2001: 487, Chytopoulou-Pappa 2007: 89, Streeck 2013: 19). 6 In fact, they went along with the European Integration of Greek capitalism and unavoidable processes of capitalist restructuring at the expense of the Greek dominated classes (Mavroudeas 2013). 7 The 1990s and the further widening of higher education institutions gave a further impetus to the creation of positions and scholarship directly addressing European studies as such. EU-oriented and EU-funded themes also became a generalized motif in Greek academia and largely defined the new contours of scientific research and interests (Gefou-Madianou 2000: 268–269). 8 This had also been the case throughout my previous fieldwork in Evros. As one of my informants had put it in 2007, thanks to these funds the people of Evros had ‘everything’, in contrast to the past when they didn’t ‘even have water to drink’ (see Gkintidis 2014b). 9 In this sense, these funds were a gift first of all for those who needed them to be a gift. 10 The idea of benefits and the ensuing constitution of ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’ were accordingly conducive to the reformulation of social agents and institutions in terms of legally and morally bound ‘parties’. 11 ‘Rayas’ is the historical designation of non-Muslim Ottoman populations and is largely used in contemporary Greece as an allusion to the problematic subjugation of undisciplined Greeks to an exterior and rigid political power, but also to the dubious idea of ‘residual’ traits (that is, of the ‘Ottoman’/‘Oriental’ kind)

44 Gkintidis

12

13

14

15

among the Greek populace. Broadly speaking a rayas is supposed to be cunning, materialist, cowardly, submissive, unreliable, but also undisciplined and potentially subversive (according to those in a position of power). ‘Karagiozis’ and ‘Hadjiavatis’ are ‘rayas’ characters in the Greek version of the traditional Balkan Shadow Theater. The idea of Greeks-as-‘free-riders’ was best encapsulated in a seminal text by Greek sociologist C. Tsoukalas (1995). The moral deficit of Greeks and their ‘anarchic individualism’ lay to a great extent in their non-adherence to the moral contractual model of Western liberalism (as well as to the relative decline of older communal-reciprocal moral norms). Greek society was outlined as an exceptionally beneficiary society. Wealth and social conquests in Greece were seen by this author not as fruits of exploitation, labor, and social struggles but rather as an externally introduced materiality, a distribution of rights and wealth, or even spoils and products of theft (surprisingly, there was no mention of EU funds or ‘Delors packages’). According to him, easy money reinforced a lax attitude toward any notion of industriousness, contractuality, and morality – the supposed ingredients for sustainable capitalist success. In fact, for Greeks ‘scruples’ were the same as ‘stupidity’, and foreigners were perceived as dupes. In this sense, the political stake of that time seemed to be a moral reform, potentially harsh and severe, in which poor Greeks (‘underdogs’) would need to excel in order to improve their condition (Tsoukalas 1995: 211). European Cohesion policies in the 1980s can be seen as encompassing a momentum of social and political interventionism toward the European South, while at the same time they functioned as a clear complement to the project of the common market and capitalist restructuring throughout the last decades. This wider context allows us to understand that the discourse about supposed Greek moral and cultural ‘exceptionalities’ is not so exceptional, but rather applies to many different geographical and political settings, from the peripheries to the centers of global capitalism. The ‘moral underclass discourse’ in the Anglo-Saxon world is typical in this respect (Levitas 2005). By the time the final draft of this chapter was submitted in September 2016, most of my informants has been cast into the uneasy position of ‘opposition intellectuals’ and devoted a large part of their public discourses to championing the cause of capitalist restructuring – a cause that was endorsed anyway by the SYRIZA government as well.

3

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece Yannis Kallianos

Legitimacy and (de)legitimation1 The primary aim of this chapter is to identify the particular codifications of legitimation in the Greek crisis during the period 2010–2014. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the state attempts to justify its authority and governance strategy; consequently, it asks how modalities of legitimation have been redefined and articulated in the context of a wider neoliberal economic and political restructuring. Claessen (1988: 23) argues that ‘legitimacy is the power base for authority’, Swartz, Turner and Tuden (1966: 10) also suggest that ‘legitimacy is a type of support that derives not from force, or its threat, but from the values held by individuals formulating, influencing, and being affected by political ends’, Weber identified three main types of legitimacy: traditional; charismatic; and rational-legal. Discussing the ‘rational-legal’ type, Weber asserts that it is constituted on the ‘belief in the validity of legal statute and the appropriate . . . juridical “competence” founded on rationally devised rules’ (Weber 1994: 312). Weber’s idea that legitimacy is equivalent to the ‘belief in legitimacy’ (Weber 1978: 213) has been criticised by Beetham (1991) as problematic. For Beetham (1991: 11), a ‘given power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs’. Having said that, there is an important distinction that needs to be clarified. This concerns the difference between legitimacy as ‘the quality, or the condition of being legitimate’, and legitimation as ‘the process, or the act of making legitimate’ (Claessen 1988: 25). Legitimacy, then, refers to the condition of being able to exercise authority while (de)legitimation expresses ‘the active process by which legitimacy is created and maintained or eroded and lost’ (Ansell 2001: 8706). This study is specifically concerned with legitimation as the dynamic and contested process through which the state attempts to claim legitimacy for its authority and interventions. State legitimation, I argue, is an important process through which social and political change can be examined, since it constitutes part of the most important political acts that the state has to perform. Its function depends on it.

46 Kallianos

Social contestation and the problematic of legitimacy In 2010 the Greek nation-state was officially announced to be in a state of economic crisis. Since then a rigorous system of economic surveillance and political regulation has been imposed in the country by the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) – known as the Troika. This neoliberal restructuring along with the imposition of austerity measures has had the effects of dismantling the welfare system, a rapid rise of homelessness, the establishment of precarious employment, and an increase in suicide rates. These processes have further increased an already existent legitimacy deficit of the state and official institutions. Even before the official beginning of the crisis in 2010 there were significant instances where the state’s authority was publicly contested. Since 2010, however, the problematic of legitimacy in Greece has to be reconsidered in relation to the modalities of the crisis. I therefore ask, in which way has the crisis recodified processes of legitimation? Also, what can the concept of legitimacy offer to the study of the politics of the crisis? On 28 October 2011, the day of the national commemoration of Ochi Day,2 Konstantinos Mitsotakis, who served as prime minister during the early 1990s with the New Democracy party, made the following statement in an interview: ‘in the 1940s Greece was small, but it had a state. Today, there is no state (den yparchei kratos) . . . Even though a dictatorship state (then), it was a state that worked’,3 The events of that day, which preceded this statement, were the public reflection of a major legitimation crisis of constitutional politics in Greece. According to Habermas (1976: 48), ‘legitimation crises result from a need for legitimation that arises from changes in the political system . . . and that cannot be met by the existing supply of legitimation’, That day, and while the military and student parades were taking place, a widespread wave of public outrage was unleashed against politicians and public authorities. In this chapter I suggest that past events of public contestation have shaped discourses, practices and imaginations of state delegitimation in times of crisis. One of these events took place during the period 2006–2007 when a massive student movement emerged against a law reform to privatise universities. It was a dynamic political mobilisation that reflected a wider public discontent against the existing political system. This student mobilisation brought to the forefront a political position which stood against political intermediation and the party system. This period has also been defined by the emergence of local neighbourhood initiatives in Athens and other major cities in Greece. These initiatives organised their politics based on nonhierarchical structures and practices of everyday life, which challenged the official system of representative democracy. This period of social contestation, I suggest, marks the resurfacing of several subtle antitheses in the public sphere. These provided a framework through which the existing sociopolitical system could be challenged.

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece 47 This, I believe, becomes even more evident in 2008–2009, a time defined by the December 2008 revolt. Triggered by the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by police in downtown Athens, the revolt, whose immediate effects lasted over three weeks, exposed with great force existing everyday contradictions and sociopolitical antitheses in the public sphere. During this period, state authority and everyday hierarchical relations were widely opposed by an unprecedented radical political force (Astrinaki 2009, Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011), which organised daily demonstrations throughout Greece, clashed with the police, and created grassroots self-organised structures. It was during that period that the ‘social contract’, which was established in metapolitefsi,4 was directly challenged. Since then, the everyday politics of these events changed the way people make sense of political participation and politics in general. This change was also reflected in the use of public space during the crisis (Tsavdaroglou and Makrygianni 2013, Kallianos 2013). Demonstrations and occupation of public space, such as the 2011 Syntagma square occupation (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011, Leontidou 2012), blurred the boundaries between the public and private realms. There are three important things to keep in mind in respect to this brief examination of social contestation. First, the fact that the current legit-imation crisis has also been shaped by delegitimation processes that took place before 2010, which is when Greece was officially declared to be in a state of crisis. As Dalakoglou (2013c: 35) argues, the debt crisis ‘signifies an escalation of the ongoing social crisis’. In this context, significant political practices developed that challenged state policies and hegemonic socio-political processes. Second, the emergence of an extensive network of grassroots initiatives of resistance and solidarity based on non-hierarchical structures. These initiatives reflect an attempt by people to take control over their lives. By organising the everyday based on a different political paradigm, these initiatives use daily practices to challenge hierarchical structures and political intermediation of official institutions. Third, a process of neoliberal state restructuring, which became even more discernible after the 2012 elections. In light of this, the 2012 double elections fulfil a significant function. While grassroots economy and solidarity networks were rising, the 2012 election turned attention to the official political stage. The double elections of May–June 2012 marked the intensification, by the state and government mechanisms, of a series of neoliberal, structural administrative interventions based on moral-economic narratives of progress, redemption and (symbolic) purification. Considering how this change in governance has played out in the Greek context in times of crisis, the question that emerges is in which way has the state attempted to legitimise itself? Such an endeavour, I suggest, is interrelated with attempts to reorganize imaginations, subjectivities, and to introduce new technologies of governance and public administration. At stake

48 Kallianos are two main processes, which are essential in comprising this operation: first, the political project of the reengineering of the state, and second, the employment of uncertainty as an apparatus of governance.

The reengineering of the Greek state Let us go back to the ‘there is no state’ discourse. This is quite a common discourse in the Greek public sphere. In this context, it implies that the state is unable to exercise its sovereign authority. During the 2012 elections, the New Democracy party, which later formed a coalition government under its leadership,5 used features of this discourse to create a specific narrative in order to relate the past and the present to ideas of disaster/crisis while connecting the future with notions of governance/state.6 Eventually, this narrative was used to create a basic dilemma that was then imposed upon the ‘social body’: if there is no state (or if you like, if the state does not function as states should), give us legitimacy to form one/to make it work, or else descend into chaos.7 Based on this imposed dilemma, the coalition government, which was formed after the 2012 elections, employed a dogma of ‘law and order’, Berger and Luckmann (1967) argue that one level of legitimation works through ‘the creation of language that is implicitly legitimating’ (Ansell, 2001: 8706). I therefore suggest that such narratives were employed to justify the acceleration of a neoliberal project of state restructuring in Greece. This process put to work a political project to restructure the political economy of public administration. This re-structuring, I argue, has been formative of the legitimation process. This process constitutes part of what Wacquant (2012) explains as the reengineering of the state; the efficiency and efficacy of the state have to be re-evaluated in order to strengthen its capacity for strategic interventions. Wacquant (2012) considers that neoliberalism is a political project that entails not the dismantling but the reengineering of the state, and argues that part of this project is ‘the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential’ (Wacquant 2012: 68). From 2012 to 2013, and based on the dogma of ‘law and order’ and the narrative of ‘illegal spaces’, police invaded and evicted squats in the city centre of Athens which challenged and opposed commercial and hierarchical ideas of public space. At the same time, refugees, immigrants and homeless persons were targeted by the police and the state who organised extensive operations in order to detain them and remove them from specific areas of the city centre. These interventions were part of the Xenios Zeus Operation,8 which was initiated by the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection in August 2012. According to the police, one of the main objectives of the operation was to transform Athens into a ‘lawful’ city.9 According to the

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece 49 police, in March 2013, the police and the Ministry of Health launched yet another operation under the name ‘Operation Thetis’. This operation targeted primarily drug users and homeless persons and according to a police statement it was set up to ‘improve the image of the city centre’10 of Athens. During these police operations these groups were symbolically identified as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 2002). At the same time, this accelerating neoliberal economic and political restructuring in Greece has been strongly opposed in a variety of ways. As a response to these acts of opposition, the state has put into work a mechanism of criminalization, which is constitutive of its reengineering, since ‘the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state are an integral component of the neoliberal Leviathan’ (Wacquant 2012: 66). In July 2014, the Greek coalition government employed the measure of civil mobilisation against strikers that resisted the plans of the government to sell off part of the country’s Public Power Corporation. Civil mobilisation is a legal instrument that obligates workers to return to work. In Greece, this measure has been employed twelve times since 1947; six times from 1974 to 200911, and on another six occasions between 2010 and 2014. It is therefore evident that it has been employed extensively in times of crisis. The civil mobilisation order activates an individual rather than a collective process of social control through the distribution of a compulsory individual letter of ‘invitation’ of civil mobilisation. In this context, even though it has been used to target specific communities of struggle, its implications and obligatory legal procedures are enforced individually. The example of civil mobilisation against strikers reflects this process of state reengineering. There are two main functions that this process enables: first, the measure mobilises the legal apparatus to discipline and compel specific members of society; second, such state interventions attempt to delegitimise these groups and their struggles by accusing them of working against the ‘common good’. The idea of the ‘common good’ is particularly crucial if we wish to understand how the state attempts to render legitimate such interventions. This process is related to the production of an imagined homogeneous community (Anderson 2006) based on a common ideal or (historical) national interest: a raison d’etat. According to Hobsbawm, ‘the state is weakened when it is not identified with a common good’ (Hobsbawm 1996: 273). In times of crisis, the ‘common objective’ has been defined as ‘to get out of the crisis’, which thus has been used as a symbolic and discursive framework to justify state interventions. I argue, that the discourse ‘to get out of the crisis’ has mobilised the implementation of ‘law and order’ by the state to discipline the ‘social body’. The narratives and practices associated with this mechanism have been used to justify the criminalisation, marginalisation, and exclusion of various social groups. The political objective here, though, is not simply to criminalize

50 Kallianos these groups, but to delegitimise them. Nevertheless, this is an essential part of state reengineering. At stake here is the legitimation of what Wacquant calls a Centaur-state: that displays opposite visages at the two ends of the class structure: it is uplifting and ‘liberating’ at the top, where it acts to leverage the resources and expand the life options of the holders of economic and cultural capital; but it is castigatory and restrictive at the bottom, when it comes to managing the populations destabilised by the deepening of inequality and the diffusion of work insecurity and ethnic anxiety. (Wacquant 2012: 74) What should be noted is that the neoliberal political project of reengineering entails an active legitimation process of the state, the governing elites, and official institutions. As Simmons (2001: 125) explains, ‘the state’s authority depends on its moral defensibility. It has to be shown successfully that having a state is morally better than not having a state’ (Peter 2014). Taking into consideration that ‘legitimation contains explicit theories by which an institutional sector is legitimated in terms of a differentiated body of knowledge’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 112), I argue that the discourse ‘to get out of the crisis’, is employed as an essential tool in the process of state legitimation. Through its employment the state presents itself as the moral authority within the context of the crisis. Hence, it attempts to justify itself as the only legitimate actor that has the knowledge to act in times of ‘crisis’.

The ‘symbolic universe’ of the crisis Theresa Anderson (2008) conceptualises uncertainty in terms of both positive and negative aspects. For Anderson (2008), uncertainty is as an opportunity for positive change and innovation, but, at the same time, it is associated with ideas of danger and situations that have to be avoided. It is with this latter aspect of uncertainty that I am concerned here; specifically, the connection of uncertainty with ideas of imminent danger and disaster. Boholm (2003: 167) explains that ‘uncertainty has to do with what is unpredicted in life, the odd possibilities and irregular occurrences . . . Uncertainty implies recognition of change and awareness that states of affairs are not static; they can alter drastically, for better or for worse’. In this section I focus on how notions and discourses of uncertainty have been employed by the state. At stake is that uncertainty has been identified by the governing elite as a fundamental feature of the crisis – the ‘corrosive’ factor for politics, economy and society. Government officials and prime ministers have regularly declared that ‘uncertainty has to be eliminated’ while

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece 51 uncertainty has also been described by the prime minister in 2012 as a ‘cloud’ hanging over Greece.12 However, what matters is not so much the discourse ‘to end uncertainty’ as such, but the extent to which such discourses confirm the condition of uncertainty. Passerin d’Entrèves (1969) writes, that: for laws to be obligatory, that is, true ought-propositions and not mere statements concerning the use of force by the State, a value-clause must be inserted somewhere in the system. The whole structure must be invested with some kind of authorization or legitimation. (Passerin d’Entrèves 1969: 148) That said, I suggest that in times of crisis the function of the value-clause has been organised around ideas and discourses of uncertainty to construct a justificatory apparatus for strategic administrative interventions. This can be better observed in the legal process of public administration. With the agreement of a ‘memorandum of understanding’ between Greece and the Troika and the implementation of the first ‘Economic Adjustment Programme’ the official legislative processes have been affected. Since then all governments have made extensive use of ‘administrative acts of legislative content’ (Marketou and Dekastros 2014).13 These have been activated under the framework of ‘extraordinary circumstances of an urgent and unforeseeable need’.14 A series of decrees have been passed in accordance with this framework. Ideas of unpredictability and imminent danger have been embedded in this framework, thus making uncertainty actionable. Hence, depicted as a fundamental condition of the crisis, uncertainty can be used as a resource to justify state interventions. Uncertainty, I argue, contributes in the making of what Berger and Luckmann (1967) call ‘symbolic universes’; these are ‘bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 113). Symbolic universes constitute the legitimation process by constructing orderly meaning throughout all situations, and thus integrate various processes, experiences and events/situations within ‘a meaningful totality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 114). It is a justification process which requires the activation of a variety of interconnected operations. Uncertainty, then, has been employed as a tool of governance to contribute to the creation of a ‘symbolic universe’ that explains unpredictability, instability and imminent danger as integral features of the crisis. As Berger and Luckmann (1967: 122) explain, ‘if the institutional order is to be taken for granted in its totality as a meaningful whole, it must be legitimated by “placement” in a symbolic universe’. As a result, the ‘common objective’ to ‘get out of the crisis’ has been invested with meanings of urgency – in this context, anything can be justified.

52 Kallianos It can, then, be argued that the dynamic of uncertainty has been mobilised by the state to explain notions of an extraordinary situation, and thus employ a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2004, Athanasiou 2012) in order to justify its interventions within the context of this ‘symbolic universe’. For Agamben (2013), ‘the present understanding of crisis . . . refers to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely’, Agamben (2013) suggests that ‘today crisis has become an instrument of rule. It serves to legitimize political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision’, Eventually, the ‘symbolic universe’ of the crisis serves as a legitimation mechanism, since it connects the discourse ‘to get out of the crisis’ with an inevitable and urgent intervention. At issue is that uncertainty helps imbue state interventions with rational-legal meanings of acting within the only possible scenario. Hence, it contributes to the construction of the ‘symbolic universe’ of the crisis by explaining state authority and intervention as essential and indisputable.

The neoliberal subject Since 2010, neoliberal governance in Greece has had a devastating effect on the way life itself is being experienced. In fact, precarity and notions of imminent danger have established uncertainty as part of the everyday experience for a large part of the population. Lazzarato (2013) suggests that: the financial crisis, which has turned into a crisis of sovereign debts, imposes new modes of governmentality and new figures of the subject both on the side of the governing (‘technical government’) and on that of the governed (the indebted who expiates his own guilt through tax). (Lazzarato 2013) Dean (2010) has also argued that we have moved to a post-welfarist regime of the social. For Dean, in this neoliberal framework the government is no longer conceived as a government of society: this style of neo-liberalism ceases to be a government of society in that it no longer conceives its task in terms of a division between state and society or of a public sector opposed to a private one. The ideal here is to bridge these older divisions so that the structures and values of the market are folded back onto what were formerly areas of public provision and to reconfigure the latter as a series of quasi-markets in services and expertise. (Dean 2010: 200)

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece 53 There is, then, a strong link between the reconfiguration of governing technologies and the re-constitution of the social subject based on ideas of imminent danger and uncertainty. In this framework the objective of employing uncertainty as a political tool of governance is to change the social and cultural context through which the subject positions itself in the social field. At stake is the making of a subject that would be able to be ‘productive’ ‘under conditions of radical uncertainty’ (O’Malley 2013: 184). Reid (2012) argues that there is a fundamental shift in governmental technologies: ‘from that of how to secure the human to how to render it resilient’ (Reid 2012: 144). According to O’Malley (2013: 185), the idea of resilience ‘reflects the neo-liberal vision of entrepreneurial governance’: the new resiliency approach aligns far better with the neo-liberal imaginary of each subject being the ‘entrepreneur of oneself’ in an environment that is highly uncertain. This subject, in a sense scientifically designed, approaches uncertainty as a challenge and opportunity. (O’Malley 2013: 191) Neoliberal subjects, Reid (2012: 145) argues, ‘live out a life of permanent exposure to dangers that are not only beyond their abilities to overcome but necessary for the prosperity of their life and wellbeing’. In this context, Reid suggests, that: the question posed of the subject is no longer can you exercise freedom in securing yourself from the dangers that you are faced with in living, but can you construe your freedom to live in the form of exposure to danger? (Reid 2012: 149) Hence, meanings ascribed to ideas of danger have changed, and Reid suggests that ‘danger has become that which the subject is governed to seek rather than minimize its exposure to . . . Because danger, it is now said, is productive of life, individually and collectively’ (Reid 2012: 150). In Greece, one of the main objectives of neoliberal governance is to change the social and cultural context through which people make sense of their position within the ‘crisis’ as well as in relation to the state.

A new ‘social contract’ In times of crisis this change in the technologies of governance has also been related to a new conceptualisation and politicisation of the social field by the state. In the Greek context this process has been connected with the plea for ‘a new social contract’ by various governing elites and political leaders on various occasions since 2010.

54 Kallianos The notion of the ‘social contract’ attempts to identify society with a homogeneous entity and, thus, to neutralise the various antagonistic forces and contradictions that constitute the social field. I therefore take into consideration Kapferer’s argument that: the very notion of the social contract between the state and society, so vital in the legitimating of state power, is further grounded in such processes and is itself a major ideological instrument for the production of the society of the state. (Kapferer 2010: 132) Hence, being a political and social construct, the ‘social contract’ is being employed by the governing elite as part of an essential process through which the state organises the conditions to produce and shape ideas, representations and practices of a homogeneous social and political entity. Considering the ways in which uncertainty has been utilised as an apparatus to define the ‘symbolic universe’ of the crisis, and therefore establish notions of change and urgency as part of this specific ‘universe’, I argue that the construction of this new ‘social contract’ by the state is also constituted on a process of continuous change, which would be always necessary and urgent. At stake in this process is the normality of the breaching of this constructed ‘social contract’ by the state. According to Athanasiou (2014), as ‘crisis’ becomes a complex assemblage of power relations which both manage life and expose to death, the ‘state of exception’, which is usually deployed to signify the element of emergency at the heart of the normative administrative discourses of crisis, proves to be not exceptional but rather ordinary, systematic, canonical, and foundational. (Athanasiou 2014: 73–74) In times of crisis in Greece, the interpolation of uncertainty and imminent danger in the legal and the political apparatus has created the conditions for a repetitive employment of ‘administrative acts of legislative content’. These introduce novel ways of governance and public administration which work to the advantage of the governing elite and the neoliberal institutions, and have been socially and politically challenged. In this context, the breaching of the ‘contract’ acquires qualities of a normalised process since in times of crisis the potentiality of this breaching has become an intrinsic part of the institutional process. The breaching of the ‘contract’, then, is inherent to this new ‘contract’. What this means is that its ‘validity’ depends on a contingency defined by the state. What these processes indicate is that the imposed framework of consecutive changes is not only necessary for the neoliberal reorganisation of the social field. It is also constitutive of the ways in which the state attempts

Crisis, contestation and legitimacy in Greece 55 to claim legitimacy for its authority and interventions. The employment of the ‘symbolic universe’ of the crisis, which is utilised to explain features of urgency, uncertainty and imminent danger as constitutive of this condition, provides the context through which the state claims to be the only moral authority to act within the situation of the crisis.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Stef Jansen for the stimulating discussions on the topic of legitimacy. Many thanks also to Antonis Vradis, Andreas Chatzidakis and Christos Filippidis for their insightful comments on previous versions of this chapter. 2 Ochi Day is an annual national holiday in Greece. It took its name from the word ‘No’ (Ochi), which allegedly was the response given by the head of the Greek state, dictator Ioannis Metaxas, to the Italian ultimatum on 28 October 1940. Karakasidou (2000: 230) argues that these national celebrations have been used by the Greek state to establish a ‘“consensus” on national identity’. For more on Ochi Day, please see: Panourgiá (2009: 48–49), and Karakasidou (2000). 3 Available at: www.tovima.gr/politics/article/?aid=427393 (accessed 13 November 2014). 4 Metapolitefsi, which literally means ‘the political era after’, marked the end of the military Junta (1967–1974) in Greece and denotes a process of democratisation in the country. 5 After the May/June 2012 elections a coalition government was formed by New Democracy, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and the Democratic Left (DIMAR). 6 The discourse which was used during that period is paradigmatic. Antonis Samaras, the president of New Democracy during the 2012 elections and later the prime minster in the coalition government, talked about the ‘rebirth of Greece’ which he associated with ‘the great leap to the future’. Available at: www.tovima.gr/files/1/2012/05/26/ΟΜΙΛΙΑ%20ΑΝΤΩΝΗ%20ΣΑΜΑΡΑ.pdf (accessed 13 January 2015). 7 Samaras stated, ‘untie my hands so I can govern’. Available at: www.ekathimerini. com/140480/article/ekathimerini/news/samaras-pleads-for-clear-majority-butpoll-shows-nd-support-waning (accessed 13 January 2015). 8 Dimitris Dalakoglou (2013d) writes, that ‘giving imaginative names to a violent operation is a military tactic, which police adopted for their large-scale operations within urban terrain’. Available at: http: //crisis-scape.net/blog/item/121-virtuessweepers-and-changing-values (accessed 18 January 2015). 9 Available at: www.tovima.gr/society/article/?aid=469724 (accessed 10 February 2015). 10 Available at: www.kathimerini.gr/30420/article/epikairothta/ellada/prosagwges132-to3ikomanwn-apo-to-kentro-ths-a8hnas (accessed 23 January 2015). 11 Available at: www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=188224 (accessed 27 January 2015). 12 Available at: www.primeminister.gov.gr/2012/11/04/9815 (accessed 2 February 2015). 13 Administrative acts of legislative content ‘are executive administrative acts, normally issued under exceptional circumstances, having a content which normally belongs to the competence of the Parliament. These administrative acts are

invested with the status of a legal statute, under the condition that they are ratified by Parliament within a certain time period’ (Marketou and Dekastros 2014). 14 Galanopoulos and Avramidis (2014) explain, that ‘it is explicitly stated in Article 44, paragraph 1 of the Constitution that ‘[u]nder extraordinary circumstances of an urgent and unforeseeable need, the President of the Republic may, upon the proposal of the Cabinet, issue acts of legislative content’. The acts of legislative content issued in 2012 were as many as those of the previous decade combined’.

Part II

The nation

4

Far-right extremism in the city of Athens during the Greek crisis Tryfon Bampilis

Golden Dawn performances Between 2010, when the infamous, far-right extremist organization Golden Dawn and its leader Nikos Mihaloliakos were elected in the Athens municipal elections, and November 2013, when the murder of its members Manolis Kapelonis and Giorgos Fountoulis took place in Neo Irakleio, public appearances and demonstrations by the party and its supporters proliferated and became frequent events in various neighborhoods of the city of Athens. On many occasions such public performances appeared to be spontaneously mobilized or were purported to be an expression of the indignation of Athenian citizens (Dalakoglou 2013a, 2013b, Kandylis and Kavoulakos 2011). However, as will be argued below, these events had a deliberately political structure with specific aims and elaborate preparations made for them. In this chapter I will focus on those public appearances that were enacted in order to emotionalize the crisis, and to profit from the state of emergency and the social or ‘moral disintegration’ that several actors of the group presented as the legitimate causes of their mobilization. Such events are particularly useful in discussing the social and political appeal of Golden Dawn, as they subsume a set of meanings and practices that aim at legitimizing the presence of this far-right extremist party and normalizing social and cultural differences. While anthropological work on far-right extremism aims at a better understanding of ideological foundations and practices of such groups, the author attempts to approach these extreme phenomena with empathy but certainly not with sympathy (Gingrich and Banks 2006). As anthropological research usually involves immersion in the social life of a specific network of informants, the author has tried to distance himself from the perspectives of his informants in an attempt to outline the development of their arguments and political styles. By borrowing the idea of performance from Banks (2006), my aim in this chapter is to express what he calls ‘the processual nature of identity expression, indicating an underlying norm in which performances indicate a degree of self-consciousness, including the elements of showmanship, awareness of

60 Bampilis audience and manipulation of specific symbols’ in far-right extremism (Banks 2006: 52). Such an approach moves away from the assumption that a specific group or subculture will share essential commonalities that might be turned into some sort of ‘way of thinking’ or ‘total way of life’ and focuses on the view that political styles demonstrate continuity over time and are long-term, intensive processes that actors are involved in learning and reproducing. Developing a style is a long, sometimes painful, activity that requires dedication and conviction. This process encompasses ideological, aesthetic, and corporal qualities and, as such, styles can be assets or investments that relate to the immediate social and economic context (Ferguson 1999: 100). Just as Golden Dawn’s politics have been institutionalizing various forms of collective action that construct its identity as a supposedly ‘grassroots’ party, their food banks, security patrols, blood banks, and attacks on theatrical performances reproduce various versions of nationhood and authentic Greekness and essentialize social and cultural differences. As they further emotionalize the crisis and national socialism, they purport to act as moral agents fighting a corrupt political system and the ‘polluted’ actors in it and try to enact a political critique that will liberate the country from its oppressors, e.g. the Troika, ‘foreigners,’ ‘Jews,’ or the European Union. Any effort to explain the social and economic causes of the appearance of Golden Dawn has to take into account the fact that the country has received two financial bailouts in recent years (2010, 2012) and has been in deep recession since 2009, which has led to the introduction of a number of controversial policies under the supervision of the Troika. The austerity measures, which include major spending cuts, reforms and privatizations, cuts in salaries and public services – including education and welfare – have plunged the economy into the most severe recession of any established democracy (Eurostat 2012). The duration and intensity of this crisis have affected Greek society at large, bringing down the traditional party system as we knew it up to 2012. Since then the political system has been struggling to gain legitimacy and public support. As Kirtsoglou has argued, there has been a deconstruction of the ‘social contract’ in Greece, as neoliberal projects shrink the welfare state and social policy in general (Kirtsoglou 2012). This context has also been described as a process of de-democratization in which social and political rights are undermined and the politics of fear increase militarism and securitization (Athanasiou 2012). However, as many approaches have explained the success of Golden Dawn only in terms of a symptom of the crisis, a consequence of neoliberalism, and the total disintegration of Greek society in recent years (Ellinas 2013, Georgiadou 2013), this chapter is trying to balance structure with agency by arguing that the success of Golden Dawn might be better understood through an emphasis on the ‘cultural’ and the ‘performative.’1 As various actors in the party have been involved with a number of racist, sexist, and nationalist projects, the chapter draws on some specific events that

Far-right extremism in Athens 61 encapsulate the active performative potential of the party in the social life of Athens in order to normalize their presence in the Greek ‘state of emergency.’

Recent history In the Greek legislative elections of Sunday June 17, 2012, for the first time ever in post-authoritarian Greece an extreme right-wing party emerged with 18 Members of Parliament, having secured 6.92 percent of the vote, that is 425,990 votes. That event was all the more surprising as the party had received a mere 0.29 percent in the 2009 elections and had subequently intensified its racist attacks against immigrants in various parts of Athens. The notorious violence of members of Golden Dawn became all too apparent a week before the general elections, when Ilias Kasidiaris, a spokesman for the party, attacked two female Members of Parliament on a live morning television program. In 2013 the majority of the party’s Members of Parliament were arrested in connection with the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas, a Greek anti-fascist activist. At the time of writing this chapter the assassins of P. Fyssas were on trial. Consequently, in the legislative elections of Sunday January 25, 2015, when the party came third with 6.28 percent of the vote, the majority of its MPs were detained. As the party’s losses were minimal, the 2015 elections show that a stable electoral basis has been forming. Golden Dawn constitutes one of the most extreme political parties in Europe, with violent attacks against communists, anarchists, immigrants, or enemies of the party being a regular part of its activities since its foundation. However, all these events and attacks were never considered as part of the organizational culture by the Greek political system, even if there were clear indications that that was the case. The leader of Golden Dawn, Nikos Mihaloliakos, was first imprisoned for terrorist acts in 1979 (Hasapopoulos 2013: 12). In 1978 the central Athenian cinema Elli, known as a leftist and pro-Soviet venue, was attacked by a terrorist group with bombs and hand grenades, injuring dozens of people in the audience. Nikos Mihaloliakos was one of those arrested for involvement in this event (Hasapopoulos 2013: 13). The volume of bombs, grenades, and explosive material found at his home was sufficient evidence to convict him and he served a ten-month jail sentence. During his time in prison Mihaloliakos came into contact with a variety of other prisoners, including some from the colonels’ regime. One such was Georgios Papadopoulos, who would promote Mihaloliakos a few years later to head of the EPEN (Ethniki Politiki Enosis) youth section (Psarras 2012: 50). Papadopoulos founded the far-right EPEN in 1984 while in prison. This party directly supported the condemned regime of the by then imprisoned colonels. In 1996, a number of leftists were attacked in Kypseli in the center of Athens by a group of Golden Dawn members. As there were a number of

62 Bampilis witnesses at the scene, several members of the group were prosecuted and went to court in September 1998. Despite the fact that the accused were all members of the same organization, the prosecutor made no attempt to associate their actions with any organized intent. On the day of the trial a number of anti-fascists peacefully confronted a small elite unit of Golden Dawn members – the notorious ‘Golden Eagles’ – at the entrance to the courthouse. The Golden Eagles were the first elite unit of its kind, organized by Antonis Andritsopoulos (known as Periandros), one-time second-incommand in the Golden Dawn hierarchy and co-host of a television program with Nikos Mihaloliakos. Immediately after the court hearings, three students, who had left the court, were violently attacked a few hundred meters away from the courthouse by the Golden Eagles, who left them for dead (Psarras 2012: 106). Antonis Andritsopoulos was arrested seven years later in 2005 and was eventually sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment. That was the first acknowledgment of an organized crime by a member of Golden Dawn in Greece, though no other members of the large group of assailants were convicted. Since its foundation in 1983, Golden Dawn has had many admirers of Nazism, including its leadership. In the 1980s, for example, the magazine Golden Dawn (Hrisi Avgi) published hundreds of articles and special issues on Nazism (Psarras 2012: 42). According to one of my informants, when the organization was still a small, marginal one in the mid-1980s, its office in Kypseli (the party’s only office at the time) exhibited a series of photographic portraits of the most prominent Nazi generals of the Second World War. Several older members regularly wore Nazi paraphernalia and public talks on Nazism were frequent events on the premises. The party ideology follows the militaristic and hierarchical values of National Socialism. The party identifies itself as being made up of ‘nationalists’ (ethnikistes) with ‘our [version of] socialism’ (o dikos mas sosialismos) (Fragoudaki 2013). The creation of a homogenous Hellenic nation-state is their ultimate target and the idea of ‘Hellenism’ has its roots in classical and ancient culture. Contemporary Hellenes are seen as the legitimate heirs and gatekeepers of the ancient legacy. Golden Dawn also supposedly supports Greek workers, the poor, the unemployed, and a proper welfare state that is able to meet the needs of its citizens. It is in this context that their ‘Doctors with borders’ have emerged in response to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who are allegedly supporting immigrants rather than those Greek citizens who are in need. Furthermore, the party promotes the Nazi salute which is presented as an ‘ancient Greek’ one. The leader of Golden Dawn, Nikos Mihaloliakos, in a public address on October 21, 2012, saluted the crowds, saying: ‘they call us Nazis, but these hands can salute in this way because they are clean hands’ (ERT 1 evening television news). Thus, before the recent prosecution of the party began, he did not deny the accusations of Nazism; on the contrary he confirmed the party’s ideology. According to various informants, ‘Mein Kampf’ and Hermann Goering’s biography are the regular

Far-right extremism in Athens 63 reading matter of committed members of the organization. In addition, Mihaloliakos identifies with Hitler’s policy of total control over the public space, which legitimizes acts of violence. Violence emerges as a justified act of empowerment and punishment that starts in the streets and goes all the way up to parliamentary politics. Furthermore, Golden Dawn is reproducing a conspiracy theory that has become very appealing since the recession, and not only to Golden Dawn followers. This is that Hellenism is under threat from Zionism and the ‘Jews’ have been responsible for the misery and destruction of Greece. The economic crisis is allegedly a well-thought-out plan that is inextricably linked with globalization. In this context the recession has been imposed on Greece by Zionists in order to kill off Hellenism. As Greece has the most anti-Semites in Europe (Global anti-Semitism Survey 2014) and there is no public acknowledgment of the racist and anti-Semitic problems that the country is experiencing (Fragoudaki 2013), it is only a matter of time before these conspiracy theories attract even more support. Following the same line of thought, immigration is also said to be another plot to bring about the extinction of a nation that has had a pure ‘bloodline’ since ancient times but is now under threat from intermarriage and hybridization. Africans and Asians are threatening to permanently alter the racial profile of the Greeks and therefore their culture. ‘Greek blood’ is at risk. In this context Golden Dawn has been setting up ‘blood banks’ since 2012 for ethnic Greeks and members of the party only. Xenophobia and racism have to be examined within the general shift that Greek society has experienced after the large migration waves that the country experienced since 2000, and especially in the last decade as the crisis became an everyday reality. While for a long time the ultimate example of negotiating cultural difference was based on hospitality, in the last decade in public and everyday discourse, the Afro-Asian populations were conceived as out of place (Papataxiarchis 2014a). As a result, the negotiation of difference became monolithic and even the homogenizing example of hospitality ceased to exist for these types of population groups. Hospitality became politicized and became the arena of large struggles.

The Orthodox allies On October 2, 2012 various groups of Orthodox Christians and Golden Dawn members, monks from Mount Athos, the Bishop of Piraeus, and several Golden Dawn MPs, attacked the premiere of the stage play ‘Corpus Christi’ by Terrence McNally in Athens. The crowds managed to enter the theater, stop the performance, assault and threaten the audience and the actors, despite the fact that there was a large police presence. The event was broadcasted immediately afterwards on the national news and the press had a moralistic explanation for the events. The attack had been provoked by the portrayal of Jesus Christ and his disciples as homosexuals in a modern

64 Bampilis context. ‘Blasphemy’ became the focus of the discussion, as there is a juridical context for such accusations. In fact, the same evening the Bishop of Piraeus, accompanied by Golden Dawn MPs and members of the police force, accused the director and the actors of ‘blaspheming’ against the Orthodox religion and ‘hubris,’ both accusations with juridical force in the Greek legal system. Within a few hours the public prosecutor had detained the director and several actors in order to examine them and press charges. Thus the claim that Greece was morally degenerate was reproduced performatively by the Members of Parliament who participated in the events and was confirmed and further legitimized by the actions of the legal system. Surprisingly, despite the religious fanaticism of some Orthodox groups in Athens, Golden Dawn MPs are not necessarily Orthodox in their orientation, even if they adopt an Orthodox political style. On the contrary some might be neo-pagans, some sun worshipers, others believers in the ancient Greek gods, while yet others are Satanists. Among the latter was one of their most successful and popular MPs, Giorgos Germenis, who has publicly confessed to practicing the dark arts and attested his anti-Christian ideas. He is a leading member of a black metal group that is very popular with young audiences, known as Naer Mataron. His stage name is Keadas, derived from the mountain from which, according to ancient Greek mythology, the Spartans – in their own version of eugenics – threw babies that were born handicapped. As Laertis Vasiliou, who directed Corpus Christi, is well known for being of Greek Albanian descent and a gay rights activist, Golden Dawn supporters found allies in the Orthodox nationalists. As the ‘sexually deviant’ homosexual has emerged as one of the main focuses of stigmatization in Greece, homosexuality is viewed by Golden Dawn members as an illness that needs a cure and a ‘problem’ that must be dealt with. In a recent public interview given by Ilias Panagiotaros he said: ‘Until 1997, the international association of medical doctors considered homosexuality a sickness, an illness, which it is’ (60 Minutes 2014). Attacks are regularly made by members of Golden Dawn on gay men in the center of Athens and in June 2012, only a few days after the extremists’ electoral success, flyers were distributed in the neighborhood of Gazi, an area that is known to be popular with gays. Printed on the flyers were the words ‘After the migrants, it will be the gay men’s turn next.’ After the Corpus Christi incident the Bishop of Piraeus wrote a public letter to justify the attacks and the Church’s collaboration with Golden Dawn members. In the letter he expressed the opinion that Golden Dawn is a ‘sweet hope for Greece as they demonstrated in the name of our lord Jesus,’ and went on to say that the ‘crisis has clearly shown that there is a corrupt democracy where thieves succeed by being protected by ministers of finance who claim to have lost the Laggard list’ (Kathimerini 2012). He also referred to SYRIZA, the party currently in government, as ‘koukoulofori (hoodies) who burn people in league with the anarchists.’2

Far-right extremism in Athens 65 While this incident shows the increasing stigmatization of various forms of ‘otherness,’ from being a migrant to being a gay man, it further points to the state-within-a-state networks of Golden Dawn that extend to the clergy, monasteries, and the police force (Christopoulos 2014). Just as the modern national Greek identity has been systematically and institutionally connected with Orthodoxy, so segments in the Greek Orthodox Church share Golden Dawn’s anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and pro-dictatorship views overall. In continuing to make a distinction between nationalists (‘ethnikofrones’) and ‘communists’ for decades after the civil war, church charities – as is only too well known – would prioritize people deemed to have nationalist leanings (Zoumboulakis 2013: 88). Moreover, rich monasteries on Mount Athos, whose transnational networks extend to Cyprus, have close relationships with ELAM (the Cypriot version of Golden Dawn) and with some parts of the Greek police and army. While the church has maintained a charitable and humanist attitude toward migrants, especially those who are baptized into the faith, the Orthodox version of nationalism does not seem to be very different from National Socialism, which perceives the nation as a genetic and culturally defined entity. For example, Bishop Anthimos of Thessaloniki has repeatedly proclaimed all Macedonia as Greek, accusing those who are not on his side of being Bulgarian or Slav spies.

‘Migrants are the tyrants of our country’ Many of the other demonstrations in which Golden Dawn has been involved were attempts to appropriate the public space that was related to immigration, especially in the center of Athens where diversity is the norm. Agios Panteleimonas, for example, became one of the most influential neighborhoods in the politics of aggression. On November 24, 2008 about 200 people demonstrated against what they called the ‘ghettoization of the area’ – in one of the most diverse neighborhoods of Athens (Kandylis and Kavoulakos 2011: 157). The so-called ‘Residents committee of Agios Panteleimonas and Plateia Attikis’ blamed foreign immigrants for the degradation of their neighborhoods, arguing that immigrants were a threat to public hygiene and introduced criminality, and that Greeks were losing their identity. It was in this context that in May 2009 representatives of these associations closed down the playground on Agios Panteleiomonas Square in order to ‘protect the square from becoming a place for immigrants to gather.’ On this pretext these associations claimed ownership of the area, started attacking various immigrant communities, guarded the square in a militant fashion, and harassed most of the immigrants who tried to pass through. While at first these associations were not clearly and publicly linked to Golden Dawn, it became clear that the women who were supposedly peacefully protesting there were usually followed by an ‘elite attack unit’ of Golden Dawn.

66 Bampilis Just as the neo-Nazi group has been reproducing a political style that has systematically invested in xenophobia and racism, so too the government of Antonis Samaras (2012–2015) and previous governments and parties that identified with a far-right ideology have themselves endorsed these prejudices for various political ends. More importantly Greek society as a whole has become increasingly xenophobic as the inhabitants of neighborhoods in the center of Athens express their racist positions or fears openly. For example, in an event that was organized by the grassroots movement Atenistas, one of the most famous and world-renowned Greek poets Kiki Dimoula gave the world her vision of Kypseli, the neighborhood of central Athens where she grew up and in which she has lived most of her life. She said: I can no longer stand the migrants, there are so many and they take all the benches in the park so there is never a place for me there; they also steal so I am afraid to go out of my house. (Lifo 7/5/13) Her statements produced a heated public discussion about diversity and social life in the center of the capital. Various media voices asked ‘How is it possible for an intellectual and a poet, an educated person, to express such ideas publicly?’ while the association of Greek writers were quick to express their public solidarity with the poet and their opinion that the poet was a victim of a mass media plot. Similar ideas in various forms have been expressed by a number of other intellectuals and politicians, but the statement of the former prime minister Antonis Samaras a few weeks before he was elected in 2012 stands out. He said: ‘migrants are the tyrants of our society’ and he promised a program of mass deportations, though this was never fully carried through. Greece has been condemned on numerous occasions by the European Court of Human Rights for the total absence of a proper asylum system and the inhumane conditions in which migrants have been held and the fact that some of them had been tortured by the police. Such public statements reproduce racist stereotypes and dehumanize migrants. But due to the rapid changes in everyday life in many neighborhoods in central Athens, many Greek families sympathize with this antiimmigration rhetoric. In Kypseli, for example, I witnessed a family I had been following since my PhD turning to Golden Dawn. According to them the apartment block they were living in had been burgled several times and a group of people from Pakistan had transformed their rented accommodation into a noisy meeting place right under the family’s bedroom. In addition, there were a number of African prostitutes who waited for customers on the street below while their pimps stood watching on the opposite pavement.

Far-right extremism in Athens 67 Since 2008, Greece has been receiving most of the undocumented migrants in Europe, estimated to be almost 90 percent of the total number within the European Union (Ministry of Interior 2013). A ‘state of emergency’ in relation to immigration was declared by the previous government, which promoted border controls, militarization of the country, and the construction of large detention camps all over Greece. They also launched racist police operations, such as Xenios Zeus, in which people with phenotypic differences were stopped in the street and detained if they were not carrying any identity papers. Golden Dawn’s success has undoubtedly been fed by the influx of migrants, and many voters chose the party because of its promise to end migration to Greece, protect the citizens, and in general ‘cleanse’ Athens of its unwanted migrants. It is not by chance that the already sizable support for Golden Dawn increased between 2006–2010 when the second wave of African and Asian migration intensified. Mihaloliakos has repeatedly said in public, ‘out of my home, out of my country,’ and Panagiotaros, another prominent MP, stated that: ‘the arrival of immigrants is an invasion, an undeclared war, a nation of 10 million facing an invasion of 3 million illegal immigrants, the majority of them being Muslims and jihadists, Muslim fanatics not just Muslims’ (Panagiotaros interview 60 min). Greece is only for the real Greeks because ‘one nation is one race, this is how God fixed earth’ (Panagiotaros interview 60 min). Migration is viewed as an international plot, a conspiracy against Greeks by Zionist Jews and Turks who are deliberately sending millions of people in order to wipe out the Greeks and/or make them degenerate the Greeks through ‘miscegenation.’ A number of attacks on and killings of migrants in the streets have been justified on these grounds and this climate has allowed the party to establish some strongholds in central Athens, of which Agios Panteleimonas is one of the best known (Kandylis and Kavoulakos 2011). As Kypseli and Patisia have been for some time the most diverse areas in Athens in terms of ethnic identity, the Dawn capitalized on these areas as early as 2008 in order to ‘cleanse’ them and ‘protect’ its inhabitants from criminality. The deliberate absence of police or even – in a number of cases – their complicity left the public space free to be claimed by the infamous ‘security units’ (omades krousis), who would attack those who looked ‘different’ and check immigrants’ permits. The construction of difference is based on the perception that Golden Dawn members have of the different forms of ‘otherness,’ with African and Asian migrants being the ones usually targeted. White immigrants and white women in particular are rarely attacked. In fact, I have recorded cases of members who are married to women of East European origin. In a discussion I had with one of the oldest members of the party about the incompatibility between seeing migration as a plot against the Greek race and intermarriage between party members and East European women, the man answered: ‘we are full of paradoxes,’ acknowledging for a

68 Bampilis moment his cynicism about racist theories. Women from Eastern Europe, who may have an Orthodox background, are particularly likely to create symbolic associations with Russia or Orthodoxy and this imagined nationalist alliance between the two countries is projected as the Romeic Byzantine heritage. Though ethnically mixed families result from the marriage of Golden Dawn members with Eastern European migrants, this form of intermarriage is not necessarily viewed as totally degenerate. This may be explained by the ‘monogenetic theory’ whereby males are thought to have superior sexual powers and the force of their sperm or seeding is sufficiently dominant to carry the male trait (Du Boulay 1994: 258). For that reason, such intermarriage almost always involves a male Greek national and a female Eastern European migrant. While cultural intimacy is reproduced through family relationships that are well concealed and kept at a distance from the general racist theories of Golden Dawn, the public performances and political style of party members target ‘blasphemers,’ ‘gay men,’ ‘immigrants,’ and other enemies of the people who will supposedly bring the country into moral and social degeneracy. While such public performances normalize social and cultural differences and promote public mobilization in a ‘state of emergency’ brought about by immigration, the ritualization of violence and other public events transform Golden Dawn’s identity into the social glue that emotionalizes the issues and further unites the supporters of the party.

Violence and mourning: the public ritualization of identity In the early hours of September 18, 2013, the 34-year-old anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas was stabbed to death in the middle of a street in the workingclass district of Keratsini in front of a police force that had been called in to save him. As Fyssas was trying to escape a group of about 50 Golden Dawn members, he was attacked and fatally stabbed by one of them. This man, Giorgos Roupakias, was known to be part of the Perama elite unit and a notorious street fighter, who could handle a knife. This event led in the end to the detention of party members and the prosecution of Golden Dawn as a criminal organization. Pavlos Fyssas was just another victim in the long list of murders and attacks by the far-right Golden Dawn party. In mid-January 2013, two Greek men on a motorcycle stabbed 26-year-old Pakistani Shehzad Luqman to death in the neighborhood of Petralona. A few hours later the police arrested the two men after a report from an eyewitness and several Golden Dawn publicity posters and flyers were found in the house of one of the murderers. While this event was reported in the local and international news, it did not have the same symbolic impact as the murder of Pavlos Fyssas. There was a major difference between the two victims: one was Greek and the other was Pakistani. As various parts of the Greek media declared, ‘it was Greek blood that brought down Golden Dawn.’

Far-right extremism in Athens 69 A few days before the assassination of Fyssas, in the early hours of Friday September 13, 2013, just one kilometer away from the place where the antifascist activist would be killed, a group of 50 Golden Dawn members wielding clubs attacked a small group of left-wing billposters, who where putting up a program for a KNE festival (Odigitis). The billposters were all from KNE & KKE (members of the Communist Party of Greece) and seven of them were so badly hurt that they were hospitalized with serious injuries. One of them was Sotiris Poulikogiannis, President of the Union of Metalworkers of Piraeus (Syndikato Metallou Pirea), who had long been targeted, because he had engaged in open conflict with local Golden Dawn MPs over employment rights. Ever since Golden Dawn’s electoral success in 2012, Giannis Lagos and Ilias Panagiotaros had been lobbying various groups of workers in Perama, Kokkinia, and Keratsini to oppose the local left-wing unions on the grounds that their efforts to maintain high wages resulted in more unemployment. Another argument against these associations was the high proportion of immigrant workers who had taken ‘Greek’ workers’ jobs. On these grounds Golden Dawn had been trying to exclude ‘communists’ and ‘foreigners’ from the labor market, promising jobs to ‘Greek’ unemployed workers (Greek meaning pro-Golden Dawn). This strategy was repeated several times in different areas of Greece as there was a long line of accusations against Golden Dawn MPs for threatening employers and factory owners and requiring them to hire only ‘Greek’ workers and fire the communists and the foreigners. This trend came in the wake of a generalized decline in and devaluation of unions in Greece (syndicalistes) by the government and media, who portrayed them as the source of the crisis and supporters of clientelism and patronage. They were also portrayed as self-serving enemies of the public, involved in constant strikes that had paralyzed the country since the recession started. In other words, workers’ associations were no longer valued as a sign of democratic political participation but seen as a remnant of PASOK and left-wing patronage politics. After Golden Dawn’s electoral campaign in Perama, the party’s local newspaper had announced that they wanted to provide ‘bread and work for Greeks.’ As a result, on June 12, 2012 a group of 20 Golden Dawn members attacked five Egyptian fishermen who were living and working in the Perama and Keratsini area. The immigrants were beaten up and one of them sustained serious brain damage. A few hours before this event the local MP Giannis Lagos had stated: ‘from now on Egyptian fishermen will answer to us’ (tha mas dinun logariasmo), thus confirming that the racist blow would come from Golden Dawn. As a consequence of the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas, on November 2, 2013 in New Heraklion in Athens, two young members of Golden Dawn, Manolis Kapelonis and Giorgos Fountoulis, were killed in front of the party’s local offices. The next day a Sanctus (or epimnimosini) was held at the place where the two members had died and thousands of people attended. Similar

70 Bampilis ceremonies were organized in a number of places in Greece and abroad. In Neo Heraklion, the spot where the bodies were found was covered in flowers, candles, and Greek flags. Some participants in the ceremony were also holding Greek flags. At a certain point some Golden Dawn members placed a new road sign above the site of the assassination, inscribed ‘Kapelonis & Fountoulis Democracy St’ and the crowd cheered them on. As the ceremony was coming to an end, a Golden Dawn member shouted the word ‘athanatoi’ (which means immortals in modern Greek) three times, an acclamation usually applied to war heroes and immediately afterwards the crowds began singing the national anthem. In the subsequent days the faces of the two men were overprinted with the Greek and sometimes the Golden Dawn flag; they appeared on Golden Dawn’s main website and since then they have been a constant part of the party’s public profile. Nowadays the two men are portrayed on large banners that cover the party headquarters on Mesogeion St. in Athens. An extraordinary number of YouTube videos and other blogs have also appeared since then, usually featuring key phrases such as ‘1st November, I do not forget’ and ‘prison, bullets and death won’t break us.’ This dimension of political life that relates to the vulnerability of loss and the business of mourning that follows is a matter of enormous social and political significance (Butler 2004); not only because it is loss that to a very large extent influences the way humans are, but also because it might constitute a basis for the idea of community – ‘An obituary becomes the means by which a life becomes or fails to become a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes note-worthy’ (Butler 2004: 34). As such, the obituary is a determinant in community building and requires the heroization and dramatization of those people who are worth mentioning. Public mourning rituals have been a strategy of Golden Dawn since the early days of the group. Every year, for example, on January 29, supporters of the group form a parade to the Ministry of Defense, known as the ‘Imia parade.’ In January 1996, the Turkish navy approached an islet close to the Greek–Turkish border, resulting in a large-scale military crisis between the two countries. The most dramatic event of the crisis was the death of three Greek officers of the Greek navy who had approached the islet on a helicopter and by accident crashed into the sea. For Golden Dawn these officers are considered heroes of war who have to be commemorated each year in the Imia remembrance rally, and in this way their obituary is a highly politicized and nationalized act. A similiar public mourning ritual is the yearly commemoration of the victims of Meligalas on September 15. The battle of Meligalas took place in 1944 between the Nazi-collaborating Greek forces of the Peloponnese and the communist national liberation army (ELAS). As the national liberation army won this specific battle, the Nazi collaborators were all executed on the spot, signaling a violent turn in the Greek civil war.

Far-right extremism in Athens 71 While the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas points to a dehumanization similar to that of all those migrant victims who had been assassinated before him but who were never mentioned or mourned, it was ultimately his national identity that made him worth grieving over. So what will be grievable is produced in such acts of public grieving and ‘violence against those who are already not quite living, that is living in a state of suspension between life and death, leaves a mark that is no mark’ (Butler 2004: 36). While the complex relation between mourning, politics, and community is undeniable, something that further confirmed the ritualization and exploitation of the victims was the electoral success in the recent European elections (2014) of Giorgos Fountoulis’s father. A retired civil servant who had never been in politics, he joined Golden Dawn after his son’s assassination, becoming the only non-military MP that Golden Dawn has so far sent to the European parliament.

The main neo-Nazi strategies In the light of recent events taking place in Greece, this chapter argues that the far-right political party Golden Dawn has been developing a political style that is based predominantly on demonstrations and the public appearances of its members in various areas of the city of Athens. The ‘activist’ or ‘grassroots’ identity that the party has been trying to project has been intertwined with three strategies: an unspoken alliance with the Orthodox Church; a strong anti-immigration rhetoric and racist practices, and ritualization of public events. While these strategies are aimed at reinforcing the public image of Golden Dawn that might be appealing to Athenians and other Greeks, this chapter has not discussed the party’s para-state relations with the state apparatuses (Christopoulos 2014, Dalakoglou 2013b), which are rarely publicly acknowledged by Golden Dawn. In this respect this chapter attempts to turn the focus of the discussion to the ‘cultural’ circumstances that enable and legitimize far-right extremism in Greece and the ‘performative’ competence of the party in a number of events. Furthermore it has emphasized that the downward social mobility and increased precarity resulting from the restructuring program deployed in the recession are not sufficient to explain the emergence of this far-right extremist party. Instead, analyzing the ways that various ‘crises’ and ‘states of emergency’ have been publicly capitalized on, performed, and manipulated by members of the party or its politicians might give us a better understanding of the success of Golden Dawn. From the distribution of ‘food for the poor’ and the ‘security units’ to the violent attacks or mourning rituals, these public events emotionalize the crises, normalize cultural differences, and invest in new forms of sociability. Many of these public performances stress purity and danger, loss and violence, class and hierarchy in an attempt to reproduce populist perceptions and enact an imagined social/political critique.

72 Bampilis

Notes 1

2

Various approaches that try to connect fascism with neoliberalism in theoretical terms relate to a large body of work stemming from Central and Eastern Europe and which by definition is based on an abrupt transition from communism to neoliberalism. As Greece is the only country in the South East of the European Union (and bordering the Balkans) that did not follow this path, its right-wing politics have a long history of political legitimacy (see Dalakoglou 2013b). The term ‘koukouloforoi’ can be translated as ‘hooded men/men wearing hoods’ that is hoodies, a word that emerged before and during the events associated with the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos in 2008 and became a very controversial term in public and political discourse. For more information on the controversy and the legalization of the term see Dalakoglou (2013b).

5

Death in the Greek territorial and symbolic borders Anti-immigrant action for policing the crisis1 Giorgos Tsimouris and Roland S. Moore

The territorial borders of the nation-state and their protection monopolized social research regarding immigration for a long period. Our aim is to question official discourses over borders in Greece, bearing in mind that immigration, asylum, and borders have moved to the central stage of domestic and international politics. Our argument is that borders, their imaginary, and their protection are also central for the governance of populations in the Foucauldian sense. We approach territorial and symbolic borders in the same analytic framework as we consider that they enforce and normalize each other and operate in complementary ways. Border issues and border controls concern, predominantly, matters of policing and have become ‘relative, dynamic and performance oriented’ (Walters 2006: 199), a field of controlling popular fears and panic (Heyman 1998, Bornstein 2002: 201). Immigration in Europe is associated largely with security issues (Huysmans 2000: 751, Vukov 2003: 335). Post-colonial and feminist scholarly attention to transnational border crossings (by such scholars as Behar 1993, Kearney 1991, and Vélez-Ibáñez 1996) has incorporated over the last two decades symbolic and critical socioeconomic theory, when considering cultural repercussions of power inequalities as they are expressed in migration policy and practice. The inherent contradiction between officially declared immigration control policies and an expanding demand in many economic sectors for cheap and flexible labor forges a regime of fear for immigrants. They experience such fear not only during their passage through territorial borders but during their daily lives, as immigration issues come to the center of the political debate, especially during a crisis. In Greece, death in the terrestrial and maritime borders for security reasons as well as fatal attacks in the center of Athens by the Neo-Nazis should be considered in common. Death at the Greek borders of desperate travelers, drowned at sea or found suffocated in trucks, is rather banal news in Greece or Italy and, at the time of writing, is increasing rather than diminishing. These deaths are directly connected to restrictive EU border policies and

74 Tsimouris and Moore regulations and with Greek controls enforced over the borders. These policies include the proliferation of controls in the cities by special police forces called sinoriofilakes (border guards). This has urged us to examine the dialectics and associations of the territorial and symbolic borders of the nation-state in the sense that imaginary borders and fear are an intrinsic part of immigrants’ daily lives. As Heyman argued, ‘symbolic action has quite real effects’ (Heyman 1998: 161). We seek to bring to light first-hand accounts by immigrants of both their passage through territorial borders and their experience of living ‘undocumented lives’ in Greece and, in this sense, living daily between inclusion and exclusion, at the borderlands of constitutional and legal protection, lives inbetween. Distinctively, the chapter’s primary source material is drawn from websites in which immigrants discuss their often harrowing migration experiences.2 The anonymity of the Internet facilitates access to immigrants’ accounts that have not been self-censored. Thus, key contributions of the chapter will be the use of the relatively borderless Internet as a largely unexplored window to immigrants’ shared understanding of how to survive and thrive both on and within Greece’s contested borders and artistic productions by immigrants. This chapter’s anthropological analysis of the online material as a form of norm creation will be triangulated by other official and unofficial sources, such as NGO reports and journalistic coverage, and it will be discussed in the framework of the current developing social theory on borders. Our analysis interrogates official Greek immigration policies and attempts to trace the potential interconnections between official discourses and police intervention with fascist action against immigrants. Special emphasis will be placed on the consequences of the Greek crisis, in the course of which the lives of immigrants have further deteriorated due not only to employment shortages but mainly to both media and police anti-immigrant panic crusades which paved the way for the action of fascist groups especially in the urban centers. Since 2010 and especially after the elections of May 2012 – when Golden Dawn won 7 percent of the total votes – the party undertook systematic, violent campaigns, targeting especially immigrants of color. As is the case with other European parties of the far right, Golden Dawn’s political project is strongly anti-immigrant and nationalistic. Our point is that state interventions and media representations during the crisis consolidated the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, criminalizing immigration with a new force and opening up the floor for the Golden Dawn’s murderous project. The concept of borders has been subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Martin Heidegger inspired a number of scholars (including Bhabha 1994) to reflect on his 1952 statement: ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is the horizon, the boundary’ (Heidegger 1971: 152). As we shall elaborate on below, this theorizing of boundaries has been reworked within the

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late modern period, by focusing also on a non-territorial, digital expansion of control in light of Deleuzian analysis that draws from the Foucauldian understandings of governmentality. We also draw from contemporary work on mobility across borders, especially by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1997) and the anthropologist Doreen Massey (1993) who differentiate those who are forced to cross borders, such as refugees and forced immigrants, from voluntary travelers including politicians, business academics, and tourists. The voyagers’ accounts differ accordingly, with self-censorship and limited verbal and less-often written distribution typifying the stories of the involuntary migrants or those without legal permission to be where they are working. Of course, many refugees believe that only they can truly understand other refugees (Tsimouris 1998). But Greek citizens have been exposed to and expressed sympathy for the representations of undocumented migrants on the web as promoted in the Greek press by Gazmed Kaplani, Albanian-in-Greece journalist and author of A Small Diary of Borders (2006). Other blogs document that a significant number of Greeks support the idea of ‘fortress Greece’, part of a fortress Europe. We argue that mainstream policies in the time of crisis contributed significantly to this idea and to a multiplication of inner boundaries. The experience of passing the physical borders is limited to the cultural and political identity of the traveler, in relation to the political and cultural establishment that exists beyond those specific borders. In other words, the experience of the subject is closely associated with and located by broader regimes of power and representation beyond his/her control. Not, therefore, a borderless world but a re-bordered world where ‘the importance of territoriality is shifting rather than simply diminishing’ (Andreas 2000: 3). The hardships of the immigrant do not end as s/he transgresses the territorial borders. The border crosses him/her during his/her entire life as s/he is perceived as ‘matter out of place’. Inasmuch as s/he remains unwanted in the country of access s/he is forced to come across daily boundaries. Alejandro Lugo is right to argue that ‘. . . in addition to external boundaries, we must always examine the “internal frontiers” . . . and the “internal boundaries” . . . permeating everyday life, in order to fully understand why and how certain borders are not easily crossed or transgressed’ (Lugo 2000: 367). An example of an anonymous web account is conveyed by Kaplani’s blog, which is reproduced in the newspaper Ta Neai A Pakistani immigrant related being stopped aggressively by the police nine times in one day: With the cards that we have, we are neither entirely illegal nor entirely legal. Therefore, they examine the documents to see if they are forged. In one police division, I asked for a receipt that I had been controlled. “You want a receipt?” “Why, are we a souvlaki stand?” they answered. “And am I a piece of souvlaki to be handled this way?” I said, but to myself, obviously. And that day I lost my job.

76 Tsimouris and Moore The intensification of ‘internal controls’ and local controls were criticized for their latent functions (Kretsedemas 2008) and were considered ‘intrinsically racist’ (emphasis in the original) (Cohen 2002: 540). Properly framed, anecdotes and jokes provide insightful commentaries on the everyday social life of immigrants in Greece. A popular Greek joke is ‘An Albanian tourist’, and such a one-liner evokes the typically agonizing journey of Albanian labor migrants who enter Greece desperate to make money to send home3 rather than to bask on the warm iconic beaches beloved by the Greek National Tourism Organization or engage in professional recreation. Within the wider political economy and based on Eurocentric cultural predominance, such a joke may be understood with the use of Orientalism as the consequence of cultural imperialism activated when ‘subaltern others’ encroach on the territorial and cultural boundaries in which they originally belong. In such a framework, the Balkans are not merely a geographic region but simultaneously constitute a hegemonic European fantasy (Todorova 1997) and a historical process of differentiation which is given meaning from the idea of Balkanization, with a number of negative connotations including the alter ego of European superiority. Even among Greeks who would be horrified to recognize any racist interpretation of the phrase, the humor derives from the expectation that the only expected presence of an Albanian in Greece would be as an illegal migrant, ready for unwanted and dangerous work for low wages. Kaplani comments on contrasts between the symbolic and territorial borders: The immigrant is one who is encircled by borders. Conventional boundaries, those that divide countries, are not for him anything other than the large visible border. There are however thousands of other, invisible, borders, which tighten around him every moment, every day, almost his every move, almost his every desire and ambition. The language: Behold the first invisible boundary. Which immigrant hasn’t tried that initial thrill – which resembles one’s first love – that one feels when he pronounces the first sentences of the foreign language, which until yesterday sounded like hammering noise or a loud sewing machine? Then, you try to steal accents and rare expressions, especially those which you believe will make you remove the difference from the locals: come on babe ‘re pedi mou’, no fuck ‘ohi re gamoto’, it’s nonsense ‘einai moufa’, you get on my nerves ‘mou tin dineis’, Christos kai Panaghia ‘Jesus Christ and Virgin Mary’, and the infamous, you asshole ‘re malaka’4 . . . You try to say all of these as originally as you can, to seem, as much as possible, indigenous, to convince them that you can become one of them . . . (2006: 96) Despite the inventiveness of the immigrant, John Berger seems equally pessimistic regarding the transgression of borders in his ‘Seventh Man’ (1975):

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He treated the sounds of the unknown language as if they were silence. To break through his silence. He learnt twenty words of the new language. But to his amazement at first, their meaning changed as he spoke them. He asked for a coffee. What the words signified to the barman was that he was asking for a coffee in a bar where he should not be asking for a coffee. He learnt girl. What the word meant when he used it was that he was a randy dog. Is it possible to see through the opaqueness of the words? (Quoted in Bhabha 1994: 165) If we accept the visions of Kaplani and Berger, borders are not constructed through cultural difference but predominantly through cultural hierarchy, poverty, and by the mere fact of being in a place one should not be as an immigrant. If he or she were a tourist, the whole matter would have been different. As Kaplani underscores, the physical borders are the great visible border. Those which are difficult for the migrant to overcome over time are the other, the unseen but entirely real boundaries, which emerge in everyday life and in unpredictable ways. We would add that these frontiers are more recognized, identified, and intensively experienced rather than those serving in border areas and there are long-term and deeply felt consequences. On the contrary, for those who rationalize and naturalize the nationalistic vision with ease, the legitimate or non-legitimate guardians of the nation, those who are fully subjected to ‘the national order of things’ (Malkki 1995), the boundaries they impose are either taken for granted due to rational-ization and normalization or are not even visible. The growing consciousness of borders and boundaries concern primarily those not fully fitting into the purity and the essence of the nation as they are living and suffering in the subaltern borderland. A large volume of immigrant web-accounts detail the multiple legal restrictions and preconditions existing for immigrants not only after their border passage but by the mere fact that they have been borne by immigrant parents – in most cases immigrant children are deprived any nationality after they come-of-age (Papastergiou and Takou 2013) – and constitute a powerful reminder of their liminality and virtually, of their provisional existence in Greece, living thus permanently, in ‘borderlands’. A particularly compelling story repeated in different variations on the web features talented young children of migrants who face expulsion from Greece even though they were born and/or raised in Greece if they leave their studies and do not collect the official stamps for proper paid work.5 One is a brilliant math student and the other a masterful violinist, but the latter is regret-fully told that if he were a soccer rather than music star, he would have received the necessary stamp of government approval. The interactive character of blogs enables Greek citizens (also usually anonymous) to write sympathetically and condemn the bureaucratic hellish ‘Catch-22’ mazes the second-generation migrants must navigate in the Greek public

78 Tsimouris and Moore sector. In Greece, as elsewhere, despite the strict provisions of immigration laws, exceptions are not uncommon especially for athletes.

Borderlands and contact zones as dangerous, fluid, and creative spaces: the Greek case before and after crisis Renato Rosaldo has suggested that borderlands are creative sources of cultural production, not just passing or exclusion points (Rosaldo 1989: 208), and for Horstmann (2006) borderlands are fields of resistance or paradoxical and contradictory fields (Alvarez 1995: 462). In classic anthropological theory, also, the phase of liminality has been discussed as a condition of anxiety, embarrassment, and transformation of the self (Turner 1969). This may explain why immigrants living in borderlands become so creative in exposing the empty spaces and gaps between their own living experiences and their lives as objects of representation. The hegemonic myths and the official rhetoric about ‘other’ experiences in Greece turn out to become a parody. ‘Live your Myth in Greece’ was one of the central advertising slogans of Greece during the Olympic Games of 2004. The same slogan was used as a leitmotif, as a repeated refrain, in the theatrical work ‘One in Ten’, a performance based upon the first-hand experiences of immigrants. Against the glamorous frame of the Olympics, the grotesque realities of the immigrants offered a striking contrast when directors asked the actors portraying the migrants to move about the stage rapidly, each holding a ‘Live your Myth in Greece’ sign (Vassileiou 2007; also described in Kotzamani et al. 2009). As already argued, ‘borderlands, crossroads, and contact zones. . . disrupt celebratory nationalist narratives’ (Fishkin 2005: 19), exposing the difference between representation and experience. Despite, or because of, Greece being seen as the borderline or at the margins of Europe (Herzfeld 1987), it has rather been left alone by the rest of the European Union to do the ‘dirty work’ at the borders. Due to this, the Greek administration relies more on its armed forces and the Frontex6 operating as the guardians of the borders rather than pursuing implementation of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties that it has signed for the protection of immigrants and refugees. This institutional orientation contributes significantly to the subjection of immigrants in the borderlands and the margins of legal order and, occasionally, in the borderline of life and death. Indeed, between 1993 and 2007, nearly 9,000 immigrants perished attempting to cross the European borders (Eleftheriadou 2007). Thus, despite the Greek state’s growing inability to control its territorial borders, it tries to regulate the flow of human beings according to European prescriptions, the needs of its domestic labor market, and according to occasional micro-political goals. To these ends, the borders are multiplied, internalized, and become more fluid. The institution of ‘border control

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police’ (sinoriofilakes) in the center of Athens and other cities may be noted as part of this attempt. In this respect, Andreas (2000: 3) is right to argue that ‘debordering is being accompanied in many places by a partial rebordering in the form of enhanced policing. . . Thus it may be more accurate to say that the importance of territoriality is shifting rather than simply diminishing.’ Drawing on the work of Deleuze, Walters argues that ‘in control societies power has become more fluid, less centred. We have gone from moulding to modulation’ (Walters 2006: 190). Despite the delocalized power of the state, control is not diminished but rather is dispersed and diffused within society, thus provoking permanent fear and anxiety among immigrants, especially among the less privileged. Control now operates more as a filter separating the wanted from the unwanted, and less as a territorial dividing line. In this context, with the term state we do not mean only the constitutional and institutional mechanisms of government according to a conventional sociological approach, but rather what McLaren (2005) calls the corporatestate-army-media complex or, simply, what he calls the ‘power complex’ and its hegemony in the Gramscian sense. In order to operate effectively, the values of the power complex have to be diffused, socialized, and internalized by the people concerned. Quite often the ‘cleansing raids’ of police, which are taking place in Greece, are anticipated by media ‘propaganda – raids’ promoting and anticipating the criminality of immigrants and are sustained by ethnocentric education and mainstream ideology. While both are multiplied and intensified in periods of economic and political crisis, the state apparatuses of control are everywhere, anytime, deterritorilized, digitized, diffused, localized, modulated, internalized. Since the late 1980s, when the number of immigrants in Greece started increasing significantly (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2005: 2), the demand of individual immigrants and of their formal associations was a legal framework that would facilitate the application for legal permission to stay and work in Greece (nomimopoesi, νομιμοποίηση). The Greek state, despite the large number of non-documented immigrants, appeared reluctant to face immigrant issues with long-term vision and policies and preferred to ignore them as invisible subjects meaning its policies were ineffective (Christopoulos 2004, 2013). A large number of non-documented immigrants fulfilled the needs of the black labor market as cheap and provisional labor mainly in the domains of agriculture, domestic work, the construction industry, and in the invisible jobs of small tourist businesses (e.g. cleaning, gardening, cooking). As other scholars have argued, and as was the same in postwar European immigration, immigrants are treated as a reservoir of flexible labor. Their non-legalization and their ‘non-visibility’ adds to their flexibility as a labor force and enables their further exploitation for ‘demanding, dangerous and dirty’ work, while state authorities avoid undertaking any responsibility for their legal protection.

80 Tsimouris and Moore The demand for legalization became more pressing and dominated over the following years, returning as a much more urgent demand with regard to the so-called ‘second generation’. The new law for citizenship implemented in 2010, surpassing for the first time the jus sanguinis canon, the ‘principle of blood’, sought to meet the need for integration of the large number of children and young adults of immigrant descent, born or/and growing up in Greece (Christopoulos 2013, Papastergiou and Takou 2013). As matter of fact, only a small number of immigrants got Greek citizenship according to this law due to strict documentation demands. Notwithstanding a significant number among the undocumented latecomers in Greece departing from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and African countries which are in a state of war, the percentage of successful application forms from asylum seekers in 2008 was just 0.06 percent while in previous years this was even lower. In current years the number of successful applications increased as a result of the pressures from civil society and human rights activists. Similarly, for economic immigrants, the endowment of residence permits depends upon work permits. This means that an immigrant can be legally accepted in the country under the condition that s/he would be able to demonstrate that they have a job, and that s/he would able to afford to spend money in the Greek state and be competent enough to deal with the bureaucracy even if she or he knows just a few Greek words. Over the last decade, many immigrants who successfully passed all these obstacles obtained an annual residence permit which, to their detriment, had already expired. This could be viewed as the bureaucratic incompetence of the proper immigrant authorities but as researchers working for the independent authority (Ombudsman/Sinigoros tou Politi) suggest, it can also be understood simply as a way to carry out immigration policy. As the history of both American and European immigration demonstrates (Higham 1952), in periods of economic and social crisis, immigrants in general, and particularly the non-documented among them, become the scapegoats of the crisis. In other words, their legal and social invisibility and their shadowed lives provide fruitful space for their exploitation as a flexible labor force. In the era of free and fast movement of capital, information, and images but not of persons, this fits perfectly with the needs of free market, late capitalism. While the criminalization of immigrants and xenophobia was not unknown in Greece (Karidis 1996, Baldwin/Edwards 2001, Ventura 2004), the deterioration of the economic situation from 2009 nurtured significantly xenophobic attitudes and paved the way for the intervention of the police force. As we will explain, state action becomes more repressive and violence against immigrants more rationalized, inasmuch as hegemonic and media representations are successful in the dissemination of xenophobic sentiments targeting immigrants as responsible for the deterioration of life mainly in the urban centers. What Vukov argued for Canada – ‘Affective epidemics

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of insecurity that proliferate through news media culture become crucial to the ways in which many states recuperate their regulatory practices and rationalize their policies’ (Vukov 2003: 339) – is equally true for Greece. Immigration in the same period was further criminalized and immigrants were represented almost exclusively in the role of ‘the bad and the ugly’. A very clear outcome of the elections for the European Parliament of 2009 was the empowerment of the extreme right party LAOS, campaigning for the expulsion of all immigrants from the country. In the following months, the Greek government of Nea Demokratia struggled to win over the voters of LAOS for the approaching parliamentary elections, adopting even more xenophobic policies especially during the summer. This includes the expulsion of non-documented immigrants after the evacuation of their houses, the construction of more detention camps, mass mistreatment at the borders, and the acceleration of procedures for the usually negative assessment of applications for asylum in such a way that has not been accepted by European partners. Along the same lines, many ‘cleansing operations’ (epiheiriseis skoupa) took place in the center of Athens during that same summer. Thus, it is true to say that state borders are porous but it is also true to argue that their porosity depends upon the political circumstances of the destination country and especially upon one’s status as an immigrant. In addition, the location of an immigrant’s country of origin in the global spectrum of power hierarchy has much impact over his/her accessibility and recognition in the destination country. Over the last years in Greece, the situation of non-Orthodox immigrants of color coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa worsened due to both the so-called Greek crisis and to ‘Islamophobia’. On occasions of shortages of labor force, state authorities loosen border controls or implement exceptions for special categories of laborers. When unemployment is high, nationalistic political forces target immigrants as responsible for unemployment, criminality, and social decay. In Greece, the austerity measures opened the way for the orchestration of moral panics by mainstream media and anti-immigrant operations by police, thus producing the space for the dissemination of violence and murderous attacks against immigrants by the Neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn.7 Another consequence of the Greek crisis was the escalation of controls, checkpoints, and supervision procedures for immigrants not only in the territorial borders but equally in the passages of inner cities. New digital technologies allowed de-territorialized controls, producing an environment of fear as police initiatives and operations were the main institutional tool to deal with immigration. Obviously, the development of institutional antiimmigrant action and controls deteriorated the existence of both documented and non-documented immigrants in the sense that over-generalization, putting together immigrants ‘sans papier’ with immigrants holding a residence permit, refugees, asylum seekers, redefined and undermined their difference: ‘at the end, they are all illegal immigrants’.

82 Tsimouris and Moore In a study of transnational migrants’ online activity in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Francis Leo Collins observed that seemingly open online communication is also subject to surveillance and discipline, ‘that seek to police the borders between bodies and subjectivities, both on and offline’ (Collins 2009: 839). Although the focus of his study was the web engagement of well-off South Korean students in New Zealand, we find that similar processes characterize the anonymous Internet accounts of far more marginal migrants living illegally in Greece. Indeed, in Greece, the special police unit against electronic and online crime is often considered as the most effective department of the Greek police force.

Policing the crisis in the neoliberal context as a border proliferating practice par excellence The extracommunitarian immigrants already ‘in our midst’ are the targets of mounting hostility and violence as politicians of the right and conservative governments fuel popular fears with a rhetoric of exclusion that extols national identity predicated on cultural exclusiveness (Stolcke 1995: 2). A few weeks before the Greek parliamentary elections of 2015, Antonis Samaras, the Prime Minister of the coalition government, was photographed in front of the fence established close to the river Evros in the Greco–Turkish border of North Greece. This border area is considered as one of the main passages of non-documented immigrants from Turkey to Greece. From this point he was proud enough to declare, if not to perform, that the fence is an achievement of his government and expressed his determination to protect the borders of the homeland. It is interesting to note that Golden Dawn commented that his declaration was hypocritical and stressed that the Prime Minister invented the systematic violation of homeland borders just before the elections in his attempt to win over the votes of the citizens scared about the flood of immigrants. The ‘timely’ performance of the Prime Minister and the rationale criticism developed by the Neo-Nazis may be taken as a hallmark of the public debate that culminated in the years of crisis, from 2009 onward. Mainstream discourses constructed immigration as an enemy ‘in our midst’ to be faced and repressed in military ways in the borders of the state. This was fully reflected in the language used to speak of immigrants by government representatives: ‘Greece turned to fenceless vineyard’, ‘we are determined to recuperate our cities’, ‘immigrants are a health bomb’, ‘they are threatening our lives and our homes’ were typical expressions in the most official domains and were often accompanied by police operations. Those acts of representation and intervention opened up the floor for the members of Golden Dawn, who multiplied their murderous attacks especially in the center of Athens. In the same vein we should understand the electoral success of Golden Dawn in the elections of May 2012 that shocked the Greek society. Considering that in the recent past the electoral percentage of the Neo-Nazis was less than

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0.5 percent, their empowerment is not a direct outcome of the crisis but of the ways in which crisis was represented, conceptualized, and rationalized. Deaths of ‘clandestine-immigrants’ (lathrometanastes), according to the language of official and journalistic reports, in the Aegean Sea and in the terrestrial Greco–Turkish borderline, are part of ordinary news in Greece over the last decades. We will never learn if the drowned in the sea were asylum seekers exercising their right to survival or economic immigrants seeking to escape poverty. In the best-case scenario, we shall learn if they were men, women, or children and their country of origin. As emphasized long ago, international law protects states and not refugees (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2002) or those who struggle to cross the borders. Death makes the abstract policies and bureaucratic understandings on borders concrete and is embodied increasingly in the Mediterranean but not only there, as the family of a Guatemalan undocumented worker in the U.S. discovered when he was killed in an accident and mistakenly cremated in spite of his family’s desire for burial of the body (Brandes 2001). In any act establishing boundaries, control works out effectively inasmuch as it affects predominantly the imaginary space ‘of the people’. The national territory is imagined as the non-negotiable property of the Greeks by descent and as such the territorial boundaries maintain an almost sacred significance. In addition, inner-city police controls remind us that borders have been re-territorialized and multiplied, operating more like a ‘modulation’ process rather than as a ‘molding’ enterprise. In this respect, not only is there the occasional physical extermination of immigrants in the borders of the state, in the Aegean Sea, in the territorial or maritime borders, but also those targeted by fascists due to their color or just because they do not feel legal enough to visit a hospital are included in the losses, due to these multiplied, ‘modulated’ borders. Death at the borders may be seen only as the last stage of a process performed by international and state mechanisms, which especially in periods of crisis negate the existence of the most precarious subjects and locate them as ‘bare lives’ beyond the boundaries of polity and legal protection in the sense analyzed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998). The Italian philosopher has good reasons to argue8 that state action in times of crisis seeks not to impose order but rather to manage disorder. This becomes possible by exposing further the precarious lives in order to calm down, to appease, and to govern in the Foucauldian sense, domestic anxieties regarding unemployment and insecurity. A great number of critical voices in Greece and elsewhere interrogate on diverse grounds, including human rights violations and the resources spent, the emphasis placed upon border controls and the procedures of policing immigration and not on the protection of human lives by creating structures of access and integration for immigrants. Criticism surrounding Frontex in relation to violation of human rights, its militarization, and its connection with corporative interests may be

84 Tsimouris and Moore located in the same framework. This is clearly stated by Fotiadis when he eloquently argues that: the drama of Lampedusa was interpreted as an opportunity for the acceleration of the implementation of the security dogma with the basic goal nothing else but the militarization of European border controls and the conveyance of executive and political power into the instruments representing the organized interests of the ‘industry of security’. (Fotiadis 2015: 56) A similar statement was made by Lampedusa ’s Mayor, Cuisi Nikolini, ‘I am becoming more convinced that European policy on immigration considers this offering of human lives to be a way to restrict of flows of people or may be a deterrent’.9 The multiplication of deaths in the Mediterranean after Lampedusa confirms a strong interconnection between the intensification of militarized patrols of the borders and the losses of human lives. Greek authorities violently implement the same preventive policies and their statements leave no doubts about it. This is reflected clearly in the Greek Police’s chief announcement of 2012, that came out one year later, on December 20, 2013: We must make their lives non-viable, that is they should know, as they come in (the country) they are going to be imprisoned, otherwise we are ineffective, we are becoming the most attractive place for immigrants.10 Most importantly, the act of policing state borders, both external and internal, a clear act for ‘policing the crisis’ (Hall et al. 1978) empowers and reinforces the internal frontiers and boundaries, fixes difference, increases the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and favors the non-compatibility of cultures and people. This means that if we want to fully understand what happens in the borders of the Greek state and of the European Union and what ‘begins its presencing’, we have to look from the other side of the borders, that is, through the eyes of Greece’s and Europe’s ‘others’. When crossing the dividing line most immigrants expect to come across some sort of better life, but they discover, to their detriment, more borders, control, and repression if not death, especially in the period of crisis.

Notes 1 An intial form of this chapter was delivered as a paper at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium 21, Vancouver, October 2009. The post-2010 developments affected the situation and heavily influenced our analysis. 2 We rely on filtered blogs in which Albanians and others transmit their accounts in Greek. 3 See Dalakoglou 2016a. 4 These are idiomatic expressions, used as a mark of indigineity.

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5 http: //afmarx.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/yiorgos-samson-hatsatrian/ and http:// imerologiomiasksenis.blogspot.com/search?q=) 6 According to the official declaration, ‘Frontex also works closely with the bordercontrol authorities of non-EU/Schengen countries – mainly those countries identified as a source or transit route of irregular migration – in line with general EU external relations policy’. http: //frontex.europa.eu/about-frontex/missionand-tasks/. 7 ‘Chrisi Aygi’ in Greek, the fascist Greek organization has been empowered and undertook violent action against immigrants predominantly during the crisis. 8 In his lecture on November 16, 2013 in Athens, organized by ‘Instituto Poulantzas’. 9 www.space-invaders.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Giusi-Nicolini.jpg 10 http://stokokkino.gr/article/4440/Arxigos-Elas-prepei-na-toys-kanoume-to-bioabioto

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The concealed and the revealed Looking to the hidden bounty of the land in crisis times David Sutton

Introduction Treasures are haunted and lie hidden in the island’s countryside; they reveal themselves in supernatural ways through dreams and visions, but their acquisition is ambiguous . . . (Papachristophorou 2013: 21) On a fieldwork trip to the Greek island of Kalymnos in the fall of 2012, I was struck by the confluence of a number of conversations I was having. I had been tracing the family history of an elder informant who was telling me about the ancient treasure on her grandmother’s land which had been stolen by a neighbor who had had a dream about its location. This led the woman’s daughter to tell me about her husband, a builder who had been taking down someone’s old house when suddenly U.S. nineteenth century gold coins rained down on him from the rafters. A bit later I was talking with the woman’s grandson about the Greek crisis, and he told me about various rumors that Greece’s debt might be erased, either by the donation of a rich benefactor who would eliminate it in one fell swoop, or by the discovery of rare metals, worth 100 times their weight in gold, at the bottom of the Aegean. This chapter is an attempt to bring together a variety of such conversations going on in Greece about concealed objects of value. It takes place in times of crisis: as of 2016 Greece is deep into a crisis that seems to have no end, and that, through the significant worsening caused by imposed austerity measures, has led to nearly 30 percent unemployment, a massive rise in suicides, the growth for the first time in Greece of a neo-Nazi party, and other signs of hopelessness and discontent. At such a time, talk of buried treasures or miraculous saviors might seem to echo an older anthropology of millenarianism or cargo cults. However a generation of anthropologists, from Michael Taussig (1980) to Jean and John Comaroff (2001) has taught us to look deeper into such phenomena, as complex commentaries on contemporary capitalism. Here I draw on growing anthropological interest in alternative ‘materialities’ (Santos-Granero 2009), without embracing a notion

The concealed and the revealed 87 of radically different, non-Western ‘ontologies’ (Holbraad 2011). I suggest in this chapter, then, that a careful ethnography that ‘does justice to the more nuanced and situational relations between humans and non-human entities’ (Hill 2013) is key to understanding what might unite seemingly diverse realms of folklore and international politics, and diverse objects of buried treasure, from the head of a Cyclops to petroleum, natural gas, and rare minerals. This allows me to look not simply at indigenous critiques of neoliberal capitalism in Greece, but to the cultural and historical bases that form the ground of such critiques, and the role that situated ethnography can play in addressing global issues. What lies beneath the ground (or the ocean) is, of course, a powerful metaphor that is usually given a psychological spin. Here I focus on some of its more existential aspects, and defer psychological questions for future consideration. Instead, I want to suggest some parallels among the experiences of different types of objects that Charles Stewart (2012) has usefully called ‘findables’ (from the Greek vresimata). Findables suggest interesting notions of agency: not passive objects that are discovered, but rather the fact that they are findable reflects not just issues of ‘if you know how to look,’ but that these findables may often aid or block their own discovery, either through their own, past human, or supernatural agency of various types. I’ll be discussing several types of findables: buried treasure of different kinds, edible findables, and finally the findables represented by international commodities like petroleum and osmium.

Multiple findables Not surprisingly, key findables in much of Greece are the statues and other remains of the ancient Greek past that form one of the key materialities of the modern Greek nation-building project (Yalouri 2001). It’s important to stress that the more famous of these findables, such as the Elgin marbles, are described by many Greeks as having an independent will. Yannis Hamilakis has described the way such ideas pervade everyday and ‘official’ discourses in Greece: . . . the animate properties and human-like qualities of antiquities, including their emotive reactions, are encountered today both in official discourse (by politicians, as well as professional archaeologists) and in the public arena. In the crusade for the Parthenon marbles, for example, it is the marbles themselves that demand their repatriation, and their nostalgia and sadness, as they stay ‘imprisoned’ in the British Museum, are often evoked on various occasions, be it in articles in serious newspapers, the poetry of Kiki Dimoula, or the newspaper articles by Manolis Andronikos.1 (2008: 8)

88 Sutton Or as Yalouri notes in her analysis of the discourse of antiquities in Greece, there is a fusion of nature and culture in which: The Greek earth is blessed because it is fertile, its fertility lying in its richness in antiquities. Antiquities are depicted as natural products of the Greek land . . . the body of the Greek land gives birth to both people and antiquities. (2001: 65–66) Indeed, Hamilakis recounts the fertilizing of statues in some Ottoman Greek villages with manure in the belief that the statues would, in their turn, keep the village fields fertile and protected (Hamilakis 2011: 51). More famous finds are often felt to have been recognized through the human intentionalities of those who buried them originally. A reader of a Greek newspaper, commenting on recent rumors of new finds connected to Alexander the Great at Amphipolis in Serres, makes the following comment: The enormous and unique tomb of Amphipolis is protecting something extremely unique, important, and precious. . . . Ancient Greeks were not as stupid as to raise this pyramid of earth and dirt (away from inhabited areas in order to plant bushes so that one marble lion would be hunting rabbits and partridges. (Thermou 2013) The reader suggests that the Ancient Greeks were not stupid, but had the insight to bury it under this enormous mound, which is a feat of wondrous technical ability, and to leave ‘signs’ of its value. Sign here is suggestive of a potentiality to reveal secrets to those who are in fact knowledgeable, or open to these signs. As Vournelis (n.d.) argues: The word for burial marker in Greek is sima. Sima or simadi, (lit. that which has meaning), is used in vernacular Greek to refer to signs to be deciphered by treasure hunters in their quests; often they may be just drawings painted on a rock or a wall; other times the physical environment may serve as a simadi, when for instance it resembles the shape of an animal, an object like a cross, a human finger etc. In addition, one may be given a simadi in a dream, in which case the word can refer to an event one may experience in the future and of which one may get some warning if successful in understanding (katalavaino) the simadi. Simadia can be seen on treasure maps, in dreams, or while reading coffee grinds. Such signs may have been left by more or less distant ancestors or by previous occupiers such as the Ottomans, while others are given in dreams by religious figures or deceased relatives and have the potential to lead one to the discovery of findables of great value. The existence of such simadia, whether they appear in dreams, in stories, or in maps

The concealed and the revealed 89 does not necessarily equate with their understanding. They may be visible to all but access to the findables they protect is reserved, and the ability to decipher them invokes a cultural knowledge that often grounds claims of identity. Here we see the complex relationship between human intention, interpretive skill, and the existence of material signs in the environment that seem to demand to be read. As Vournelis suggests, this involves complex temporalities of a return to the past and fulfillment in the future, as well as non-rational states such as dreams and visions that allow one access to the non-mundane materialities represented in signs and their referents. Religious icons have a similar intentionality in Greece: they wish to be uncovered from their unfortunate and mistaken burial places. The saints represented on these icons enter people’s dreams in order to tell them of their location, to give them the knowledge to seek them out and through their persistence to uncover them. Stewart (2012) provides a wealth of detail on the search for icons on the island of Naxos over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He focuses on a series of dreams, visions, and possessions that occur among villagers in the course of the 1830s, which lead to the unearthing of bones and religious icons. In most of these dreams and visions, villagers are directed by the Virgin Mary or her mother to search for the icons and on finding them to build a new home for them, that is a church or other place of worship. A key part of the dream vision is when the Virgin explains that the icon was buried in the rocks (of the mountainside) when an Egyptian family fleeing persecution from iconoclasts had come to Naxos, but then prayed to be swallowed up by the earth to avoid further persecution. The bones discovered were taken as the bones of this family. Thus, religious icons, like other findables, inscribe a history of struggles into the landscape of the island. Some of the power of icons is that they are both connected to the saints (or the Virgin) that they represent, and thus the saints have the power to appear in dreams or visions, while at the same time the icons themselves seem to have the power of self-creation as part of the Orthodox tradition of acheiropoietos, or ‘not made by human hands.’2 Moreover, they seem to lie in wait for the islanders, revealing themselves at particular moments of religious or national crisis, a theme that also appears in discussions of natural resources, as I show below.

Revealing the concealed: buried treasure on Kalymnos A type of findable that I will describe in greater detail, because of their centrality in the imagination of Kalymnian islanders where I conducted research, are the buried treasures usually ascribed to pirates, conquering powers such as the medieval Knightly orders, or other past illegal or semi-legal activities. This type of treasure was long ubiquitous on Kalymnos, and a number of people were said to have gotten rich from it.3 Stories of treasure could also

90 Sutton be seen as a type of historical reflection on the different periods of the island’s colonial past. Stories of such treasure are filled with the intrigue that we typically ascribe to pirate treasure, secret maps that must be deciphered, and expeditions to remote locations. Treasure stories often involve interesting assemblages, which include non-human agency. For example, folklorist Niki Billiri (1982) recounts that on the mountainous island of Telendos (part of Kalymnos) many gold coins have been found after avalanches, triggered by the erosion of the rock face, caused the clay jars in which they were hidden to roll into the ocean. There, they were adopted as homes for octopi, which got the coins stuck on their suckers and deposited them on the sea floor where they were found by Kalymnian divers. Fertility here is not only in the land or the sea, as Yalouri suggests, but also in the total environment, an environment that encompasses human and non-human, ‘material’ and ‘social’ in Latourian fashion, and that affords possibilities for findables. In many stories the treasures are often said to be guarded by supernatural agencies, devils of various kinds that have to be placated or that can make you go insane. Furthermore, the treasures themselves can change their nature in response to human action, most notably if you reveal knowledge to neighbors or even family members, or if you tell a lie about what you are doing, a chest full of gold coins can turn themselves into coal, expressing the extreme sensitivity of treasure to human social relations. One woman who found a treasure along with her daughter had it turn to coal when she told a neighbor that she had made a vow to the Virgin Mary to make coals for censing.4 When the neighbor left she found that the gold had indeed turned into coal (Billiri 1982: 298). She decided to leave the ‘treasure’ behind, as she explained to her daughter; ‘maybe someone else will come and find it who has better fate and luck than us, and the treasure will have turned back into gold (flourza, lit. gold florins) for them to take.’ Here we see the way treasure conceals and reveals itself based on human actions and dispositions. Treasure is also tied up in the reading, and sometimes misreading, of signs, both ‘natural’ and ‘social.’ One needs to be sensitive to any unusual signs. As Papachristophorou writes about treasure on the nearby island of Leipsoi: ‘To treasure hunters the relevant codes are numerous, anyway, and concealed in commonplace images and places visible to all but only significant to the “insiders.”’ (2013: 21). This is shown in one story recorded by Kalymnian folklorist Yiorgos Tirikos-Ergas (2016). This story involves the narrator recounting his grandmother’s observation of a horse and rider passing by her field and seemingly disappearing into an area where there was an old cistern so that the horse could slake its thirst. The unknown appearance of this horse and rider on repeated occasions leads to suspicion: are they looking for treasure? This suspicion is seemingly disproved when, in fixing the cistern, a repairman finds jars filled with something glittering hidden beneath it. Looking at it, the family does not take it for ‘treasure’ but for sand instead,

The concealed and the revealed 91 that just happened to glitter, as sand often does. So the jars are thrown away, and the sand is used to polish spoons. Later, the narrator’s grandfather has another look at the bits of remaining sand, and, still wondering about it, takes it to the local gold merchant, who tells him that it is not sand, but gold dust, ‘the froth of gold’ (afro tou malamatou, malama is a local word for gold). But it is too late. Expecting to find gold only in the form of coins, the family has misread the signs – the horse and rider leading them to the place where the treasure was hidden, and the glitter that appeared to them like sand. The narrator’s aunt is eventually driven crazy by the realization that there was treasure there all along, if they had only properly understood what the sign of the horse and rider was trying to communicate, and that they have let a great treasure slip through their fingers. The message seems to be that treasure always involves the danger of not reading the signs correctly, and the risk of madness when one has failed to successfully claim the findable that was there all along. At a somewhat more mundane level, treasure becomes imbricated in many kinds of social competition and raises issues of trust within families and between families and neighbors. Billiri recounts one story of a family who discovered a huge treasure of jewels, but fell to fighting as they were carrying their treasure back home. Once again, the treasure turned to useless rocks when they had to make up a story to explain their whereabouts to a parentin-law (sintexne, that is the parents of one’s child’s spouse). As Billiri puts it: ‘They were like brothers up until the moment that they found it’ (1982: 304). Here it is internal dissent that becomes the issue. As I have argued elsewhere (Sutton 1998) dissent is a wider theme that pervades Greek storytelling, that is the failure to overcome internal tension/competition for the good of the group, in this case, the family. In another example, I was told of a family in which the brother tried to dig up treasure without letting the sister know. As he was digging, he was noticed by a neighbor, who said he would go to the police if the brother didn’t cut him in. The neighbor came back later and dug up the rest of the treasure, while the brother and sister ‘lost their chance’ (tuxero) because of their internal fighting (see also Tirikos-Ergas 2016). As this last story suggests, problems can come from outside the immediate family as well, as neighbors become a source of conflict/distrust. The woman whose husband had gold coins rain down upon him was extremely cautious in talking to me about it. When I offered to look up the value of the coin when I returned to the States, she gave me complicated instructions on what to say when I called her, that is not to mention coins, but to say that the trip that I was going to take was going to cost however much I found the coin to be worth. All this was under the assumption that both neighbors and the state might grow suspicious of any sudden windfall of wealth. Thus, treasure hunting on Kalymnos enters into the circuits of mundane sociality and the trust and distrust of neighbors that often makes up everyday social life. As one woman recounted to me, her neighbor’s son-in-law had gotten the idea that there was a treasure (maali5) in her field, and asked her if he

92 Sutton could look for it with his gadget (mihanima, that is metal detector). She was ambivalent about it, knowing the illegality of treasure hunting (indeed, one Kalymnian had gone to jail recently for trying to sell the treasure he had found), but eventually she agreed. The man had gone with her neighbor (his father-in-law), but had not asked the woman’s husband to go with them. They didn’t find anything and soon after he left for Australia. Over a year later the man returned, and one day he passed by the woman’s house saying ‘I’m going back’ (paw piso). Soon she found that he was once again searching for treasure in her field, without, to her mind, having reaffirmed her assent. When she complained to her neighbor about this, instead of apologizing, she was told that ‘when he said ‘I’m going back,’ you should have understood.’ This led the outraged woman to break off relations with her neighbors. She realized that they weren’t the kind of people to have a friendship with given their reactions and the fact that even successful treasure discovery would lead them into an illegal network to sell their finds. Here treasure moves from the remote locations of legend to the mundane spaces of social relations, where even attempts to mediate among competing claims (rather than outright theft) get caught up in the difficulties of everyday sociability. Finally, treasure takes up themes of relations with the outside, in this case, foreigners, and in particular foreign archaeologists. They are often depicted as sources of greater knowledge than Kalymnians of the real value of objects found underground. For example, Katerina Kardoulia recounted to me the story of her grandparents’ field in which they were digging to plant a vineyard and they discovered a burial site with 11 graves filled with earrings, necklaces, and other objects. As Katerina put it, ‘they were illiterate; they did not know of such opportunities (ευκαιρίες) that if you find (things), like earrings, they have value.’ They ended up selling them at an antique store when they were on a pilgrimage to the holy lands, but only got pennies for them. Several years later archaeologists came from England and asked them if they had dug there. They told the archaeologists what they had found, and Katerina recounts the following dialogue: Grandma: We dug to make a vineyard and this is what we found. English men: Where did you find these things? Grandma: So grandpa went to the Holy Lands to go become a hadji/pilgrim (χαντζής) and gave those things away and got presents for the kids. English men: Oh, grandma, if you only knew how valuable those were. What else did you find? Grandma: A big head with one eye. English men: Where is this thing now, grandma? Grandma: We rolled it over the rock and it broke up (το κάναμε έτσι πάνω στην πέτρα και έσπασε). English men: Oh, grandma, if you only knew, if we had this we would take it to the museum.

The concealed and the revealed 93 Here foreigners are represented as having greater knowledge, based on book learning, of the true value of objects. Another image of the foreigner is as an appropriator of ancient objects (archaiokapilos) or even as a treacherous usurper (‘epivoulos nosfistis.’ Tirikos-Ergas 2016). In one story a woman complains that the foreign archaeologist even asked her for a glass of water while he was in the midst of stealing treasure from a field barely a meter away from her property (ibid.). As Tirikos-Ergas (2016: 7) puts it: His movements are those of a lord and in relation(s) to the natives he presents himself as a superior who addresses inferior people. He takes what he wants, by right of his deep knowledge and monetary capacity (monetary strength). He is, moreover, a free man, among enslaved men. Thus, the foreigner exploits his greater knowledge to exploit, usurp, and appropriate local wealth, pulling it directly out of the ground and whisking it away never to be seen again.6

Oil and hydrocarbons: revealing the grounds of international politics At the same time that I was tracking these discourses on buried treasure on Kalymnos, I became increasingly aware of discourses about the existence of hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas) and precious minerals (Osmium) in the waters surrounding Greece and Cyprus. So-called experts have estimated vast potential oil and gas deposits in the Aegean, already suggesting up to 22 billion barrels of oil in the Ionian off of Western Greece, and potentially much more in natural gas. One Tulane University expert estimated the potential in already discovered reserves to net the Greek government over 300 billion Euros (Engdahl 2013). In the midst of the ongoing economic crisis, this has led to talk of wiping out the Greek debt in one fell swoop. One analyst, however, describes a ‘curious kind of a dance with the IMF and EU governments, a kind of “energy Sirtaki” over who will control and ultimately benefit from the huge resource discoveries there’ (Engdahl 2013). For example, Greece is undergoing tremendous pressure from Germany and the EU to sell off its public assets including state oil companies, which would net a much smaller relief on Greece’s debt (Engdahl 2013). Another issue is the lack of clarity over ownership of mineral rights in waters in the Aegean and around Cyprus, which have long been a source of conflict with neighboring Turkey. Different countries in the region promote claims to Energy Exploration Zones (EEZs), often in conflict with the claims of neighboring countries. Greece and Cyprus have formed an alliance with Israel to promote their claims to these waters,7 but Turkey has said it would consider Greece’s drilling in the Aegean an act of war. In the meantime, Greece is being approached both by the U.S. and Russia with competing deals for exploiting this oil, also implicating the hostile relations between Russia and Turkey. Relations between Turkey and Israel, aggravated by the Gaza

94 Sutton Flotilla, have deteriorated over such potential plans as well. While Engdahl refers to an Energy Sirtaki, another analyst reaches for the metaphor of ‘Energy Chess’ (Katman 2014) to describe the maneuver, which may implicate Syria as well. While much of the work remains at the exploratory stage, the American Noble Energy company has recently been drilling up to 1650 meters around Cyprus, accompanied by Israeli naval ships and drones, while the Turkish government has its own ongoing negotiations for exploration with Shell Oil (Katman 2014). Indeed, Turkey’s response in one case was to send its own warship to accompany a Norwegian firm conducting research in the area (Eissler and Arasil 2014: 78). The natural gas around Cyprus looks to be ‘among the world’s largest discoveries of the last ten years’ (Eissler and Arasil 2014: 76). Lebanon is also a player in this region, and is laying its own claims to EEZs in the region. The number of international players, nominally associated with different countries, negotiating to drill around Cyprus in 2012 numbered 15, including consortiums from Russia, Italy, France, Canada, Malaysia, the U.S. and Israel (Eissler and Arasil 2014: 79). Discourses surrounding hydrocarbon explorations and the conflicts that they engender are suggestive for some of their parallels with notions of treasure described above. For example, on a radio broadcast from July 2, 2014, on the Greek-Australian radio channel SBS, the newscaster noted that the hidden wealth of Greece under the Ionian sea and Libyan sea (Livikou pelagou)8 south of Crete seems to have come time to come to light and to be utilized appropriately, and indeed at a time when Greece needs more than ever this invigorating injection ‘(aksiopithi katalila; tonotiki enisi). She refers to a public presentation of information about research into undersea hydrocarbons in Greece which took place in London. She noted that the Energy Minister Yiannis Maniatis expressed the desire of Greeks to become a meaningful producer of petroleum and natural gas, and relayed his claim that all the different political parties in Greece support the development of this sector of the economy, and all want to participate, indeed, that ‘disagreement on this topic is thought to be nearly anti-patriotic.’ Here we see the notion of findables, objects that are hidden or shrouded in darkness which ‘come to light,’ and which seem to have the agency to reveal themselves at a particular time – at a time of crisis – for the good of the nation. The commentator on the broadcast, however, raised the issue that such deposits in various Greek waters have been known about – that they have ‘been hidden’ – for many decades, is this, indeed, the moment that they will finally be utilized? Here the medial passive verb tense suggests the possibility that the hiding is not simply a matter internal to these objects, but is tied up with human agency as well. The use of the phrase ‘in the fullness of time’ (to pliroma tou xronou) suggests the outcome of a series of events or signs which makes sense of – fulfills – these previous events or signs. These signs, as noted above, must be read and properly interpreted because they are potentially opaque. Once again, this discourse is suggestive of hidden

The concealed and the revealed 95 agencies, though in this case probably of the human variety. This is indicated in the following discussion, which goes on to note that both Greek and foreign (American, French) researchers have ever since the 1970s pointed out (episimanan) the significance of these particular regions, and suggested to a succession of Greek governments the need to proceed to necessary research for their utilization. But for reasons that we have yet to learn, all the subsequent Greek governments turned a deaf ear . . . for decades, during which time other neighbouring countries . . . were developing their own resources in these areas, enjoying significant economic benefits. The announcer points out that this failure comes during a time when Greece has suffered, and that some Greeks have, in fact, lost their lives because of the deep economic crisis, and that the Minister of Energy referred to this as a ‘betrayal of future generations.’ Thus, for unknown or unstated reasons, previous leaders have failed to make good on the signs that have literally been marked out for them (the verb ‘to point out,’ episimanw, contains the word for ‘sign’ within it). The announcer recounts being present at a similar discussion four years prior, when one of the leading figures responsible for researching hydrocarbons noted his complete certainty of the existence of such deposits in the waters south of Crete, and that the amount could be exploited by Greece in amounts above 250 billion Euros, more than the outstanding Greek debt at the time, a debt for which, as she points out, has meant that ‘Greece has been bound hand-and-foot to its lenders since that time.’ The commentator, however, notes that this is, in fact, a very good time for Greece to be pursuing these deposits, suggesting that perhaps if they had come to light at earlier times they would have been squandered rather than being used for the essential needs of the country. The discussion ends by contextualizing the current find within the global situation of instability in Ukraine and Iraq, making these finds in Greece all the more significant, and that the presence at the recent discussion of all of the world’s leading oil companies meant that perhaps ‘we have reached the end of the road in opening up this new chapter for Greece.’ This image of an end and a beginning is also suggestive of the fullness of time, or the notion that the wealth of Greece itself may rescue the Greek people at a critical moment in the history of the nation. But, of course, with perhaps unintentional irony, this hydrocarbon treasure too may turn to useless coal if it turns out that the hydrocarbons are inaccessible to profitable drilling technologies. This discourse has interesting historical echoes, as Papastefanaki (2013) has noted in her tracing of the bauxite industry in Greece during the course of the twentieth century. As one entrepreneur with hopes of using bauxite to industrialize the country, expressed it in the 1930s, Greece has been endowed by nature with this precious material: it rests with its government and with its credit organisations to ensure that this

96 Sutton treasure remains Greek, and does not fall into foreign hands, as there is a threat that this will happen. (2013: 159) Indeed, during this period the French company AFC ‘discussed the prospect of investing in Greek bauxite deposits and attempted to arrive at a secret agreement with the Greek Chemical Products and Fertilisers Joint Stock Company group and the Bank of Athens’ (165). Papastefanaki also notes the internal intrigues, as various Greek businessmen ‘engaged in their own activities, often one against the other’ (167). In the postwar period, the U.S. became involved as part of Cold War politics, labeling bauxite among other ‘strategic materials . . . [of] great importance for the joint defence of the North Atlantic treaty countries.’ Since they only existed in small quantities in countries of the so-called ‘free world,’ they ‘were sought after in all the countries of the West to form stockpiles in case of emergency’ (171).

Local echoes While Kalymnians told me about these oil reserves and the struggles with ‘neighbors’ and great power interests, they also noted that even closer to Kalymnos were rumored deposits of the element Osmium, which as a metal alloy is increasingly used for high tech applications, and is considered one of the rarest and most expensive substances. An article in the local newspaper suggested that the existence of these deposits may explain the interest of Turkey in the uninhabited island of Imia several miles from Kalymnos. This suggestion was elaborated in an Internet blog that I saw posted by a Kalymnian man in June of 2014. The blog post, entitled ‘The Secret Real Truth,’ claimed that each Greek was ‘worth’ (antistihoun) 96 billion dollars based on estimates of the mineral wealth of Greece. The post begins with the claim that the interest of Albanian, Macedonian (Skopian), and Turkish nationalists in various border regions with Greece is that hiding behind them are American interests that want to plunder Greece’s national wealth. A caption decries that the mineral wealth of Greece belongs to Greeks, not to the Troika (those behind the austerity measures). The post goes on to lay out the locations of descriptions of various minerals, including Uranium, Osmium, Bauxite, and a half dozen others, along with oil. The post concludes: Let us not forget that first we entered (were forced into) the IMF, that is the deficit agreement, and then they tell us about the vast mineral wealth of Greece. The implication being that Greece has been put in a position to sell off its mineral rights very cheaply. What struck me about all of these claims are the obvious parallels with traditional treasure etiologies: the need for secrecy and potential for instant wealth which would attract the attention of neighbors. In both there are various rumors that then lead to clues which

The concealed and the revealed 97 indicate greater findables, as well as the claims laid to land or sea, which indicate knowledge of their potential value on the part of local actors (e.g. neighboring countries) or their more distant supporters (the U.S. and other great powers which may support local claims with plans for future enrichment).9 The intricacies of such claims on the world stage are only matched by the intricacies of local stories about knowledge and betrayal, as shown, for example in that of Katerina Kardoulia’s grandmother’s loss of the treasure in her field to her neighbors. Beyond these nefarious human agencies lies implicitly the potential transformative potential of findables themselves, oil and natural gas being notoriously volatile; they could lead to massive enrichment but also to the pollution and destruction of Greece and Kalymnos’s most enduring asset: the ocean. Indeed, the dangers from within and dangers from outside seem an apt metaphor for capturing the notion of the ‘resource curse’ that plagues countries in which oil and other natural resources are ‘discovered.’ The likelihood of an increase in warfare, inequality, and environmental catastrophe as a result of these discoveries has been documented for many countries throughout the world (see Behrends et al. 2011).

Discussion and conclusion: metaphors for fertility? In comparing ideas about the concealment and revelation of ‘treasures’ and other findables with that of hydrocarbons and precious minerals, I have perhaps been engaging in the familiar anthropological practice of ear-tweaking: suggesting the similarities between the hyperrationalist discourses of international relations and power politics with the presumed custom-bound irrationalities of folklore and its local instantiations. What more is one to make of these metaphorical similarities than the debunking of tired contrasts between the traditional and the modern? In part I am drawing on my earlier work that used the notion of ‘analogical thinking’ to suggest ways that the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are drawn into a similar interpretive frame through the deployment of key interpretive themes: the same concept of ‘betrayal from within’ or ‘betrayal from outside’ can be applied to the understanding of the experience of Kalymnians with their neighbors as it can be extended to national and international relations (Sutton 1998: ch. 6). In the same way, ideas about ‘History’ as projected on the national stage of ‘Greece’ are inflected with local knowledge of ‘histories,’ the stories and conflicts that make up everyday life on Kalymnos. This chapter extends that idea by showing how the materialities of everyday ‘histories,’ the maali, or Kalymnian treasures, are also part of the same complex of national findables that make up ‘History.’ Indeed, sometimes they are exactly the same: the statues and other remains of the past that may begin as local histories (stories of Kalymnians who seek them, reveal them, and struggle over them), but are quickly incorporated into History as these objects become part of the past of national history, a process beautifully described by Stewart (2012). The seemingly ‘occult’ materialities (Santos-Granero

98 Sutton 2009) that these findables entail are validated by a national historiography that places them within a recognizable ‘rational’ story of linear temporalities, while not erasing their multitemporal, non-linear aspects (see Hamilakis 2008, Stewart 2012). One typical way that anthropologists have analyzed these types of materials is as a metaphorical statement, often a critique of capitalism, particularly in its ‘millennial’ form (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Just as Taussig (1980) argued for Bolivian tin miners, animated money and other occult social practices can be potent meditations on the depredations of capitalism and the ways that it seemingly creates value where none existed before, but always in the context of considerable moral ambiguity. Comaroff and Comaroff have coined the term ‘occult economies’ for the millennial version of such practices; at a time when finance capitalism has seemingly stripped away every vestige of connection between production of goods and production of value, occult practices seem to thrive both in the peripheries and the metropoles of the world system. As they define the term, occult economies display: a material aspect founded on the effort to conjure wealth – or to account for its accumulation – by appeal to techniques that defy explanation in the conventional terms of practical reason; and an ethical aspect grounded in the moral discourses and (re)actions sparked by the (real or imagined) production of value through such ‘magical’ means. (2001: 310) The moral aspect is clear in treasure tales: failure to follow the proper procedures to appease various natural and supernatural agencies leads to the treasure transforming itself into worthless material, and to lead to the destruction of social relations among family and neighbors and the risk of personal alienation, that is becoming insane. At a time when much of Greece has gone from relative prosperity to desperation (while a few still prosper) through what seems to many like an accounting trick,10 the notion of ‘occult economies’ seems an apt descriptor for many ways that economies prosper or tank, and treasures conceal and reveal themselves. To quote the Comaroffs again: ‘As the connections between means and ends become more opaque, more distended, more mysterious, the occult becomes an ever more appropriate semantically saturated metaphor for our times’ (2001: 317). These findables, then, can be taken as multivocal. In some ways, they are explanations for the wealth of powerful insiders (Vouvalina on Kalymnos – see footnote 3) or outsiders (archaeologists, Americans, etc.), while suggesting, along with Taussig (1980), the anti-social – or at least ambiguous – nature of wealth acquisition,11 in which ‘legitimate’ treasure acquisition is always a difficult, negotiated achievement, and claims to benefit the wider community compete, or combine, with anti-social practices, whether one is dealing with icons, ancient statues, or the natural resources that I have been discussing.

The concealed and the revealed 99 But I have been suggesting here a second possible reading, that captures the notion that findables are in some sense produced by the land and sea, the total sociomaterial environment of Greece, as illustrated in the example of the treasures distributed by octopi on the sea floor described above. As Stewart writes: The stories of haunted treasures on Naxos express the emotional bond with place. They open a window onto a spiritualized landscape that is literally the ground of village existence. . . . Belonging to the village involves one in this matrix of animate connections between land and community. (122–123) Indeed, in looking at stories of treasure on Kalymnos, one finds a constant reference to localized knowledge, the place names that identify a findable’s location are place names that do not appear on maps, but that are associated with an older generation in which places are named, as in the Australian dreamtime, for the supernatural agency of certain past actors, and that thus connects landscape to bonds of local identity. The search for treasure is not simply about personal anti-social enrichment, but is also about preserving the kind of deep local knowledge that makes place habitable.12 This attitude toward the environment can be seen if we briefly consider one other type of ‘findable,’ that of the edible variety. The landscape and seascape of Greece has always been a place for foraging, whether for wild greens, snails, sea urchins and other sea creatures, or exotic wild mushrooms. These products of nature or products of the actual land/seascape of Greece are similar to other findables in that one must develop the skill to follow signs, take risks of certain kinds, and learn to protect one’s knowledge or only share in trusted channels. As Knight (2014) notes about the wild mushroom hunters of Trikala in central Greece: one mushroom aficionado apparently scared people away from his favorite mushroom spots by hiding in bushes and hooking the handle of his cane around the legs of what he perceived as trespassers. The true cause of this mysterious event was only disclosed decades after taking place. On other occasions people have been reluctant to disclose information on mildly poisonous or extremely bitter species in the hope that their fellow villagers will give up the mushroom hunt. What is of particular note here is not just that the knowledge of edible findables follows some of the patterns of other buried treasures, but that this is part of a larger cosmology in which the land and sea of Greece itself is seen as the source of bounty if one has the deep local knowledge of particular places, histories, and the conditions for the production of certain edibles. This is part of a Greek view of the taste of place which is a sort of indigenous notion of terroir, that is, the idea that the specific conditions of the sun, the soil, and the climate in various locales produce differences in foods that are significant and valued if one has the proper knowledge and skill to detect them.

100 Sutton Similar ideas can also be found in the realm of natural resource exploration, as anthropologists have argued for a number of different geographical contexts. This can have a nationalist spin, as Ferry and Limbert (2008: 11) note: It is not surprising that resources come to be associated with ‘support of a country’ at the end of the eighteenth century, for resources, especially ‘natural resources,’ are intimately tied to the history of the nation-state as a modern political form. This is certainly why we often see pictures of waterfalls, forests, mines, and indeed ‘native peoples’ on national currencies. These natural resources ground the political body of the nation by demonstrating its emergence or growth from that territory and its ‘natural’ endowments. Oil companies, as well, draw on local discourses to pose oil exploration as tied to the mystic powers of the landscape to produce wealth, with ‘depths’ serving as a metaphor uniting the geographical, the historical, and the spiritual (Rogers 2014). As Weskalnys (2015: 612) notes in her analysis of the concept of ‘first oil’ (that is when oil is posited but not yet discovered): ‘It acts on forms of speculative knowledge – knowledge that is necessarily incomplete, based on uncertain and partially obscured evidence, and that occasionally makes “less than rational connections between means and ends” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 310).’ This is once again to point out that occult materialities are not the preserve of local systems of meaning and ‘exotic’ others. They can coexist with seemingly hard-headed ‘rational’ material claims and desires, just as ‘myth’ coexists and overlaps with ‘history’ (Hill 1988; cf. Stewart and Strathern 2002). This point should lead us to be suspicious of claims of ‘new ontologists’ who champion separate ontologies in a fashion that seems to take us back to the time of separate and incommunicable ‘cultures’ (see Graeber 2015). In a Greece faced with the largest financial and existential crisis of the past 40 years, treasure in the form of things buried in the ground or resources in the ocean are not simply a potential solution to contemporary problems. They are part of a worldview that reaffirms the link of people to place at a time when neoliberal capitalism threatens to put the land, resources, and antiquities of Greece up for sale (and a fire sale at that). In these times it is not surprising, perhaps, that we are witnessing people ‘returning to the land’ in the form of gardening and foraging, treasure seeking and hoping for ‘treasure’ on a national scale, a fraught pursuit which, nevertheless reconnects people to their identity at multiple levels. As Stewart suggests, treasure is one of the key ways that people reconnect with place. To give him the last word: The treasure lost by the grandmother will, in the fullness of time, be recovered by one of her descendants, and if they are in Athens, they will have to go to the village. The story as it circulates in the family is, thus, a perennial invitation to return home. Home is where the treasure is. (2012: 123)

The concealed and the revealed 101

Notes 1 Greece’s most famous archaeologist, known for his excavations of the Macedonian kings. 2 Stewart (2012: 68). On the power of objects ‘not made by human hands,’ see also Van de Port (2011). 3 Many Kalymnians speak of the exploits of Katerina Vouvalina, the widow of the most prominent sponge merchant on Kalymnos, who was said to have significantly increased her wealth through treasure seeking. Vouvalina was also considered the ‘ruler’ of the island throughout the middle years of the twentieth century because of her economic power (see Sutton 1998). 4 A practice of using the branches of trees and vines to make incense for religious purposes. 5 Maali or mali (accent on the a) probably comes from the Turkish ‘malik’ meaning possession or wealth (see Skandalidis 2014). 6 This echoes similar stories from the eighteenth–nineteenth century. Ottoman lands involving clashes between Western antiquarians and local people over the appropriation of antiquities. See Hamilakis’ (2011) discussion. 7 According to Engdahl (2013) ‘Israel is planning to build an underwater gas pipeline from the Israeli Levantine fields across Cyprus waters onto the Greek mainland where it would be sold on the EU market.’ 8 The waters south of Crete are referred to as the Libyan Sea, despite their distance from North Africa. 9 See also the following blog post, which similarly makes the claim that ‘Greece is not poor’ if it exploits its untapped resources (http://theeconomiccollapseblog. com/archives/greece-is-not-poor-it-actually-has-massive-uptapped-reserves-ofgold-oil-and-natural-gas). As the author writes: ‘Reportedly, Greece is sitting on hundreds of millions of barrels of oil and gigantic natural gas deposits that are worth trillions of dollars. It is truly sad that Greece should be one of the wealthiest nations in all of Europe but instead the country is going through the worst economic depression that it has experienced in modern history.’ Following the comments thread one finds a number of people claiming a connection between the discovery of these resources and the IMF and EU claims to control Greece in light of its debt. 10 Debt is, of course, political, as Graeber (2011a) has shown extensively. As is the notion that Greece owes money to Germany given that many Greeks point to the unpaid World War II debt of Germany to Greece (see Christodoulakis 2014). 11 Another interesting comparison might be with Rasnake’s (1988) account of the Bolivian culture hero Tyusninchis, who hides minerals, which used to be scattered in plain site, in the mountains, away from both rapacious foreigners and the local people themselves. See also Stewart and Strathern’s (2002) account of the Duna of Papua New Guinea, whose spirits also act as protectors of the landscape against rapacious mining companies. 12 Hamilakis’ (2013: 113) notion of ‘place’ as a sense, or a ‘sense of place’ also seems relevant. As he puts it, sense of place is ‘the specific experiential mode associated with the emplacement of human action, its grounding in specific locales, the familiarity which such a grounding brings, the almost instinctive and automatic sense of sensorial recognition of paths and routes and features, the gathering and the harboring of memories by places. . . .’ The extent to which this sense is more specifically elaborated in Greece than, for example, the U.S. or Western Europe, is an open question for future consideration.

7

Crisis within a crisis? Foreigners in Athens and traces of transnational relations and separations Sarah Green

1960s Athens: cosmopolitan foreigners Fifty years ago, in 1965, Athens was a vibrant city, a cosmopolitan city, a city full of tensions, rumblings of revolution, or at least a sense that people were beginning to have enough of the right-wing rulers who had been helped into government by a consortium of international powers in the decade before – by the USA mostly, people believed. The US government was following the Truman Doctrine, trying to ensure strong, conservative government to prevent the communists getting in.1 It was not only the Americans, of course; others had an interest in Greece, whether that was based on Cold War ideologies, romantic ideals borne of reading classical history, or realpolitik. It was an edgy space in 1965, one that had been built, in its modern guise, on a tangle of partly contradictory, and thoroughly cosmopolitan, aims and ambitions. Bastéa (2000) has charted how the core architecture of Athens built during the nineteenth century reflects a mixture of transnational and nationalist ideals about what Greece and the Greeks should be. It would be interesting to ask, today, in the twenty-first century in the midst of crisis, whether those ideals, those dreams2 based on imagined perceptions of a classical Athens upon which Modern Athens would be built, were ever realised in any meaningful sense. Yalouri (2001), who closely studied the variety of uses to which the Acropolis has been put, both symbolically and otherwise, also noted the strongly transnational influence on Athens, from the moment of Greek independence right up to the present day. Athens is a transnational city par excellence – which is to say that transnational political and economic interests have had exceptional levels of involvement in the way the city, and the Greek state which has located the headquarters of its government there, has developed over the decades.3 That international involvement, or interference some might say, continues today of course, even though the way in which the involvement has manifested itself is rather different now. Many have suggested the difference is generated by a neoliberal form of capitalism, one that has turned everything

Crisis within a crisis? 103 into a (consumer) choice.4 Well, perhaps not quite everything: the exception is choice itself.5 Not having any choice over the right to (consumer) choice seems a strange kind of compulsory freedom in a time of crisis – or at any time when people have no money, come to that.

Newcomers, conflict and the concept of crisis That is jumping ahead in this story about the entanglement between Athens and its transnational connections and separations. I want to pay particular attention to how such connections and separations relate to the new people coming into the city just now, in the midst of the major economic trouble that has been affecting Athens since 2009. The world’s media have regularly reported scenes of conflict and the flaring up of apparent utter chaos between the new arrivals to the city and the police, not to mention the conflicts between the new arrivals and the self-styled anti-migrant vigilantes who have joined Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή). It is easy to believe that many of these vigilantes joined the organization at least partly in order to have the moral right to beat the new foreigners to a pulp. This would be analogous, and incorporating analogous ambivalent and intricate social motivations, to the phenomenon of some young British men becoming football fans in the 1980s partly in order to beat their opponent’s fans to a pulp after each match (Armstrong 1998). The combination of these images of conflict and chaos coming out of Athens – anti-austerity uprisings and demonstrations on the one hand, and battles with new arrivals from troubled places on the other – has contributed a considerable amount towards generating the sense that a major crisis is underway in Athens. I will return to this point later. Suffice it to note here that Roitman (2013) suggests that ‘crisis’ is a concept that has to be taken for granted in order for people to be ‘in’ it (that is, in crisis), and also so that people can analyse what caused ‘it’ (that is, the crisis). This means, Roitman suggests, that the concept itself (crisis) becomes an unanalysed blind spot, it forms the backdrop within which everything occurs, without actually thinking through the assumptions that are embedded in the concept itself – assumptions that might actually contribute towards creating what it is describing. Roitman does not deny the seriousness of the experiences that people who describe themselves as being ‘in crisis’ find themselves (in her case, she was studying the financial crisis in the USA). Rather, she is simply asking the question: what difference does it make to call these experiences and events a crisis? Roitman’s focus is on those who have the power to create the labels, and the effects of those labels. In thinking about Athens ‘in crisis’ my focus is rather different: it is on the people who are living with this label, and who accept it as a reasonable account of what they are experiencing. What does it mean to them? And the reason that this is important is the way that the concept both links Athens with, and disconnects it from, other places. I will return to this.

104 Green

Foreigners before the migrants In any case, the streets of Athens did not look anything like ‘crisis’ in 1965, and certainly not in terms of newcomers to the city. Fifty years ago, Athens was home to a small but diverse population of those kinds of foreigners who do not think of themselves as migrants, but some other category of nonGreeks living in Greece, either permanently, temporarily, or for only part of the year.6 Not that anyone could really have thought of themselves as an immigrant to Greece in those days: it was not until the 1990s that the Greek state developed clear or workable immigration policies or migration legislation concerning ‘foreigners’ (that is people who were not in some way defined as being Greek).7 Consequently, as the legal status of ‘immigrant’ did not really exist in Greek law in the 1960s, people in Athens were either Greek or they were foreign. There was no added legal, social or moral nuance to that distinction, that sharpness conveyed by the term ‘migrant’ – or even worse, ‘illegal migrant’.8 That is important to remember: in contemporary territorial politics, migration is a legally defined status first and foremost; migration may become a social issue and one that politicians argue about, but neither can happen before migration actually exists as a legal status.9 It is also worth mentioning here that not liking foreigners is not the same as not liking migrants. The implication of the word ‘migrant’, at least in Greece at the moment, involves a claim to some kind of belonging to the place – the land of Greece – in a way that is not implied by the word ‘foreigner’ (ξένος). While a migrant is clearly different from someone born in the place, they are nevertheless intending to stay, and there is an implied break with the place from which they came. In contrast, and within this kind of conception, a foreigner can only ever be a visitor, and however many years s/he stays in the place, her/his ‘belonging’ is to somewhere else. The Greek word for hotel, ξενοδοχείο, literally means a ‘container for foreigners’, a place where foreigners are kept – which is to say, a container that is separate from where people who are not foreigners are located. Ultimately and axiomatically, foreigners belong elsewhere, so they have no claim over the Greeks’ place. Migrants, on the other hand, are foreigners who either have a legal right to belong here (having moved from somewhere else), or who have every intention of staying here even if they do not have that legal right, and that changes things in important ways. As both Gourgouris (1996) and Herzfeld (1986) have noted, in the case of Greek nationalist rhetoric, the moral connection between the nation and the exclusive right to a geographical, physical location, a place called Greece, is intense. Within this kind of nationalist logic, it is possible to see no contradiction at all in being friendly towards foreigners, and even priding yourself on your hospitality towards foreigners (φιλοξενία – foreigner friendship), while also being hostile towards migrants.10 The difference is a perceived difference in relationship with, and claims to, the land.

Crisis within a crisis? 105 In any case, in the 1960s, many of the non-Greek Athenian residents (the foreigners) were people who somehow felt a little uncomfortable in their own country, whether for social, political, economic or legal reasons: antiApartheid white South Africans; gay men; tax exiles; a variety of writers, poets, artists, and out-of-work actors who wanted to live cheaply. The lack of any coherent government policy about what to do about foreigners made it relatively easy to live there. Of course, it was not an easy city, but it was easy enough to exist there as a foreigner without too many questions being asked. Athenians were used to these kinds of foreigners, transients who came and went, and who lived their lives largely separately from the Greek people of the city, though usually on friendly terms: a nod of the head, a polite hello in the coffee shop. There was not a great deal of interest on either side. Even during the military regime of 1967–1974, there was not much interest in these transient foreigners on the part of the regime. That included the poorer foreigners (of which there were very few in those days) as well as the more wealthy and educated political refugees and ex-patriots (who rarely classify themselves as migrants anyway, even when the legislation exists). The foreigners were really a matter of indifference to the Greek state in all senses of the word, as they did not really formally exist in bureaucratic terms.11 So long as they were not committing crimes, and in particular, so long as they were not selling drugs or getting up to any other kind of behaviour defined as troublesome by the Greek police, the existence of foreigners in Athens remained formally unrecognised. They lived without the paperwork because it was not possible for them to actually have any paperwork. That placed them in something of a legal grey zone, or a black hole even. This meant that if they did attract the attention of the authorities, they had almost no rights whatsoever, and accounts of brutality, especially during the period of the military junta, are common; but so long as foreigners did not get in the way of anybody powerful, life went on.12

1990s and the invention of migrants It is difficult to imagine, in these days of the hyper-professionalisation and securitisation of migration, that such a 1960s world in which the laws were so unclear about these matters.13 This all changed quite radically in Greece after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was followed by the downfall of the two other non-aligned socialist governments in Europe, the former Yugoslavia and Albania, both of which shared borders with Greece. At that point, the Greek government developed a series of new migration laws and policies, much of which were written hastily and hardly discussed in parliament at all.14 Politicians and journalists often suggested during that period that, for the first time in the country’s history, Greece was having to deal with immigration rather than emigration. The majority of arrivals during the 1990s were from Albania, but there were many others from the former Yugoslavia and other former Soviet areas as well.15

106 Green It is important to remember that political change in the neighbouring states was not all that was going on in terms of the geopolitics of migration in Greece during the 1990s. At exactly the same time (and not coincidentally), Greece was preparing to become a member of the EU’s Schengen zone, which required Greece to be subject to Schengen regulations concerning border controls. The first major law about immigration in contemporary Greece, the Aliens, Immigrants and Refugees Law (Law 1975/1991), was introduced in order to comply with Schengen requirements.16 The way in which successive Greek governments have chosen to interpret these requirements, as many commentators from that time have noted, has been to regard migration as a security threat, and the new Greek laws and policies on immigration reflected that.17 Samatas suggests that in fact, the Schengen regulations embed the perception of migration as a potentially criminal offence against which Schengen countries needed to protect themselves; and he also suggests that the regulations were seriously deficient in protecting human and civil rights in the building of what many have since called ‘Fortress Europe’: a hardening of borders outside the Schengen area, while softening the borders within the area, in return for a fairly substantial rise in levels of surveillance over the people within the Schengen area. Samatas concludes that ‘securitisation prevails over human rights and civil liberties in Schengenland’ (Samatas 2003: 153). Whatever one may think about that conclusion, it is certainly the case that the sense of threat about the new arrivals rapidly spread throughout Greece during the 1990s, expressed particularly strongly in populist sentiments about the new arrivals, as Bakalaki (2003) has noted. In my own work on the Greek–Albanian border area in northwestern Greece, the re-opening of the border in the early 1990s also reopened mixed feelings about the relations and separations between the two sides since the end of the Greek civil war in 1949 (Green 2005: 218–234). Unlike the responses to the migrants in the urban centres, which were fairly starkly split between fear of, and hostility towards, the new arrivals from Albania (the majority); and strong defence of the rights of the immigrants (the minority, but vocal) – in the border area, there was considerably more ambiguity and ambivalence in feelings about the Albanians and the Northern Epirots (Albanian citizens who were part of the Greek minority in Albania). What went almost unnoticed in this quite intense and diverse debate was that suddenly, everybody in Greece was talking about immigrants, whereas before they had spoken of foreigners. The category ‘immigrant’ had been legally created in the historical moment during which major political changes around Greece’s borders were occurring as a result of the end of the Cold War, leading to many new arrivals in Greece from former socialist states. And it occurred during a period when EU requirements that implemented a fairly radical change in the definition and perception of migration into the Schengen area were being implemented. The rather informal conditions of the 1960s, in which people came and went more or less without anyone

Crisis within a crisis? 107 in government creating a record of it, had become unthinkable. Moreover, as Ruben Andersson argues in Illegality, inc. (an ethnographic study of migration through the Spanish north African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla), the technical and infrastructural business of controlling borders once the legislation and policies were put in place became big business. The laws and policies, combined with the border control infrastructure, basically created a particular figure of the migrant, both as a migrant, and as being always suspect, both in terms of security and legality (Andersson 2014).

The 1920s arrival of the Asia Minor refugees: officially a return There was much talk, in that heady post-socialist moment in the 1990s, of how Greece had never experienced in-migration like this to the country before, that this was a novel experience. For reasons I have just explained, and in strictly legal terms, that was true. However, this was not the first time that Greece had experienced the arrival of a large number of strangers all at once, and it was not the first time that Athens and its surrounding areas was strongly affected by such arrivals. As Renée Hirschon richly reported in her ethnography of Pireaus (the main port that serves Athens), Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe (1989), the port area was one amongst many areas in and around Athens that had experienced a huge influx of refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, another period in Greek history that has been ascribed with the label ‘crisis’. That was the period when the Greek word for ‘refugees’ (πρόσφυγες) began to carry particular weight and significance in the country. As Hirschon records on the first page of her ethnography, land was put aside for these refugees in the outskirts of Athens and in Piraeus. Even though many of these people had never been to Greece before, and even though many could not speak modern Greek, they were officially defined as ‘coming home’: Greek Orthodox peoples sent to Greece when the Ottoman empire, their former home, ceased to exist as a place.18 As Hirschon records, and unsurprisingly, Greece felt foreign to these newcomers, and they confronted significant levels of prejudice from the existing residents in Greece. In short, these people both regarded themselves as being foreigners, and they were regarded as such by the residents of Athens and Piraeus, too. To this day there are many Greeks who say that they can distinguish between someone who is from a ‘dopia’ (indigenous) family and one from a ‘prosfigiki’ (refugee) family. Officially, however, these people were returning to their ‘homeland’, Greece; they were not migrants. And formally speaking, they were not refugees either; they were ‘returnees’, Greeks returning to Greece. For the people involved, both those moving from former Ottoman territories and those already living in Greece, the understanding of the situation was quite different from the formal legal position.19 Of course, this was also not the first time that a debate was held about what constitutes a ‘Greek’. Bastéa notes,20 as do both James Faubion and Michael Herzfeld in different ways,21 that in the early period of the Greek

108 Green state in the nineteenth century, there were heated disagreements about who counted as a Greek and who did not, which was based as much on how recently people had moved to Greece, and what part they played in the War of Independence, as it did on any concepts of blood or soil. The 1920s arrivals were something of a repetition, then, of newcomers who are, to a greater or lesser degree, Greeks. That 1920s period marked two things about the relation between Athens and newcomers to the city. The first is that it established a material, embodied link between the city and other parts of the world, as well as between the city and transnational organisations such as the League of Nations, which oversaw the compulsory movement of populations between Turkey and Greece.22 And second, it established a social context in which strangers arrived in the city in very large numbers, all at once. The sheer quantity of people arriving in a short space of time was a major characteristic of the events during that period, and this question of quantity has been repeatedly discussed ever since. That same question of quantity was also addressed in the 1990s, when people from neighbouring post-socialist countries arrived: and as noted, they were the first cohort of arrivals in large numbers who were legally classified as migrants and refugees, rather than returnees.

The 2000s: a sense of disproportion The arrivals during the 2000s, who have also been described in terms of large quantities, were something else again. By the year 2000, the full range of regulations for compliance with Schengen had been put in place in Greece.23 That was combined with the strong ‘securitisation’ approach of successive Greek governments towards migration, and a lack of political will to provide adequate facilities or resources to newly arrived asylum seekers and refugees.24 Then the series of events in the Arab world, beginning with the US response to 9/11 in Afghanistan in 2001, which led to repeated flights of people from troubled places, only increasing in intensity from 2011 when the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ began, has led, by 2015, to a perception that the sheer numbers of the new arrivals in Greece in general, and Athens in particular, had become overwhelming. An apparently crucial difference between the 1920s mass movement of populations and both the 1990s and the 2015 period is that in the 1920s, the ‘exchange’ of populations between Greek and Turkish territories was carried out officially by transnational agencies who were following the policies established in the Lausanne Convention of 1923. And it is true that in 2015, there were no coordinated transnational policies that were intended to move populations from one place to another. Indeed, the virtual absence of any coordinated transnational efforts to deal with the humanitarian costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then the so-called Arab Spring uprisings (not to mention, again, the fallout of the 1990s breakdown of

Crisis within a crisis? 109 socialist governments in Europe), is something that the United Nation’s High Commission on Refugees regularly criticised.25 Yet at the same time, it would be difficult to argue that there has been no coordination: the level of investment, policy development, legal changes, technological development for surveillance and control, and planning that has gone into the management of the European Union’s borders is if anything a far bigger undertaking than the exchange of populations in the 1920s. But there are two key differences between the earlier period and the current one. The first is that all of the recent measures have been designed to keep the now illegal newcomers out, not to move people from one place to another; and second, the new measures are permanent fixtures, they are not intended as a temporary measure to deal with an unusual situation. The border regulation policies were designed to ensure that the EU’s outer borders remained more or less impermeable. They are not designed to allow people in. The temporary relaxing of those regulations by Germany, Hungary and Austria in the summer of 2015 showed quite how much pressure had been building up just outside the EU territories: those countries rapidly, within days, reversed the more open-door policy. As the summer of 2015 drew on in Greece, the numbers of new people coming in, already thought for several years to be ‘way too high’ for the Greek authorities to cope with, became, according to the news reports, overwhelming. From the perspective of the UNHCR and a number of other agencies attempting to deal with the situation, this was avoidable: had there been a transnational will to set up a legal means for people to safely flee the places in which their lives and livelihoods were in danger, or already destroyed, and to relocate safely elsewhere, then the highly disorganised, dangerous and expensive trips made illegally, both across the Mediterranean and overland, would not have occurred. In the views of many who have been commenting on the political and economic conditions of the contemporary moment, this is just one symptom of policies that are designed to allow the free flow of trade, capital, people and resources in line with neoliberal ideals, but which have strongly restricted anything that runs counter to that, in an ongoing battle just about everywhere in the world (and in anthropology, Chris Gregory and David Graeber are two of the betterknown observers who would see it that way).26 From this perspective, this particular political and economic geopolitical logic has created multiple regions in the world where life has become so harsh, either because of ongoing violent conflicts or because of the extreme lack of resources or opportunities, that people are driven out to look for something else, some way to survive. Many of them head for Europe. And what they are confronted with is a highly intricate border control regime that was designed to keep them out. As a result of particularly harsh controls in certain entry points into the EU, the vast majority of undocumented people trying to enter the EU from these troubled places have now been trying to enter through Greece.

110 Green The majority of those people end up in Athens, one way or another, at least for a time. As in the 1920s, the sheer numbers of migrants, with radically insufficient structures and resources to handle them, has made it feel like a crisis, piled up on top of the financial crisis. And the media helps to encourage that sense, reporting it as a crisis within a crisis. Here, Roitman’s (2013) short book on the concept of ‘crisis’ is worth exploring in a little more detail. Roitman argues that the work the concept does is threefold. First, the idea of crisis places events in historical time: ‘crisis’ breaks up everyday life by asserting that what is happening now is something different, something that is not normal, and something that creates a rupture. Second, ‘crisis’ provides a means to morally judge events, to argue that something is revealed by this moment of crisis that was not so visible before (e.g. the raw brutality of neoliberal capitalism). In that way, crisis becomes a platform for mobilising political action in response to the crisis. However, Roitman suggests, if you have to rely on the self-evidence of crisis in order to combat it, then you can only have ‘anti-crisis’ (something to be against), rather than crisis and ‘something else’, something positive that could replace crisis (Roitman 2013: 91). Third, and in contrast, crisis also provides a means to render things actually anti-political: crisis is an unnatural or abnormal state of affairs, contrasted to what is normal, and so it is conceptually conservative, seeking a return rather than something different. In order to get back to ‘normal life’, the natural order of things, you have to stop trying to make political points, and instead do something to restore normal order. While this call for a non-foundational understanding of political action makes sense, there is something about the concept of crisis in the case of Athens that Roitman’s account somewhat sidesteps, and that is the question of scale. The implication of Roitman’s argument is that crisis is one of those conditions that is understood to occur at a scale beyond the local, both in its causes and in its effects. Crisis not only hurts the ‘wo/man in the street’; it sends out waves of effects to other parts of the world, and it is also created by waves of effects from other parts of the world. It is also considerably bigger than the things that happen to people individually. It is a ‘crisis’ because it affects many hundreds of thousands of people all at once, and sometimes, millions of people. The kind of crisis Roitman is discussing, which is in fact aimed at understanding the concept in terms of ‘financial crisis’ in the USA, is not simply a personal crisis, one that any individual may experience in their lives as a result of particular personal events or relations; it is a crisis that generates a domino effect, a crisis of global proportions. That captures something of the situation in Athens in the period since 2009; but there is another element of scale that is not quite captured by Roitman’s analysis, and that is the sense of the overwhelming character of what is occurring. Overwhelming both because the events appear to be relentless and have no clear end in sight; and because there is such an enormous gap between these events and anybody’s capacity to deal with

Crisis within a crisis? 111 them. It goes off the scale. It is hard to capture in words that peculiar sense of enormity that people expressed to me, both in Athens and on the island of Lesvos during July of 2015: it was a period during which the arrivals of refugees on the island were at their most intense. At the same time, the Greek banks were closed temporarily to prevent a bank run because of uncertainty about the outcome of the referendum held on 5 July, which asked the Greek voters to decide on whether the Greek government should accept a new austerity package from the Eurogroup, in return for more funds to help stave off default on repayment of existing loans. The whole series of events felt too large. Corsín Jiménez (2008) captures something of that sense of disproportion in his discussion of the sense of stress, anger and helplessness of Spanish academics who were being asked to become ‘knowledge managers’ in the ‘knowledge economy’ while being given none of the resources needed to achieve that, and at the same time being constantly audited on their failure to achieve it. In Athens, the sense of overwhelming enormity of the gap between what is possible and what is required – demanded, even – both in the case of the refugees and in the case of the Greek economic situation, was what made people feel that ‘crisis’ was the appropriate description of what was occurring. It had also become the new normal, of course; the fiscal ‘crisis’ had been going on since 2009 (the financial crisis began somewhat earlier), and the refugee/migration ‘crisis’ had been going on since the 1990s. Marianne Ferme, in her ethnographic analysis of Sierra Leone, describes how common it is, these days, for the abnormal to be the new normal – or ‘normally abnormal’ – as she would put it (Ferme 2001). This is not so much an evocation of Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ as it is a sense that things ought not to be this way, but they are like that anyway, and are likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Crisis as a rupture, yes; but one that in this case generates a new normal, rather than a return. To gain a sense of this development of disproportion, it is worth going back just a few years, to 2008. It was different in Athens in 2008, just before the fiscal collapse of the Greek government changed things dramatically. In Syntagma Square in August of that year, the city’s police officers were the ones who dealt with the undocumented migrants. They were dressed like police as well, in dark blue trousers and light blue cotton shirts, rather than dressing in black in bulletproof jackets, with weapons and, often, crash helmets, as they are dressed today. In 2008, the undocumented traders would put out their stalls to sell their goods – handbags, umbrellas, children’s toys, cigarette lighters, household crockery and cutlery, all kinds of things – right there in Syntagma Square, right in front of the Greek parliament buildings. And the Athenians would browse these stalls, looking to see if there was anything interesting in among all these things that were made in China and arrived into the hands of the migrants, who were not from China, by mysterious routes. Then the police, in their blue shirts and dark blue trousers, would arrive; the traders would pack up within 20 seconds and run away at high speed. When the police were gone, the traders would come

112 Green back, and the whole thing would be repeated again in a little while when the police patrol returned. It is hard to remember Syntagma Square in that way now. Omonia Square, located in a less wealthy part of central Athens and with a past history of being a red light district, was a little harsher even in 2008, there were already quite a few tensions developing there, and in Exarheia too, the area in which many students and artists have often frequented. But the harshness with which the military-style police now deal with the issue is something else again: an order of magnitude different from the earlier period to such a degree that it has become a different kind of phenomenon. The cat and mouse game of 2008 allowed a mutual recognition that everyone involved had a job to do: the police had to keep order on the streets, the traders had to try and fit themselves in between the policemen’s rounds. The dynamic in more recent years seems to be based on no recognition at all: the perceived sheer scale of the problem has made it impossible, it seems, to see any of the people involved in it as people. They are migrants or they are police, and neither category appears to recognise the other one as anything other than a category. A far cry from the situation in the 1960s, in which the concept of ‘migrant’ did not really exist at all. Now there are people on the streets of Athens who are nothing but that category. Everyone knows it is not only the police who are confronting the more recent migrants. Members of Golden Dawn are out on patrol regularly, wearing their uniforms that echo and borrow from the military style of past dictatorships. They go out in order to defend Greece and the Greeks, they say; they go out in order to ‘sort out’ the migrants, as an act of patriotism. Except for their tendency to valorise violence, they provide an echo of Harel Shapira’s account of the Minutemen of Arizona in Waiting for José (Shapira 2013). The Minutemen (named after the men who needed to be ready in a minute to defend America in the earlier period of that country’s history) are patrolling the US–Mexican border on behalf of their country, they say. The Minutemen (some of whom are actually women) are unpaid, unofficial, and their aim is to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Shapira points out in his ethnography that many of the Minutemen are much like the rest of the population in their political and social views; the difference is not nearly as sharp as some would like to believe. A similar point was made by Douglas Holmes about the growth of the far right in Italy, in his book, Integral Europe (Holmes 2000). The reasons that some of the police, border guards and general population end up being harshly prejudiced against people who have left deeply troubled parts of the world and come to Europe in search of something better, is not a straightforward matter. Work like that of Shapira and Holmes demonstrates that it is actually quite difficult to disentangle many of the values and sentiments of those who are against the migrants from those who are harshly against those populist anti-migrant sentiments. Edward Said suggested a long time ago that many ideologies have a tendency to avoid confronting the negative, dark side of

Crisis within a crisis? 113 ourselves by ascribing those characteristics to others, to the ones we can legitimately condemn for being in some way lacking, most especially in terms of values and decency (Said 1991). Of course, prejudice and bigotry should be challenged whenever and wherever possible, most especially when those sentiments are directed against a category (migrant) that has only been recently legally introduced in Greece; and most especially when the presence of people on the streets of Athens who fit that category (migrant) is also the outcome of years of EU as well as Greek political, legal and technological arrangements to make it so. But there is an equal responsibility to examine whether elements of that same prejudice reappear in the way that the bigotry is challenged. It is a knotty issue. Besides the battles going on in the streets and in the ‘no-go’ areas of Athens, the areas that ‘decent people’ would never go, there are also other places where migrants can be found, behind closed doors and away from the gaze of the heavily armed police. Prominent amongst these people are care workers of all kinds, working in the homes of the people who possess more money than time.27 Those migrants are protected by their patrons, some say; others say they live a life that is something between imprisonment and slavery, having replaced their own family and home for somebody else’s, in the hopes of sending money back and making things better for the next generation. Those people effectively have few, if any, rights that they can actually exercise; they might get out on a Sunday afternoon, to breath a little in the park, but not always. They are an invisible small army, keeping things going in Athens, despite everything else apparently falling to pieces. In focusing on what happens in the streets between border guards and migrants, these less eye-catching aspects of the new arrivals to Athens should not be forgotten.

Concluding remarks There are three main points that this brief sketch of changes in the status of foreigners in Athens has tried to make. First, it is not the first time there has been a sudden arrival of large numbers of people from elsewhere to this city. However, it is the first time that people legally defined as refugees and migrants have arrived in large numbers. What this points towards is that both in the past and in the present, particular forms of relations and separations with other parts of the world, which includes the legal relations between different places, are as important to understanding what is going on with newcomers in Athens as studying the events in Athens itself. Without understanding the fundamentally transnational character of this place, it would be difficult to make sense of what is happening. Second, one distinctive aspect of the migration in its most recent iteration is the way it is strongly tied to legal and technical changes made in relation to border management of the European Union region. That process, which has a variety of political and economic motivations and logic behind it, has been having the effect of quite radically rearranging the relation between people

114 Green and place, and that could be seen particularly acutely in Athens in 2015. As Bridget Anderson has noted in her study of migration policies in the UK, this not only involves a deeply ideological debate about the moral status of migrants; it also involves a deeply ideological debate about the moral status of citizens more generally (Anderson 2013). In the UK, Anderson argues, the definition of a morally upstanding citizen closely matched the needs of the UK economy, so that anyone who was not appropriate – whatever their foreign status – was morally corrupt and therefore a member of the undeserving poor. Anderson effectively questions the significance of the national border here, suggesting that the division between a migrant and a citizen who is defined as undeserving is almost no difference at all. The policies of the UK government suggest that in both cases, the aim was the same. What is intriguing about that kind of rhetoric in terms of what is currently going on in Greece is that both European politicians and the media often write about the entirety of Greece and the Greek population as being members of a morally unacceptable group: people who do not pay their debts, who do not work hard enough, who do not work by the rules. During the debates about the restructuring of Greek debt by the Eurogroup in the summer of 2015, the question of whether the new government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras could be trusted was constantly raised as a ‘blockage’ in coming to agreement.28 Here, the always already transnational connections and disconnections between Athens and other places, and most particularly in moral terms, become acutely visible. Third, the overwhelming disproportion of what has been occurring in Athens in recent years is an important element of experiencing the process as a ‘crisis’. It is not so much the idea of abnormality (though that is present); it is the enormity of the gap between the events as they are unfolding in people’s lives and the capacity to deal with them. And that gap is not simply a matter of imagining either global forces or the sudden occurrence of unnatural disasters as Roitman describes. It is also a perceived unbridgeable gap between what people in the city understand is going on and how it is possible to deal with it, and what those who have a transnational stake in deciding what will happen next in Athens imagine is possible. The situation is disproportionate, as Corsín Jiménez notes (2008).

Notes 1 Clogg (1986: 137–140). 2 Gourgouris (1996) and Herzfeld (1986). 3 The choice of Athens as the capital of modern independent Greece in the 1830s was the result of ideas about classical Greece written by German and British classical scholars; the first interim government was located in Nafplion, the capital of the Peloponnese region, a much more substantial city at the time than Athens, which Clogg describes as having been a ‘dusty’ and relatively small town (Clogg 1992: 46–9). 4 Graeber (2011b).

Crisis within a crisis? 115 5 Strathern (1992: 183). 6 My own family were amongst them in 1963 and 1964, but by 1965 we had moved to the island of Lesvos, returning to Athens from 1971 to 1974. 7 Karyotis (2012: 394–395). 8 Bridget Anderson provides an excellent analysis of the negative moral assessment implied in the term ‘migrant’ (Anderson 2013). 9 Karyotis and Patrikios (2010), Triandafyllidou (2009). 10 The whole issue of what ‘foreigner’ means in social terms in Greece has been discussed at length (and see especially Herzfeld 1991: 80–86). The key point of that debate for my purposes here is that hospitality establishes a clear moral and social division between the foreigner who is being treated well, and the host. The term ‘migrant’ (μετανάστης) implies a much less clear distinction in terms of rights to the place. Location is very important in this matter in Greece. As Herzfeld notes, a great deal of the concept of hospitality in Greece is addressed towards neighbours, when they visit the homes or events of the host. 11 This is a different form of indifference than discussed by Herzfeld in his account of the ideology of bureaucracy – according to which people’s differences have to be ignored in order to treat everyone equally: civil servants must strive to be indifferent to difference, as it were (Herzfeld 1992). What I am drawing attention to here is an indifference generated by the complete absence of a certain group of people from the bureaucratic system. 12 A different, but analogous, situation exists in Moscow for not-entirely-legal migrant workers who come there from different parts of the former Soviet Union (Reeves 2013). In that case, the workers were crossing state borders to get to Moscow that in the past did not belong to countries at all. Rather more darkly, the undocumented refugees who drown in their attempts to get to Greece are also people who, by definition, have no documents, and so they cannot be recognised by the state (Green 2010). 13 Andersson (2014). 14 Samatas (2003: 114). 15 Swarts and Karakatsanis (2012). 16 Baldwin-Edwards (1997), Samatas (2003). 17 Karyotis (2012), Karyotis and Patrikios (2010), Swarts and Karakatsanis (2012), Swarts and Karakatsanis (2013). 18 See also Green (2010) for a more detailed discussion of what kind of ‘return’ this exchange of populations constituted. 19 I discuss the epistemological shift in the relation between people and place that occurred between the late Ottoman and the creation of nation-based states in more detail in Green (2005: Chapter 4). 20 Bastéa (2000: 21). 21 Herzfeld (1986), Faubion (1993). 22 Hirschon (2003). 23 Samatas (2003: 141). 24 Greece has been repeatedly criticised by international agencies for its failure to provide adequate treatment or facilities for asylum seekers and refugees. See, for example, www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/26/greece-immigration-un-id AFLDE69P1VV20101026 (Last accessed 10 October 2015). 25 www.unhcr.org/561227536.html (Last accessed 9 October 2015). 26 Graeber (2011a), Gregory (1997). 27 Lyberaki (2011). 28 www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/12/greek-crisis-surrender-fiscalsovereignty-in-return-for-bailout-merkel-tells-tsipras (Last accessed 10 October 2015).

Part III

Subjectivities

8

Greek depression Uses of mental health discourse from the economy to the psyche Anna Apostolidou

Introduction: ‘hard’ facts Currently (2014) undergoing the fifth year of economic depression, Greece has also been documented as experiencing a generalized tendency towards (pathological) depression of almost national proportions. The very term ‘national depression’ – used literally to make a sensational journalistic point (Efthimiadou 2011), or analytically to describe a set of psychopathological phenomena (Madianos and Economou 2014) – is encountered in local and media discourse alongside the recent ‘suicide epidemic’, whether numerically verified or not (cf. Skapinakis 2012), and comments about an overall ‘mad situation’. Produced and circulated both by credible scientific sources and populist media exaggeration, such statements create an imprint of mid-crisis Greece as a country gradually sinking in mental health problems and despair. The debt crisis, and the collateral measures of fiscal adjustment, seem to have brought about a shocking rise in psychological impediments that have, in different ways and degrees, affected the entire population. The comparison and correlation between economic and epidemiological facts is a task that has been undertaken by numerous well-documented studies. Apart from the fact that the overall health of the general population has been considerably downgraded (Kentikelenis et al. 2011), notable effects have also been documented in the domain of mental health. Low socio-economic position and economic hardship have long been found to be factors that lead to various degrees of depression (Scutella and Wooden 2008, Butterworth et al. 2009). Moreover, recent studies focusing on the repercussions of the crisis have demonstrated that loss of income has had a negative effect on self-esteem and on the sense of self-sufficiency, self-worth and wellbeing of the affected agents (Giotakos et al. 2012, Skapinakis 2012); prolonged unemployment has also led to high risks of serious psychopathology and suicide attempts, or suicidality (Economou et al. 2011). More importantly, impoverished individuals, who were already experiencing psychiatric disorders, represent a high risk group during the crisis period (Giotakos 2010), while the unemployed are found to be at greater risk of developing a major depressive episode (Madianos et al. 2011).

120 Apostolidou The public dialogue of psychologists and psychiatrists in Greece concludes that the crisis is responsible for the ever-rising percentages of stress and panic attacks, sleep disorders and abuse, anti-social behaviour, depression and other malfunctions. Moreover, the economic recession has been especially tough for people already suffering from a mental condition, especially as far as exclusion from employment is concerned, partly because of the culturally attributed stigma and perceived danger that these persons carry (EvansLacko et al. 2013). While epidemiological data is not sufficient to mitigate the mental health effects of the crisis on the general population, and there is a need for more focused research efforts on various sub-groups affected by the crisis (Economou, Peppou et al. 2013), such as children (Anagnostopoulos and Soumaki 2013) or the elderly, the overall situation appears rather dismal if we add the inability of the welfare state to stand up to the challenges presented. It is worth underlying that the right to mental health is systematically being denied to greater parts of the population, especially the high-risk groups: immigrants, poor, unemployed, or persons lacking medical coverage (Stylianides 2012). On top of such alarming data about the aggravated situation concerning mental health problems, it is estimated that 75 per cent of the population that experienced some sort of serious psychological distress are not getting any treatment for their problem (Skapinakis et al. 2010). Even though terms such as ‘suicide epidemic’ are contested (Skapinakis 2012) and a sober tone on portraying the facts is recommended, people who have suffered a gradual or sudden degradation of their social status and prospects of living are undeniably in grave circumstances.

Mental health terminology and emerging subjectivities The above portrayal depicts a whole nation as sinking under depressive and psychopathological syndromes. It is not easy for an anthropologist to accept such claims as uncontested, or even to fully evaluate the aforementioned data. Among the main symptoms of depression, the DSM V (American Psychiatric Association 2013) includes the following: depressed mood, such as feeling sad, empty; feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt; recurrent thoughts of death or suicide, or a suicide attempt, etc. Recently, the increasing agony of the question ‘what constitutes pathology’ in an era when new tropes of mental and psychological suffering are emerging has brought about fresh inter-disciplinary connections between (social and communal) psychiatrists and social scientists in order to promote new models of action-oriented theories and initiatives, such as cultures of support and human rights protection (Stylianides 2014; see also Autonomo Steki 2012). Studies on the complex relationship between culture and depression stress the centrality of cultural knowledge systems and all the elements (nature, causes, evaluations, etc.) associated with ‘abnormal states’ (Lutz 1985). And although there are no objective means to measure the impact of

Greek depression 121 the prolonged economic crisis on an individual level – some of my interlocutors have rediscovered hidden psychological recourses, while others have evidently collapsed under the pressure of an imminent catastrophe – there is something to be distilled from the way people in Greece talk about mental health. Although both anthropology and psychiatry focus on the qualitative dimension of human experience (Jenkins 2007), and have often delivered various definitions of extreme suffering, experience and abnormality, the present inquiry attempts to trace how the wide dissemination of mental health terms has affected the way local agents speak about their situation during a time of multilevel crisis. The sudden outpouring of varied anthropological work that the Greek crisis has brought about may have helped to de-pathologize the Greek antiausterity discourse, yet it has failed to sufficiently problematize the neoliberal consciousness and neoliberal variations, since the latter remain a taboo for social analysis (Theodossopoulos 2015). Basing my assumptions on pre-crisis Greek ethnography on agency and accountability, I would like to offer some thoughts on the way in which concepts of mental health (madness, depression, suicide, etc.) have been employed in the last five years in order to re-gain agency and handle the widespread feeling of powerlessness that many Greeks express. An anthropological stance on the topic of local mental health discourse offers the potential to illuminate not only what is being documented, but also how these ‘facts’ affect our society’s perception of reality. I argue that the evolving generalized crisis in Greece has subtly reshaped our knowledge system about fundamental mental health attributes. The diffusion of the language of mental health pathology in everyday conversation, the use of mental health issues as an argument that supports the (unjust?) political-economic crisis that Greeks suffer, and the self-identification of local actors as depressed or desperate has created a linguistic and cultural means to articulate a counterdiscourse that promotes cultural representations of subversion. On the one hand we have a wide circulation of concepts such as depression, despair, frustration, emotional pain, suicide. On the other hand, we find the notorious ‘Greek madness’ (‘η τρέλα του Έλληνα’), or the protests of the ‘indignants’ (‘αγανακτισμένοι’) (Theodossopoulos 2013, 2014a) that seek to expel the fear of madness as a synonym to the fear of death and distraction and appoint to it new subversive connotations. Thus prolonged despair as a generalized cultural symptom carries the potential of becoming a means to voicing a discourse of resistance and hope. In this peculiar interplay between crisis and mental health, we may trace the possibility of a cultural space where new post-liberal subjectivities may emerge.

Anthropology and/of/within Greek crisis It is undeniable that the crisis has had a major effect on many underprivileged social groups, who had been struggling even during the period of the

122 Apostolidou phenomenally prosperous pre-crisis period. As Dalakoglou attests, many of the central socio-economic factors that exploded during the crisis – such as unprotected migrants, under/unemployment, rise of violence – had been slowly seething for at least a decade before the actual bang of the debt crisis, despite the circulating narrative about the strength and growth of the Greek economy and the infrastructure fever that took place at the time (Dalakoglou 2013c). Theoretical understandings of the crisis in both anthropology and psychiatry focus on the victimization of the individual and the loss of previous collective or emotional functions. My focus is on the discursive handling of emotive language in Greece, especially with reference to mental health and stability. Portrayal of the country as a madhouse, citizens as depressed or on the verge of suicide, and the politics of capitalist forces as paranoid are encountered daily in the Greek media and circulate widely in discussions among local agents. In this context, affective discourse has a central place in everyday conversation and media coverage, and keywords that traditionally refer to mental health issues/problems are used as metonymies for social destabilization. This discourse often obscures the actual mental health issues that certain populations face, and at the same time, provides a rhetorical space in which indirect political statements can be articulated. Personal narratives collected from official Greek helplines underline the importance of the imprint of the economic crisis outside the diagnostic context, in cases where a specific malady is not present: they repeatedly report generalized stress, loss of personal dignity, fear of the future, a generalized sense of helplessness, intense anger, sadness/mourning of citizens about their condition and passivity vis-à-vis a ruthless reality (Economou, Charitsi et al. 2013: 8). It is evident that, far beyond the psychopathological frame, the impact of the crisis filters the social actors’ understanding of reality, anthropological understandings being part of the same dynamic. Obviously, the intellectual does not think and work in a social void. Her presuppositions, her theoretical questions (and answers) are often stained by the disciplinary dialogue that takes place in disciplinary loci: conferences, classes, media, books such as the one at hand. In a scholarly group with affiliations and sensitivities shared by the wider left, neoliberalism is viewed with considerable reservation and critical scepticism. In addition, the vast majority of anthropologists dealing with the Greek crisis are Greek nationals, or people with close ties to the Greek issues, which in fact makes the distance between the observer and the object at times too small. Greek anthropologists are themselves subject to the same crisis as their field subjects/interlocutors, which produces the peril of a set of successive projections. It is worth noting that, when dealing with extreme circumstances, which affect a vast array of psychosocial parameters, the anthropologist is herself part of the creation of a critical discourse. Herzfeld (2011) underlines the centrality of ‘soft’ social research to the great economic and political stakes that threaten to end the European continent as we know it. The intricate links between the social

Greek depression 123 and the political, but also ‘the political confrontational power of emotions and experiences’ (Papataxiarchis 2014a: 21) provide an excellent site for practising reflexivity and generating ethnographic questioning that sets off from ‘personal’ concerns. In this context, I wish to acknowledge that my own growing interest in mental health-related discourse spurred off my own personal concerns and problems through reflexive thinking on a persistent contradiction: the continuous interplay between psychological instability and intense emotional turbulences brought about by the social changes during the past years and, on the other hand, an effort to engage in sober, responsible (rational?) political thinking. While on the individual level this is a bumpy road with many setbacks, I think that on the level of collective discourse production it presents interesting angles about the inextricable ties between psyche and culture.

Emotive language and pathology At a time when a sense of victimization is overwhelming, social subjects resort to intense emotive or unreasonable language in order to understand and socially negotiate their vulnerable position. Although the negotiation with the influx of foreign agents has led to the acknowledgement of cultural diversity and the demystification of the homogenous Greek world (Papataxiarchis 2006), everyday stereotyping and blaming tactics (Herzfeld 1992, 1997, Brown and Theodossopoulos 2004) continue to play a central role in political discourse and create a space for explaining away social injustice, bureaucracy, politics, etc. and regaining a degree of control in what is perceived as a continuous marginalization and European peripheralization (Theodossopoulos 2013). Recent anthropological research has focused on the modalities through which local agents tackle issues of globalization, foreign powers, history and national identity (Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2010, Sutton 1998) with interesting results. For example, the rhetorical handling and interpretation of the present with familiar schemata that come from the local past, what Sutton terms ‘analogic thinking’ (Sutton 1998) seems to be extremely plausible in the country’s depiction of national identity as marginalized, manipulated and exploited by foreign actors today. In this context, expressions of indignation, as thoroughly studied by Theodossopoulos (2013, 2014a), ethnographically attest to how emotive language works to articulate an alternative possibility, a creative engagement with power structures or a transformative ‘indirect resistance’ in a discourse that paradoxically combines anti-hegemonic elements with defensive nationalism (Theodossopoulos 2014a). An interesting example is provided by descriptions of madness (including political risk-taking and unpredictability) as a national trait. The phrase ‘They don’t know us at all, we are crazy’ (‘Δε μας ξέρουν καλά, είμαστε τρελοί εμείς’) expresses a cultural conviction that irrational actions are far preferable to being subjected to humiliating compromise, which coincides with an ethnographically identified poetics of

124 Apostolidou personhood that has run through the modern Greek state since its establishment (cf. Herzfeld 1985). Yet another ethnographic example relevant to issues of mental health is the expansion of conspiracy theories in Greece, which, as research has indicated, go hand in hand with the feelings of powerlessness, helplessness and an incapability to trust the political and social establishment. Assumptions about foreign forces that impinge on Greek sovereignty, foreign secret agents conspiring with Greek politicians, statistical spuriousness to alter the debt figures and air spraying on Greek citizens to keep them tamed and apathetic (Galanis 2013) crowd numerous Internet sites but also come up in everyday conversation. Widespread cynicism towards the Greek political system, but also the rise of far-right (and far-left) movements and parties, has been proven to make conspiracy theories more believable and their cultural circulation stronger. Psychologists claim that this is especially so in cases of economic or natural disasters (terrorist attacks, crises, accidents), when the human mind searches for explanations in spheres outside the rational and what is officially claimed (Swami et al. 2014). Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness and they have been proven to be more compelling to those with low self-esteem, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large (Swami and Furnham 2014). However, this recourse to collective paranoia, the strong belief in unproven theories about secret and vicious forces, usually of foreign origin, is also a way to create meaning out of a disempowered position. It may well be that the re-invention of a social body, the re-weaving of a social fibre, which is nowadays urgently attempted, cannot be accomplished without a degree of collective introspection, and of shouldering responsibility. What at first seems like an irresponsible and hasty attempt to evade all responsibility about one’s current mishap may be read as an intricate local strategy which aims at problematizing power and agency. This is predominantly a discourse of blame (Theodossopoulos 2013), of evading responsibility, of maintaining the comfort of powerlessness; however, it can also be viewed as a narrative of loss, of mourning and inner suffering, of attempting to understand what went wrong and create new meaning. Sutton (2003) connects a long historical experience of foreign ‘meddling’ with the circulation of conspiracy theories in Greece and places the phenomenon within an array of sensible attempts ‘to open global politico-economic processes to popular scrutiny’ (Sutton 2003: 204). It is worth noting that such practices do not circulate exclusively among the uneducated, the underprivileged or those who remain marginalized. The very portrayal of the local crisis by mental health experts is occasionally performed via recourse to such pathology-centred language, in another yet interpretative attempt to discern order out of a state of emergency. For instance, certain psychiatrists attribute the critical character of the current economic recession using a medicalized analogy: they claim that the explosion of public debt only exposed the failure of the pre-existing system of

Greek depression 125 dependence and fetal clinging upon a paternalistic state, which only reproduced the underdevelopment of a civil society and intercepted the citizens’ psychic coming of age (Chalkousi et al. 2012: 5). Even though such representations create serious interpretative difficulties to social analysis, they could nonetheless act as a viewing point for examining how Greek mental healthcare providers attempt to approach the generalized disintegration of the system within which they work: from the lack of recourses and infrastructure which are necessary to care for the augmenting populations that approach them to the unprecedented proliferation of (minor or critical) mental health problems that these populations face. Furthermore, this portrayal of Greek citizens as immature children who endeavour to evade responsibility for their previous or current problems partly coincides with ethnographic evidence that considers the various local strategies which aim at problematizing power and agency. Another powerful metaphor, used in two complementary ways, is that of illness and pain: the illness of the national body, which is suffering through no fault of its own; and the suffering of the ‘weak’ subjects who experience prolonged emotional pain, which eventually turns into suffering. Le Breton (2009) focuses on how pain becomes suffering, stressing that it gradually takes over the whole being, thus transcending the body and transforming the subject. According to this view, pain is the radical deconstruction of the certainty of the world, a loss of meaning and worth that constitutes being as a burden. Even if academic discourse on pain and suffering often undermines the actual degradation of the experience of pain, suffering and losing one’s mind, recent work unveils the intellectual potential of such concepts as melancholia and loss (Eng and Kazanjian 2003), which may reinvigorate notions of ethics, politics and identity by placing the emphasis on collective traumas, such as the crisis experienced by Greek society nowadays. Even though questions of human suffering in contexts of extreme inequality are often overlooked by anthropologists by recourse to cultural relativism, the condition of suffering needs to be documented, described, illuminated and complicated by practising anthropologists (cf. Farmer 2003), even if it involves intangible areas, such as that of mental fragility. Especially when confronting the fear of being entangled in the social production of systemic indifference, a common reaction in view of extreme human suffering (Scheper-Hughes 1992), the non-tangible effects of the crisis, that is the affective realm, become critical indicators of societal sensitivities and soft spots. Illness, as an inalienable part of human experience, has the capacity to act as something that ‘enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals’ (Woolf 2002 [1930: 19]). According to Butler, such conditions of vulnerability could become sites of reimagining the possibility of community: If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human

126 Apostolidou where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. (Butler 2004: 151) The discursive management of pain and suffering, that is being performed by local actors in order to describe a situation of continuous frustration and loss of agency, points to the direction of examining fragility as a means of voicing political objection, of expressing intolerance and of attempting to divulge cultural resources of resistance.

Subjection and the discourse of hope On the other end of the spectrum, the pathology discourse within the Greek crisis also includes a liberating and ‘healing’ potential, which often comes up in informal discussions and even in more formal settings (such as the recent parliamentary elections). The discourse on health, both physical and mental, as an allegory for social life is also prominent in the domain of the economic stabilization of the country: we hear about economic recovery, sanitization (εξυγίανση), rationalization (as opposed to institutional chaos and anarchy) and socio-economic stabilization, etc. The medicalization of language in times of acute social crisis is not surprising when studying economic shifts and social change in general (cf. Athanasiou 2011); the discourse on pathology is a powerful means of oppression, of othering, of rendering the actual subjects shuttered and in need of healthcare provision. Pathological elements are evident in socio-economic discourse in two different respects: on the one hand in the language of politics, both indigenous and foreign, promising solutions that have the capacity to act as healers/doctors in the suffering bodies of economy and society; on the other hand in expressions of agony on behalf of social agents as they attempt to cope with overwhelming phenomena, which have rendered them powerless. Yet here we trace an interesting potential that many Greeks have begun to utilize: through the pathology discourse comes an attempt to de-medicalize the situation, by voicing a counter-disourse of hope and healing, which can be traced in bottom-up social movements. In his Foucauldian take of crisis, as encountered in the context of physiology and pathology, Lynteris (2011) notes that ‘krisis, both crisis and judgement, is a concept that brings to the surface a new kind of truth, a new series of techniques of capturing the truth, and, of course, a new subject of securing the truth’ (2011: 207). This concept of crisis as a paradigmatic opportunity for truth, which brings to mind the Hippocratic concept of krisis as the paroxysmal turning point in an illness that defines the end result (either death or recovery that stems from changes which emerge through the very crisis), is quite evident in contemporary Greece. Through different and at times contrasting angles, social agents seem to wait for the moment of truth to arrive, when mistakes of the pathogenic past will

Greek depression 127 be brought to justice, or when a new social dynamic will remedy prolonged injustice, when the failures of capitalism, patronage, foreign dependency and so on will be unveiled and restored. A prominent example is provided by the motto for the radical-left party SYRIZA (at the time of publication governing in coalition with anti-memorandum right-wing party Anexartitoi Ellines) which summed up the whole rhetoric of healing the injurious present of the crisis in a nutshell: ‘hope is on the way’ (‘Η ελπίδα έρχεται’). And even though, or exactly because, a scenario of pathology and catastrophe is the predominant discourse in the media, which circulates among discussants and is reintroduced as an imprint on reality, recent everyday accounts attest to other directions as well: those pointing to an optimistic potential. With a series of programmatic proclamations about a swift and painless change (which is yet to be proven as practicable in the short-term future), SYRIZA got a spectacular 36.3 per cent in the January 2015 elections, in part by appealing to the sense of prolonged and unjust suffering (or despair) that Greeks had been going through. It is characteristic that extremely few of my interlocutors cared about SYRIZA’s pre-election ‘Thessaloniki Programme’ which described the party’s intentions to deal with the problems of the country. Also, a noteworthy percentage of SYRIZA voters moved horizontally from right-wing Nea Dimokratia to SYRIZA only in the last few days before the election in what was termed a ‘vote of protest’; and most of my interlocutors expressed a powerful combination of ‘having nothing to lose’ and the conviction that ‘all else (here: political parties and lines) have failed’ or ‘have been proven to be worse’. So, a considerable part of Greek voters, also those who supported other parties, seem to have voted in light of thymic processes, that is in an emotionally explosive context, with (varying degrees of) surrender to hope. This discourse is grounded on a deep-rooted need of becoming independent, of regaining a healthy, virile and autonomous state both on the personal and national level, thus negating the representation of social illness and pathology that has long stained the representation of Greeks. On that note, an interesting point is the translation of the co-governing party Ανεξάρτητοι Έλληνες (Independent Greeks), which also appeals to a patriotic sense of pride and throwing off the unbearable foreign yoke. In the relationship between Greece and Western Europe, there are well-documented longterm cultural misapprehensions about materiality, and cultural concepts regarding personal autonomy (Hirschon 2012), which create tensions of an ontological nature. And while such cultural unlikeness may be subject to different interpretations, in the genealogy of a sense of dependence and manipulation, Herzfeld’s idea of ‘crypto-colonialism’, which describes Greece’s paradoxical historical condition of a national independence that was contingent on the approval and support of colonial powers (2002), becomes once again quite timely: rationality and craziness, or rationality-as-craziness becomes a discursive trope through which local agents seek to carve out a space of re-empowerment, of hidden recourses and vocalization of hope.

128 Apostolidou In her work The Psychic Life of Power, which brings forth the ambivalent effects of social power, Butler (1997) considers how the subject, which can be perceived as the instrument of agency, is also the effect of subordination, as a result of the deprivation of agency. Looking at it in another way, this means that ‘a power “exerted on” a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power “assumed by” the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997: 11). Psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and in how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Butler argues that, in the paradoxical interplay between power and agency, power itself is reliant on subject formation and not external or exerted on the subject. Therefore, since subject formation and social change are indeed related and complimentary in the interplay between power and psyche, we are currently witnessing the formation of new subjects. In this context, ‘the performance of melancholia as the shameless voicing of self-beratement in front of others effects a detour that rejoins melancholia to its lost or withdrawn sociality’ (Butler 1997: 181). Voicing self-castigation through self-proclamations of madness, of craziness, of hysteria, of suicidality, many Greek interlocutors trace a discursive space to express – and ‘exorcise’ – their sense of helplessness and turn their subjection to power from a traumatic contingency to an engaged, however fragile, citizenship. On the other hand, they appear to be reclaiming the pathology’s discursive possibilities in order to de-medicalize their situation and propose political statements of locally originated hope and ‘healing’. This creative use of a culturally embedded ‘disemic’ discourse (Herzfeld 1982), provides local agents with a prime upon which they balance their self-perception as disempowered and at the same time as regulators of their own destiny. As Herzfeld observes, disemia ‘reflects the habitual way in which the Greeks have responded to their modern political predicament, namely their position on the “margins” of Europe, both as its spiritual “ancestor” and its political “pariah”’ (Herzfeld 1997: 18). This prolonged two-sided state is reflected in the modern-day oxymoron of mental health standards on the one hand rapidly deteriorating and on the other hand mental healths discourse arising as the country’s only hope. This also pertains to what Athanasiou terms ‘precarious intensity’ (2014: 76), which implies an agonistic way of attending to vulnerability, an engagement with the collective that embraces vulnerability while acknowledging the instrumental use of precariousness as an instrument of neoliberal governmentality. Mental health concepts are also relevant to contemporary Greek crisis from a theoretical perspective. This peculiar madness/pathology rhetoric may be said to originate in Greece as a result of the fracture of late capitalism. In the peak (and evident decline) of late capitalism, the Deleuzian concept of cultural schizophrenia is a useful lens through which to theorize about the rupture of societal ties and the impact on the individual (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In a bold analogy, the ‘isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence’ (Jameson

Greek depression 129 1983: 119), the crisis constitutes a liminality that can have the effect of disorienting the subject, and may contribute to the egolessness that is characteristic of schizophrenia. What is currently expressed as despair (‘I don’t know what to do’, ‘I feel lost’, ‘We don’t know what awaits us tomorrow’) points to the direction of Deleuzian schizophrenia as a cultural symptom, while at the same time exposing the deep misworkings of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari conclude that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit . . . Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death. (1983: 246) In times of crisis, it is not only the obvious suffering that needs to be taken into account. Precariousness is not only measurable by numbers or by material conditions. It is not enough to document the poor, the outcasts, the suicide rates. We also need to address the subtle shifts in our understandings of what counts as pain, loss, insecurity, and destabilization that create new sensibilities of what it means to be human. New modalities of the personal and the collective emerge inadvertently when there are violent changes in the social structure and, more often than not, they are indicators of future social norms. The shaping of schizoid subjectivities that emerge out of the antinomies between the political and the lived reality stem from the ambiguities of the postmodern condition. I have followed the biopolitical suggestion by Butler and Athanasiou that ‘there’s nothing merely economic about economics’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 39) and that in order to disturb ‘the hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism we need to open up conceptual, discursive, affective and political spaces for enlarging our economic and political imaginary’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 40). The two interlocutors treat the concept of dispossession outside the conventional neoliberal cadre of the possession–dispossession bipolar (in discussing phenomena such as forced migration, homelessness, foreclosures and extreme disparities in wealth) and set it as a theoretical trope, which entails deprivation and loss and examines the contemporary production of social discourses, modes of power and subjects. Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property and a broader belonging to the world, in arguing that there is a limit to self-sufficiency; it is at this very threshold of autonomy that we can see ourselves as relational and interdependent beings. Therefore, social subjects are constitutively dispossessed of their own selves, bound together through a self-displacement that incubates the potential of an isolated solidarity. If dispossession is shown to be a ‘normative violence that determines the terms of subjectivity’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 2), the

130 Apostolidou widespread imaginative use of mental health discourse acts as a means of gaining the power of recognition and managing the regulatory discourses that economic and political power have brought about.

Conclusion As qualitative and quantitative research supports, the Greek population experiences an unforeseen rise in suicidality, widespread phenomena of low self-esteem and growing helplessness, a proliferation of common mental disorders, such as minor and major depression, all being positively correlated with the repercussions of crisis (unemployment, poverty, homelessness, etc.). On the one hand, Greek psychologists and psychiatrists document the rise of anxiety symptoms, sleep disorders, substance abuse, anti-social behaviour, panic attacks and depression among other situations. On the other hand, the dramatic decline of mental health services and the ability of the general population to seek help for mental health problems is also widely acknowledged by private practitioners and institutions alike, leading to all those augmenting problems being left untreated. Nevertheless, while the actual domain of mental health is notably problematic, the discourse that is created through mental health terms and analogies is growing on an ever faster pace. The mental health crisis discourse uses old material of cultural truths in order to cement new articulations of protest, defensive claims and critical response, which also connect with questions of thinking critically in times of crisis. ‘This question(ing) also involves taking into consideration that critique is always already in crisis, as it pertains to interrogating the terms which determine what counts as an ontological claim’ (Athanasiou 2014: 72). Recourse to terms about mental instability, psychological suffering or collective madness reveals that recent statements in Greece take the form of a discourse that is both descriptive of the wounded social body while at the same time it is prescriptive of the ways in which a ‘state of emergency’ may act as an excuse to render self-control, to negate reason altogether and to become a-logos. Anthropologists cannot afford to be the spectators of calamity. While the media have gradually established a state of apathy, by the relentless projection of imagery that is too cruel to comprehend, to absorb, or to empathize with, social agents engage in the redistribution of news through the use of social media, which has invigorated a sense of ‘engaged citizenship’ (Papailias 2011b). Scattered traces of such engaged and subversive citizenship are to be found in the way the discourse of pathology (here: mental health) is employed in order to de-pathologize the stereotypical representations of Greeks but also the population’s disempowered position. We could even argue that, in the present circumstances, Greeks are following the opposite direction of what Foucault describes as definitive of the modern experience in Madness and Civilization, when portraying the slow process of constituting the regime of confinement at the end of the eighteenth century, in

Greek depression 131 order to exclude/extrapolate and cure the mad. ‘Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice’. This pertinacious hanging on ostensibly unreasoned and unreasonable thinking may be viewed as a cultural strategy for sustaining a cultural phantasm as insubordinate, maverick, a unique nation, or a nation of madmen. The use of mental health terms, of illness and danger but also hope and healing, exposes the creative space that an oppressive discourse, like that of pathology and unreason, potentially provides. If ‘unreason defined the locus of madness’ possibility’ (Foucault 1965: 78), then, to recontextualize Foucault, many Greeks feel that Europe ‘could watch out for and guard against the subterranean danger of unreason, the threatening space of an absolute freedom’ (Foucault 1989 [1961]: 79).

9

New-poor The Being, the Phenomenon, and the Becoming in ‘Greek Crisis’ Neni Panourgiá

The Event that has been termed ‘The Crisis’ in Greece has engendered the production of analyses from various epistemic and methodological locations, not all of them mutually legible, and almost none of them producing a common epistemic groundwork. The lack of ethnographic accounts of the crisis is as pronounced as it is explainable – ethnography takes time; it takes time to be carried out because the protocols take time – the protocols of the encounter that demand lengthy face-time, in-depth interaction, and thick knowledge of the context which produce the needed longitudinal trust that makes such an encounter analytically and epistemologically useful. It takes time for the ethnographer to move between the encounter and its analysis, as it takes time to narrate it, more time than running mathematical models of analysis or deploying already-there theoretical and analytical models that often perform the labour of salvage anthropology, setting the groundwork on which later, more detailed and nuanced analysis will take place. What would such an ethnographic encounter look like and what would it produce, though? There have been some attempts at such an engagement which are now finding themselves in print – early on Penelope Papailias’s editing of a cluster of such ethnographic gestures, and soon thereafter Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, Dimitris Dalakoglou, and myself, among a few others.1 These first ethnographic engagements presented the early image of the crisis, primarily concerned with the resistance against the neocolonization of Greece by the global financial powers, and looking especially at the ‘movement of the indignants’ and the ‘movement of the Squares’ more than tracing the effects that this neo-colonial intervention (in its iteration as ‘austerity measures’) has had on the (ethnographic) ground. This is precisely what I want to attempt here: to explore ethnographically the valances of poverty produced in Greece under the current politico-economic crisis, its narrativizations, its different deployments, its variant processes, its praxiological concerns. The process of becoming new-poor (neóptohoi)2 has been amply discussed in non-empirically based disciplines (such as economics, political science and sociology) but any in-depth, ethnographic descriptions are only now percolating to any discursive surfaces.

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Here I am presenting thoughts and concerns that have been populating my encounters with people on the ground, so to speak, following them around, being present, now as a witness, now as a co-actor, oftentimes as an inert presence in this vortex of experience that started with the signing of the Memorandum in May 2010. There is one particular family, and one particular member of it, that I follow through the process of becoming poor, as I consider their particular social environment (with which I am also intimately connected, inevitably, as almost everyone is connected intimately with some social environment that surrounds the coming into poverty at this point in Greece). I listen to perceptions of quality of life and its translations from the hegemonic use in the media, including questions of subsistence, health care, access to education, and access to the financial system and its mechanisms.3 I engage thickly and deeply with specific events that have taken place since the beginning of the crisis that intertwine questions of immigration, policing, solidarity economy4 and the global system of finance capital as they percolate into the narratives of my interlocutors.5 I make these sites of concern visible, tracing the details that are hidden in the folds and cracks of the experience, in the hints and nods of unspoken words, in the non-verbalized but also in the exhausted cries of despair about debt and capital, of an insolvency that indexes a dissolution, of multiple foreclosures in time, in space, in access, cries about production and reproduction, of poverty that speaks its name and of poverty that refuses to be engaged with. I am attempting all this by looking at the narrativized beingin-the-world that is Greece right now, 2015, at this point (and being fully aware of the danger of thinking about a country in terms of a person I am attempting to think of Greece not as something inanimate but as the constellation of millions of psyches), thinking on it through specific and targeted (Hegelian) moments in the European intellectual landscape. Put explicitly – if Greeks are narrating the being-right-now in specific terms, can one engage ethnography as a tracking practice not only of the experience but, also, as a device that can locate and unearth original European texts that carry the echo of these narratives?

Das Ding an sich – The thing in itself Of course, we have all read, and all do read Capital. For almost a century, we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers’ movement which is our only hope and our destiny. Since we ‘came into the world’, we have read Capital constantly in the writings and speeches of those who have read it for us, well or ill, both the dead and the living, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, the leaders of the workers’

134 Panourgiá organizations, their supporters and opponents: philosophers, economists, politicians. We have read bits of it, the ‘fragments’ which the conjuncture had ‘selected’ for us. We have even all, more or less, read Volume One, from ‘commodities’ to the ‘expropriation of the expropriators.’ (Althusser and Balibar 1968: 1) Debt, then; debt as an, as the, organizing principle of the social commons, of modern (that is, capitalist, industrialist, colonialist) ordering of things, of people, lives, psyches, of mortgaging and foreclosing the(ir) futures, debt that creates Benjamin’s ‘one way street’, with its wreckage, its dead, its detritus. Debt that is ‘the thing in itself’, that no one sees, never becomes ‘the phenomenon’, remains the forever noumenon, leaving only its traces, its cuts and its sutures on bodies, homes, gardens, schools, bakeries. My young friend Tuhami, an Athenian university graduate in his early 30s, unemployed but for the occasional day work here and there throughout the city, had decided to avail himself of the existing programs through the Office of Unemployment (OAED) that offer training for the establishment of cooperatives and other collaborative ventures. The program started in November 2014 scheduled to last one month, but it lasted for four, with 400-euro compensation for each participant, taxable and payable in the future; ‘all in all’, Tuhami says, ‘after all is said and done, counting tax, our meals, gasoline to and from, and without counting any missed day-wages [because the program does not allow one to work while attending it] sometime in the future each one of us in the program will get about 150 euros in hand for four months of attendance. Better than nothing’ he adds, laughing at the laughability of the deal. Parergon 1 I am using here the name Tuhami as a double index – first as a reference to Vincent Crapanzano’s work on ‘truth and the real’ in its conceptual, experiential and re-presented markings on one specific and singular individual, the Moroccan bricklayer Tuhami (1980). Second, I use the name as a ‘form’ for the engagement with the real, that which lies between the impossible ideality of ‘the thing in itself’ and the presumptuousness that is the prerequisite for any engagement with the Phenomenon, in other words, to underline the ethnographic (or any other type of) possibility and capability of producing from a single body (the body of the ethnographic inquiry) anything other than an assemblage that is the sum total of what the person-inside-the-body (what we could call the subject, Foucauldian or otherwise) thinks of herself, appears to be, is perceived as, becomes re-presented, ‘is’ in her plurality. I am soldering together here Crapanzano with Stephen Tyler’s humanism (1986); Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges (1988); and Susan Harding’s standpoint theory (1986).

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One day Tuhami calls me on the phone audibly upset; he says ‘listen to what happened today: there is a man in the program, younger than you, maybe forty years old, who had no means of getting back home from the program. I had left the car where the program bus had picked us up, so I told him I’d take him home, somewhere above the antiquities [the program was taking place in the greater Athens area, and the antiquities that Tuhami mentions are not accessible by public transport]; if I didn’t take him he’d have to walk uphill about half an hour to get there, you understand? On the way he asked me to stop at the bakery to get bread for himself and his mother, because, you know, he lives with his mother who is around eighty years old.’ I asked if he is Greek; ‘totally’, Tuhami responded, and continued ‘I stopped at the bakery and as he was getting out of the car he stalled and asked me when I thought we were going to be paid by the program. I said I didn’t know; I said “brother, I am on the same boat as you are, I need to be paid soon, too.” He said that he was going to spend his last two euros. He went into the bakery and came back holding a loaf of bread and a cheese pie. He cut the pie in half and handed me one piece. Neni, I didn’t know what the fuck to do . . . Take it? Really? He had just told me that he had no more money. Not take it? Wouldn’t that be an insult on his injury? émeina malákas [I was left like a jerk, I didn’t know what to do]. I said to him “brother, just eat it, I am going home for dinner” but he insisted, so I took just a bit of the piece that he had offered me and I said “so that I won’t insult you” and I drove him home. Did he tell me the truth? Was this the last of his money? I don’t know, how the fuck do I know? How can anyone know in this whore of a country [s’ autï tïn poutána tï ho¯ra].’ ‘Who would dare to measure and compare the fears human beings experienced?’ Hannah Arendt has asked about other fears and terrors (1994 [1953]: 298). Who, really, would be able to gauge fear against fear, trepidation against trepidation, humiliation against humiliation? Who can gauge which position is better or worse, which one produces a more or less saturated emotional, existential, even analytical site, Tuhami’s or his nameless friend’s? The next day Tuhami calls me again: ‘that was his last money’ he said. ‘I offered him a ride again and on the way – because my psyche is shitty, too [giati eimai ki ego¯ skatópsychos] and maybe I wanted to test him because I am a piece of shit, and I don’t know if I can trust anyone, I asked him if he wanted me to stop at the bakery again. Do you know what he said, Neni? He said “didn’t I tell you yesterday that that was my last money?” I offered him ten euros, saying that I didn’t need it because I had a day’s work coming up on Saturday, but he didn’t take it . . . he thanked me, but he didn’t take it.’ A few days later Tuhami said that the man didn’t show up again at the program. ‘Maybe he didn’t have the money to get himself there’ he said ‘and he was too ashamed to take my offer for a ride. . . .’ We never found out.

136 Panourgiá ‘Poverty disgraces no man’ comes Walter Benjamin’s searing critique of the moralist discourses erected against the poor, only to continue: Well and good. But they disgrace the poor man. They do it, and then console him with the little adage . . . But no one may ever make peace with poverty when it falls like a gigantic shadow upon his countrymen and his house. Then he must be alert to every humiliation done to him, and so discipline himself that his suffering becomes no longer the downhill road of grief but the rising path of revolt. Yet there is no hope for this so long as the bleakest, most terrible stroke of fate, daily and even hourly discussed by the press, set forth in all its illusionary causes and effects, helps no one uncover the dark powers that hold his life in thrall. (Benjamin 1996: 452, emphasis in the original) The situation in Greece has shifted all grounds – not only the economic one (which is the most obvious), but also, much more ominously, the grounds of meaning, signification and understanding; in other words, the grounds of recognition. Is ‘poor’ an ontological category? Does it define, determine, organize the architectonics of human beings and their psyches, foreclosing any possibilities of being something other? Not in the manner in which Oscar Lewis, in his attempt to explain why the poor remain poor, decided that poverty creates existential sites that are inescapable because they occupy familiar locations of affective recognition, but in the much deeper, philosophical meaning of ontology, maybe a Kantian or even a Hegelian one, a thing-in-itself, that does not bear within it any possibility of being punctured precisely because (to remember Heidegger) ‘it does not allow it’ much in the way in which the stone does not allow for any inter-subjectivity with it. I am tempted to puncture this ontology with one that has been differently, otherwise articulated, one that has been detected as violently constructed around subjects that ought to occupy the space of the indebted, those who are perpetually always already in the debt of others, what Maurizio Lazzarato has identified as the a priori ‘indebted man’ (2012). Parergon 2 Oscar Lewis (1959) developed the theory of the ‘culture of poverty’ on which he based his comprehensive analysis of poverty. Lewis’ position was that prolonged poverty of the levels and kinds encountered in the shanty towns and ghettos present in the (1960s) US southern periphery (Puerto Rico, Mexico and Cuba) were not systemic but endemic, meaning that they were not simply the result of systemic economic violence but were primarily the result of a developed ethos (a culture) of defeat, indifference, and over-reliance on public assistance that was instilled and ingrained in those areas. He argued that the

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poor find a comfortable emotional familiarity in poverty that cannot be changed even with radical financial assistance from the outside as he tried to explain the reasons for long-term poverty not through a structural analysis of the economic violence that perpetuated the support of poverty, but through psychological explanations that maintained that the modalities of coping while being longterm poor do not change even when the economic conditions change. In other words, according to Lewis, one can lift the boy out of poverty but can’t lift poverty out of the boy, obviously an immensely problematic proposition, especially when formulated along the axis of lifting someone out of poverty rather than recognizing that poverty is an articulated global problem and that it can only be lifted when the global conditions of its presence are lifted.6

The phenomenon ‘We are not poor’ Tuhami said to me one day, as we were talking about the financial conditions of him, his family’s and his friends. ‘There are so many people who are so much worse off than we are’, he continued, as he was telling me that he did not have the extra three euros that he needed to buy Nutella at the supermarket. He continued saying ‘we are not poor, but how am I ever going to have a little child of my own if we go on like this?’ The challenges that poverty places on the rearing of children are obvious now, even without the recognition that has been imprinted on this knowledge by Adam Smith, but they certainly were not obvious in the early nineteenth century when Smith found it necessary to explain that ‘poverty [though it does not prevent the generation] is extremely unfavorable to the rearing of children’ (Adam Smith 1801: 120).

The becoming Tuhami had not always been ‘poor’, in any of the valances of the term. He was born into an old moneyed Athenian family, with grandparents who (at least on one side of his nuclear family) were both professionals and had been so for two generations (both men and women) and many more generations than that, as far as the men of the family were concerned. The family had retained its large real estate that had been handed down over a few generations, and which had been augmented by liquid assets, all in all producing a wealth that allowed the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s (his parents’ generation) to pursue their inclinations rather than be locked into revenue-and-boredom professions – his mother was a selfproclaimed artist and his father an engineer. His parents divorced when he was seven years old and he and his much younger brother grew up under the care of his mother. Tuhami himself had spent his college years working as day-labourer for (older) friends of his, picking up pocket money since the

138 Panourgiá age of sixteen. He never asked for (neither was he ever offered) benefits such as insurance and pension, or for anything more permanent. Those were the years of financial amplitude for Greece, pre-2009, when it seemed that jobs were there for the asking, even with the decline in compensation, even with the rise of the 700-euro Generation.7 A young man in early adulthood seemed poised to have the opportunity to try out different subjective locations without fearing the pinch of the markets. Or so it seemed to anyone disinclined to pay close attention to the seamlessness that stitched together global capital with the systematic erosion of rights; where responsibility, autonomy and self-determination (all of them terms and concepts that carry within them a history saturated with the violence of power, privilege and ideology) were retooled and repurposed to animate and normalize flexicurity and individuation. Even as EU-15 and EU-278 engaged in a discourse of success and affluence, and while their populations were sliding further and farther into predatory debt and uncertainty, Greece was already at the lower rungs of this performative affluence. Parergon 3 Flexicurity is a relatively new term, coined in the late 1990s to describe new approaches to the relationship between labour security and social justice that were first implemented as policies in Denmark (EC 2007; Jensen 2001). The main point of flexicurity, according to its inceptors, is that worker security – expressed as security of employment and wages and as social welfare security – creates financial rigidity that impedes economic growth. This is in contradistinction to mainstream economic theory that maintains that minimal worker financial and employment security are the incentives for good performance both in the public and the private sector. Roger Boyer has argued (for the United Nations) that the labour environment of the 1960s when ‘the institutionalization of workers’ rights and the constitution of an extended welfare state proved to be compatible with a fast and rather stable growth’ and when ‘dynamic efficiency and social justice were more frequently perceived as complementary rather than contradictory’ (2006: 2, my emphasis) has been dismantled under the pressures of globalization, as multinational corporations have outsourced their production lines to developing countries that have not entered yet into regimes of protection of the workers’ rights neither have they actualized the necessity for a social welfare state. The lack of established and institutionalized workers’ rights in those countries was translated into the euphemism of ‘labour-market flexibility’ (ibid.), a double-tongued promise – the workers were promised flexibility to move from job to job or to have flexible hours (meaning: not work full eight-hour-days) without the constraints of tenure while capital was promised the flexibility of firing and hiring or making parttime employment the only possible option.

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The phenomenon But what does this poverty look like and how can a person such as Tuhami fall into it? What sorts of reimaginings of meanings take place that change basic needs into commodities – what becomes a ‘commodity’? Bread? Milk? Soap? Health care? Having a child? Tuhami had been working as a day labourer for pocket money since the age of sixteen – first only on weekends while he was a high school student, then a few days a week while he was attending university, and then more intensively after he graduated. His employers were friends of his, older in age, whom he had met in the neighbourhood and who were running their own small-scale businesses in the building sector. One day he would be installing awnings on balconies of apartment buildings around the city, another day he would be installing aluminium door and window frames, all of it ‘black money’: although the employers issued receipts of payment to their clients, Tuhami was always paid under the table, thirty euros a day, with no contributions to the corresponding social welfare fund hence with no insurance, no pension, no leave time. I suggested that he asks his friends at least to make contributions to the fund. He was adamantly against it – ‘I am not going to push them do anything they don’t want to do on their own’ he said. So, he continued working at two jobs and would still not be able to make ends meet had it not been for the fact that he lived with his unemployed mother in her own dowry house, and, still 25 years old, was eligible for health insurance under his father’s insurance plan. But that was until pre-2009, when the crisis was only subterranean. When the crisis hit and the building sector was the second most-hit after small private businesses, those day wages all but dried up. Tuhami was hired by a pastry shop where he was preparing anything from cake batter to ganache, again being paid with ‘black money’. For the first time he was working alongside migrant workers, too – a young Albanian man and two women from Poland. I asked him one day what would happen if he got hurt at work. ‘I’d be fucked’,9 he said ‘I’ve no idea what I would do’. Parergon 4 In an article that explores the moralistic groundwork on which rests the rhetoric (both domestic and international) that circulates around the financial crisis in Greece and the presence of poverty in the country, Christos Papatheodorou identifies two topological pressure points that bleed into most accounts. The first one concerns the amount of financial amplitude enjoyed by ‘the Greeks’, that almost mythical race of people who are the object of the wagging finger of the various and different publics of the various and different media and who are represented as wallowing in unfathomable riches snatched from the hands of those hard-working ‘others’. The second one concerns the connection between poverty and unemployment.

140 Panourgiá Data collected and presented by Eurostat in 2009 that referred to the year 2008 show that Greece had the highest level of poverty of the EU-15 and one of the highest among the EU-27 (Papatheodorou 2011). These data precede the financial crisis and the multiple memoranda that drove the process of pauperization starting in 2011. Papatheodorou further notes that less than 6 percent of the poor in Europe (with the exception of the countries of the European South) live under conditions comparable to those of the poorest 20 percent in Greece (Papatheodorou and Dafermos 2010 quoted in Papatheodorou 2011: 7). Kapsalis and Kouzis have also argued how the elasticization and flexibilization of employment produces a precarity that encounters a non-dilemma: pauperization with or without the condition of employment (2014: 173).

Tuhami kept working every day of the week, with no days off or vacation, with no social security payments to cover injury, vacation or sick days, plodding along until he developed carpal tunnel syndrome. He would be useless to the pastry shop if the owner knew about it, because his wrist did not allow him to roll out and gather melted chocolate on the marble counter; but he kept working until his wrist gave out completely. Jobless, with no insurance (the coverage from his father’s having dried up), he decided to turn to agricultural work. His maternal grandfather, a dynamic and energetic engineer who had a deep connection with the land, had picked up agriculture as a hobby a few decades earlier and had revived the family’s old olive and pistachio groves and vineyards located at two different parts of the country. Initially the olive groves were distinct small plots handed down the generations as dowries and an inheritance that this tireless engineer had consolidated into one of the largest in the area; the production not only covered his family’s needs but there was always plenty of surplus that was stored in the cellars to give as gifts to friends or to have as back-up during the fallow years. The vineyards were smaller but still produced enough grapes for the family’s wine, as did the pistachio grove. Parergon 5 Voglis and Karpozilos (2014) have shown that the Eleutherios Venizelos government, faced with the rapid population expansion following the addition of the northern areas of Greece (1912) and the influx of refugees from Asian Minor in 1922 engaged in agrarian reform that would guarantee enough agricultural production to meet the needs of the country through the perpetuation of ownership of small familial cultivable plots of land while thus safeguarding the dependence of small-scale agriculturalists on the government for their economic and political protection. These farmers were only slightly different than the new ones. The old ones were the result of a violent relocation that was the outcome of war and persecution; they might or might not have been farmers in Asia Minor, but that is what they became when they were given these plots. The new farmers, like Tuhami, are the result of a violent economics, caught in what Stathis

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Gourgouris has called ‘flash impoverishment’ (2013: 169) – middle-class men and women who found themselves working the land of their ancestors performing a life that those ancestors had left behind on the promise of a perpetual urban prosperity. Neither of them fall under the two categories of farmers that Samir Amin described (2003) when he talked about ‘farmers who are not peasants’, by which he means agribusiness, who have taken up intensified industrialized agricultural production. In Greece, we see now ‘farmers who are not peasants’, because the trajectories of their lives were differently oriented and configured – farming originated as a gesture of desperation. (This account does not overlook the few large-scale non-peasant farmers who appeared prior to the crisis and engaged in farming that is artisanal, often organic, and almost always exported, with a specialized market in mind).

Having been the apple of his grandfather’s eye, Tuhami had spent many a weekend and a summer as a boy following his grandfather around. He figured that agricultural work could get him out of the desperate financial situation that he was in. The production was fully organic, the network for tending and harvesting that his grandfather had put in place was still operable, and all he needed to do was take over the oversight and contribute as much personal manual labour as possible in order to make the production viable. He continued to live with his unemployed mother who was living on the income that she was getting from two small rental units that she had acquired after her father’s death. Parergon 6 Despite the fact that the unemployed in Greece face a lower danger of pauperization (gauged by complete material deprivation) because of family support, there is no difference in the percentage of those who experience extreme deprivation in Greece and the corresponding median of the EU-27 (Papatheodorou and Dafermos 2013: 27). This is certainly a more complex picture than the one that Hegel has described as part of the modern (what he calls) ‘civil society’ (meaning the State): civil society tears the individual from his family ties, estranges the members of the family from one another, and recognizes them as self-subsistent persons . . . thus the individual becomes a son of civil society which has as many claims upon him as he has rights against it. (1967, Paragraph 238: 149)

In the summer of 2011 the small house at the vineyard, a small clapboard house built on patrimonial land that the family had been using as a beach house since the beginning of the twentieth century, was burglarized. The damage done to the house was greater than the removed items, so Tuhami decided to repair and not think about it again. A couple of months later the

142 Panourgiá house was burglarized again. This time both the damage to the house and the theft itself cost much more, an expense that had to be taken out from any future income coming from the vineyard and the groves. The rest of the family chipped in the little money they could so that Tuhami could continue tending to the two groves. The two groves being about 150 km apart and gasoline prices being fivefold what they were in the US, Tuhami found himself having to take the decision between travelling to the groves or buying groceries, a decision by no means unique to him but shared by millions of others who everyday are being called to engage with such sites of ethical and affective responsibility: pay the electric bill or buy medicines? Buy medicines or feed the child? Walk to work for an hour and save the money for a book, a pencil and crayons? When harvest time came and he counted the revenue after taking out the cost of operating both places, Tuhami realized what generations of farmers had found out before him: agricultural work, unless it is large-scale and plugged into a global financial and distribution system, cannot sustain financially even one person, let alone a family. After paying the workers who had been hired to harvest the olives, and without a state structure to help him with the export of his yield, Tuhami ended up doing what countless other olive oil producers do in Greece: he sold his yield to the Italian agents who flood the Greek olive-producing areas at the time of the harvest offering anything between 1.90 to 2.90 euros per litre. The oil is loaded onto liquid-transport tanks and moved to Italy where it is being bottled and sold as so-called Italian (this means that the oil is being marketed as ‘Bottled in Italy’ which, technically speaking, it is. But it is not ‘Italian’ oil). For his first harvest, Tuhami made 3,000 euros. The following harvest, 2012, having set up a rudimentary system of bypassing ‘the Italians’ and selling the family oil abroad, Tuhami raised his income to 5,000 euros. But other catastrophes lurked. The grove was burglarized from which a sizable amount of scrap metal was removed. He started to worry that someone was after him. He reported the theft to the local police precinct who advised him to stand guard himself to catch the thieves in the act. ‘Yeah, right’ he said to me when I asked him about it, ‘as if I am going to bring out my grandfather’s double barrel rifle and hit the thieves with birdshot! I said this to them, too’ he added. With thieves in Greece carrying Kalashnikovs these days, the sarcasm of this statement could not get lost even on the police themselves. In the meantime the country was up in arms. Loss of work, heavy taxation, severe cuts in all sectors of the economy, and the gutting of the social welfare system, all piled upon the indignation felt as a result of the collusion between the government and the Troika, and riding on the global movement of the indignados, a new wave of demonstrations, the movement of the Squares, and a heightened sense of anomie all pointed at what Hegel had correctly diagnosed even in the height of his conservative turn, in 1821:

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When the standard of living of a large mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level – a level regulated automatically as the one necessary for a member of society – and when there is a consequent loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and the self-respect which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort, the result is the creation of a rabble of paupers. At the same time this brings with it, at the other end of the social scale, conditions which greatly facilitate the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands. (Hegel 1967 [1821]: par. 244: 150)10 Tuhami for the first time in his life participated in overt political action. Having spent all his life from his formative years onwards as a ‘metalás’ (a heavy metal fan, moving from punk to heavy metal, to black metal, to death metal or some such arrangement), he had always dismissed political engagement and praxis as either a bourgeois or hippie practice. But with the crisis crushing everything around him Tuhami started spending more and more time at Syntagma Square during the Movement of the Indignants, and when that had run its course and the various squares had been violently emptied by the police he participated in the autonomous solidarity movements that sprung up throughout Greece, grounds for further politicization of people who had thus far abstained from politics. When his income dropped by 2013 to 5,000 euros per year (13.50 euros per day) Tuhami was desperately looking for any kind of a job, but jobs could not be had. Occasionally he would be called by one of his two friends for an awning or an aluminium installation but those day wages never brought him more than 20 euros a week. He lived at the beach house, used a wood burning stove for heat, refillable natural gas containers for cooking, and turned the water heater on for bathing three times a week. His family lent him the money needed for gasoline to go to the olive groves on the expectation that he would pay it back. In the spring of 2013 there were three more burglaries – two at the grove and one at the beach house. The total loss was heavy because it included almost all of his agricultural tools and equipment: the thieves stole two brush trimmers, a petrol-motored chain saw, and stripped all the metal that they could carry from the old tractor that his grandfather had bought. All in all, the damage was close to 20,000 euros. Tuhami was desperate. He called around to see how he could replace at least some of the equipment, but all he could find were offers from friends to let him use the equipment that they were using which was itself borrowed from others in a circle of solidarity. In the middle of this he developed a serious health issue. When I saw him next I asked him about it. He was visiting the Solidarity Clinic in Athens, but there was little that the doctors there could do because he needed surgery. His mother mobilized the old network of friends of her

144 Panourgiá parents who had been very affluent and influential but also, by now, dead for a few years. One of those old friends was the director of one of the private clinics in Athens who, even though he was willing to perform the surgery for free, the clinic would have to be paid about 1,000 euros. The doctor sent him to one of his old interns, a surgeon, who was operating at one of the public university hospitals in Athens. As Tuhami was going back and forth from the grove to the clinic, from the clinic to the hospital, back to the grove I went along with him one day. As we were bent over looking at one of the parts of the tractor trying to figure out what to do he looked up towards me and I noticed a growth on his left eyelid. I asked him about it. He looked at me with a look that I have never seen on anyone else’s eyes, a mixture of desperation, sadness, incredulity and pain as he said ‘do you want me to tell you about everything else that is wrong in my life right now? Do you want me to show you the other part of my body that is oozing?’ He stood up and turned his empty pockets inside out saying ‘do you see how much money is in here? That’s how much money I have to my name right now. My eye will have to wait’.

Das Ding an sich – The thing in itself Indeed, ‘who would dare to measure and compare the fears human beings experienced?’ (Arendt 1994 [1953]: 298). Christine Lagarde, the lawyer and Managing Director of the IMF, at an interview that she gave in 2012 was asked about the dire humanitarian crisis in Greece caused by the austerity measures imposed by the ‘Troika’ of the IMF, the ECB and the EU, and whether she is able to ‘block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs’ to which Lagarde replied: I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.11 The question that slithers through all these different positions mentioned here, positions that keep re- and dis-locating any certainty about who is what when and why, positions that re-insert the political and the social into the economic, that keep reminding us that oeco-nomy concerns both the oikos/ house and its nomos/destiny, and that both economy and its discontents are fundamentally a social matter, a matter of a koinonia of citizens, not a matter of the board of trustees of a corporation, the question, then, is an ethical one, posited again and again by human beings who are living under these conditions – the question of ethical recognizability. Who has the right to recognize whom as what?

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To end – the question is not whether the poor will be recognized as poor but whether there is a possibility of an ethical subjective position for such recognition. Even at the point of sharing half of a cheese pie offered by a middle-aged man who has just spent his family’s last two euros to buy it.

Notes 1 See Papailias 2011a, Dalakoglou 2012, Theodossopoulos 2013, Panourgiá 2011, 2014, 2016, Leontidou 2012. 2 I make a sharp distinction here between the term neo-poor (neóptohoi in Greek), which indicates the rapid and drastic deterioration of both income and quality of life of previously middle-class persons, and the sarcastic locution ‘nouveaupoor’ which indicates a decline from a previous level of affluence to middle-class levels of comfort. The latter can be illustrated thus: at a dinner party that I attended in the extravagantly affluent suburb of Kefalari in the summer of 2011 a friend, ‘Sophia’, said that a few days earlier she had been invited to a dinner by one of her friends in the neighbourhood. Sophia went into the kitchen as the table was getting set with grilled fish and steaks, pies, salads, cheeses, having followed platters of appetizers, when her friend said that she should probably also serve some smoked salmon. Sophia said to me ‘I had to stop her! I said, we don’t need the salmon, let’s just exercise some frugality!’ It is the former, the neo-poor, who inhabit this text, not those who have given up smoked salmon. 3 In this endeavour I have benefited by looking at the study on neo-poverty in Northeastern China presented by Ou and others (2012). 4 Ethnographic research on networks of solidarity economy is slowly rising. See Theodoros Rakopoulos 2014a,b. 5 Dimitrios Thedossopoulos (2013: 217) has found himself in the position of having to defend his choice of privileging what he calls ‘local voices’ over more concerted presentations that have appeared in the public commons, such as journalistic accounts, historical analyses, and politicians’ rationalizations of the crisis. On a certain level Theodossopoulos sees both this choice and the critique articulated against it by the Current Anthropology commentators as the respective echoes of the two main ‘camps’ in Greek anthropology – the one that he calls Herzfeldian and the other that he calls Suttonian (after David Sutton), siding himself more with Michael Herzfeld’s schema of cultural intimacy and disemia and less with Sutton’s theories of resistance. I might not join Theodossopoulos’s enthusiasm over cultural intimacy and disemia, or in his dyadic account of Greek anthropology which excludes so many anthropologists who fall under neither camp (Athanasiou, Dalakoglou, Papagaroufali, Panourgiá, Cowan to name but a few), but I am puzzled about the critique of ‘local voices’ – is this not what anthropology and ethnography are beholden to? 6 Lewis’ model came under severe critique (both upon its first appearance, cf. Eleanor Leacock 1971, Carol Stack 1974, and about its afterlives, cf. Philippe Bourgois 1995, Jean Franco 1989, Susan Rigdon 1988, Loic Wacquant 1997). 7 The 700-euro Generation refers to the economic climate in Greece between 2007– 2009 when the youth entering the workforce faced the wages ceiling of 700-euros. See Gouglas 2014 www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4576&title= The-young-precariat-in-Greece-what-happened-to-Generation-700-euros. 8 EU-15 and EU-27 refer, respectively, to the restricted Eurozone as it existed in 2009, when the Crisis happened, that shared common currency, which has since then expanded to EE-19 with the addition of Slovakia (2009), Estonia (2011),

146 Panourgiá Latvia (2014), and Lithuania (2015); and to the wider formulation of political European partners which has since expanded to EU-28. 9 The expression that Tuhami used was ‘gámisé ta’ (fuck those things), an expression that is virtually untranslatable into English. The Greek expression does not have the same meaning as ‘fuck it’ currently does, which indicates frustration and giving up, but, as a dysphemic euphemism, it invites the interlocutor to share in the realization held by the speaker of an impasse or a catastrophe. It has become the most common response since the crisis to the question ‘how are things going?’ 10 Knox mentions in his translator’s note that Hegel uses here the term ‘pöbel, that is the plebs or proletariat or riff-raff, but no single word is available for a mass of rebellious paupers, recognizing no law but their own’ which is what Knox reads into Hegel’s use of the term. Gans (1833) has interjected an addition into Hegel’s text (Knox assumes that it comes from notes that he kept from Hegel’s lectures, 1967: v) further explaining this use of the term by Hegel. Gans writes as a way of explanation on paragraph 244: The lowest subsistence level, that of a rabble of paupers, is fixed automatically, but the minimum varies considerably in different countries. In England, even the very poorest believe that they have rights; this is different from what satisfies the poor in other countries. Poverty in itself does not make men into rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government, &c. A further consequence of this attitude is that through their dependence on chance men become frivolous and idle, like the Neapolitan lazzaroni for example. In this way there is born in the rabble the evil of lacking self-respect enough to secure subsistence by its own labour and yet at the same time of claiming to receive subsistence as its right. Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another. The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society. (Hegel 1967: 278) 11 A detailed report of the interview can be found at www.theguardian.com/world/ 2012/may/25/payback-time-lagarde-greeks. The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens . . . Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. ‘Parents have to pay their tax,’ she says. Greece, which has seen its economy shrink by a fifth since the recession began, has been told to cut wages, pensions and public spending in return for financial help from the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank. Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: ‘I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.’ Lagarde, predicting that the debt crisis has yet to run its course, adds: ‘Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those

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people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.’ She says she thinks ‘equally’ about Greeks deprived of public services and Greek citizens not paying their tax. ‘I think they should also help themselves collectively.’ Asked how, she replies: ‘By all paying their tax.’ Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: ‘That’s right.’

10 Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens1 Andreas Chatzidakis

In a world ‘that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value’ (Bauman 2007a: 124), contemporary Athens has comparatively little, if any, status left. It is the world’s ‘failed’ consumer city par excellence: comprising zombie retailscapes for largely disempowered consumer-citizens that still mourn the dramatic decline of their spending power. Athens tells the story of spaces that, at least for some time, successfully promoted consumerism and, by implication, naturalised capitalism as the only alternative. But it also tells the story of neighbourhoods that resisted it, through subverting material, experiential and socio-spatial characteristics of the commoditised terrain. These spaces are now a physical manifestation of a lived ideology and its failings, an ideology that altered not only the Athenian cityscape but, more profoundly, the everyday logics and practices of its residents (and visitors). I present this account in three acts: Athens as a consumer city in the making; Exarcheia as an Athenian neighbourhood that contested the consumer city; and Athens as a failed consumer city. I conclude with questions of solidarity, a notion that (re)surfaced against the increasingly dystopian reality facing Athenian residents and reflect about Athens in the Here and Now.

A consumer city in the making I grew up in Athens throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in the midst of a transition period that brought dramatic changes to the Athenian cityscape. In many ways, the ‘ancient city’ was in a full-blown and ferocious transformation into a ‘consumer city’. For despite the ubiquitous view of the Acropolis and other ancient sites, Athens began to look more like any other European ‘future-oriented’ city: introducing some of the biggest shopping malls in Southeast Europe, iconic buildings by celebrity architects, bigger and wider motorways for ever-so-bigger and wider cars, new museums, urban lofts, retail parks, theme parks, and various new cafés, artspaces and multi-purpose buildings for an emerging and increasingly confident ‘creative class’ (Florida

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 149 2002). By 2004, the year of hosting the Olympics, Athens was keen to erase its more recent memories and eager to fetishise antiquity in its rebranding as a world-class destination. Major facelifts and investments in urban infrastructure had turned the city itself into an alluring object of consumption: contemporary yet rich in history, sophisticated, even as ‘chic’ as Paris2 and as ‘creative’ as Berlin,3 and above all full of opportunities for consumption catering to all cosmopolitan tastes and sensibilities. But the transition of Athens into a city of (over)consumption was far more pronounced not in the physical surroundings but in the everyday logics and practices of its residents. In the neighbourhood I grew up, and which in many ways epitomised the Greek model of urban gentrification, the formation of new subjectivities akin to the neoliberal consumer-citizen began to manifest in all spheres of daily life. At least for some time, nearly everyone seemed blessed with the freedom of experimentation and identity differentiation through the acquisition of an ever-expanding list of consumption objects. Soon it became not only about what people were consuming but also where, marking the formation of neighborhoods with distinct class identities. Popular songs and TV series, for instance, narrated stories of people from different districts of Athens (middle versus working class) that were to fall in love and strive for a life together despite their differences. For a city that never underwent a process of heavy industrialisation and class-stratification, as for example Paris or London, this was a remarkable cultural shift. Concurrently, some academic studies began to take note of Greece’s transition from a ‘collectivist’ to an ‘individualist’ culture (e.g. Pouliasi and Verkuyten 2011).

Exarcheia as an Athenian heterotopia – a contested consumer city? The years of the Athenian spectacle ended violently and abruptly in December 2008, uncovering various underlying tensions and contradictions, not least in the consumption-led model of urban development (see Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011). Within Exarcheia, the city’s traditional core of intellectual and political activity, capitalist ‘cracks’ (Holloway 2010) and ‘societies within societies’ (Papi 2003) began to appear everywhere. One of the most striking examples, for instance, was what is now known as ‘Navarinou park’ or ‘the park’, a former parking lot that was turned into an open squat by Exarcheia-based residents (and other enthusiastic supporters) who, in the aftermath of the 2008 riots: . . . united to squat on the space and demand the obvious, that the parking turns into a park! They broke the asphalt with drills and cutters, they brought trucks carrying soil, planted flowers and trees and in the end they celebrated it.4

150 Chatzidakis Operating on the basis of self-management, anti-hierarchical structuring and anti-commercialisation, the park aspired to be: . . . a space for creativity, emancipation and resistance, open to various initiatives, such as political, cultural and anti-consumerist ones. At the same time, it aspires to be a neighbourhood garden which accommodates part of the social life of its residents, is beyond any profit or ownershipdriven logics and functions as a place for playing and walking, meeting and communicating, sports, creativity and critical thinking. The park defies constraints relating to different ages, origins, educational level, social and economic positioning.5 Consumerist society and atomised logics and practices were at the heart of critique in various other ‘here and now’ experimentations with doing things differently. There was a collective, for instance, that directly traded with Zapatistas and various other alternative trading networks that brought together politically like-minded producers and consumers without intermediaries. There were also various no-ticket cinema screenings, collective cooking events, time banks, gifting bazaars and ‘anti-consumerist’ spaces where people could come and give, take, or give and take goods without any norms of reciprocity. For a consumer researcher, post-2008 Athens seemed to be an ultimate laboratory for alternative tactics of consumer resistance and modes of consumer-oriented activism. In a sense, as I have argued elsewhere (Chatzidakis et al. 2012), Exarcheia became a heterotopia of resistance, whereby alternative modes of social ordering – including those dictated by the ideology of consumerism – were constantly tried out. But how did areas such as Exarcheia pose a threat, symbolic and/or real, to the consumer city? Here following triadic understandings of (urban) space,6 I argue that Exarcheia represented an alternative in at least three distinct – yet interconnected – realms: material; symbolic; and socio-spatial. Firstly, the materiality of the Exarcheian built environment demarcated it from surrounding areas wherein consumption – as the main mode of organising everyday life – predominated. For instance, Makrygianni and Tsavdaroglou (2011) explain that the quick spreading of the 2008 riots was inextricably linked with the small size of building blocks and frequency of road intersections, that is, every 45m in Exarcheia as opposed to 220m in more bourgeois neighbourhoods. This translates into comparably higher visibility, possibility of ambushes and ability to communicate directly, factors that are of paramount significance to all types of civic and political activity in the area. In a similar vein, Thomatos (in Spyropoulos 2013) attributes the rise of graffiti to the dysmorphy of the structured environment and the lack of free spaces, turning walls into recipients of a generalized discontent. Colours such as black and red predominate, because of their historical association with the anarchist movement and their capacity to symbolically

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 151 express general feelings of anger and discontent. Along with some neutral colour variations, they compose the overall aesthetic palette of the area, reflected for instance in most wall flyers, posters and the variety of retail outlets. They contrast with a new generation of what some residents term ‘happy’ cafés and restaurants that opened in the early 2000s, so called because they arguably attempt to attract a more fashionable and transient clientele. Concurrently, differences between neighbouring areas are signified through a variety of other material elements: from the round-the-clock presence of riot police vans at major entry/exit points, to installations of public art and table games, restaurants with names such as ‘Molotov’, ‘Kalashnikov Garden’ and ‘Necropolis’, and depictions of Exarcheia as a separate island in objects such as restaurant tablecloths. Focusing further on the area’s retailscape, one also observes a highly disproportionate amount of bookstores and print shops (approximately 1 per 60 residents), record shops, alternative small businesses, and various organic and local food stores. In contrast, franchise chains and big multinational brands (e.g. McDonald’s, Starbucks) are virtually absent in the area, arguably because of insufficient demand but also previous instances of vandalism of such outlets by Exarcheia-based groups and visitors. This absence of mainstream brands and overt signifiers of consumerism in conjunction with the amount of space dedicated to cultural and artistic expression means that to some extent the built environment in Exarcheia conveys an atmosphere that subverts mainstream aesthetics and sensibilities of the consumer city. As one of my informants put it: I will try to describe the complexity of this area. Because the main University, the Polytechneio, is here, the Faculty of Law is there, the School of Chemistry is very close, it used to be a student area, which is something really good because it makes the feeling very good. Young people are around, books are around as well, publications. All the little workshops that used to bind the books together, there are many of those, especially in my street, many of those. Galleries and theatres, some of the most important ones are also here, cinemas and many cafés, many tavernas, cheap food. You can have a good supper with little money but it’s also an area that it’s open to new trends, maybe because of the Universities, because of the students, things seem to be like this, so there is an openness to different ideas and to trends, most of the time left ideas. Conservative people are not very welcome somehow. (Helena) The area’s built environment – including the university, bookshops, cafés, bars, galleries and theatres – therefore conveys its inhabitants’ receptivity to new ideas, ideas that in many cases also challenge the capitalist system. Books, in particular, have long been associated with free thought, knowledge

152 Chatzidakis and awareness. Their suppression through censorship or burning has historically been identified with repressive regimes such as Nazism or Maoism, as well as with dystopian visions of the future (that is Fahrenheit 451). The proliferation of book shops in Exarcheia is a material manifestation of the area’s intellectual openness, while the numerous book binders and print services facilitate the easy production of pamphlets and other activist literature. The numerous cafés and bars reinforce such perceptions, providing spaces for the easy exchange of ideas while encouraging debate (Karababa and Ger 2011). Beyond the materiality of the area, Exarcheia produces (and is produced by) a range of affective and embodied experiences that are felt by inhabitants and visitors alike. For instance, people often talk about the particular ‘air that one breathes when entering Exarcheia’, a sense of ‘tension’ and ‘urgency’ that contrasts with the atmospheric impact of surrounding neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, such seemingly ‘psychogeographic’ (Debord 1955) and ‘unconscious’ (a term used by various informants) effects correlate with both everyday events and the physical environment of the area. For instance, miniscale rioting and instances of police intrusion, even of customers found within retail premises are not uncommon. Also common is a sense of tension and ‘frenetic energy’ that pervades the area, a sense that is further exacerbated by the ubiquitous graffiti, raising a kind of ‘wall-fever’ that reflects ‘the heartbeat of a boiling city’ (documentation of Exarcheian graffiti by Spyropoulos 2013). Because the physical infrastructure facilitates instant access to communications in the sense of printed material and potential poster sites, the lived experience is one of continual action. A thought can be translated into communicative action at considerably higher speed and lower cost than in surrounding districts. Ultimately, living in and passing by the Exarcheian space generates emotional and behavioural responses akin to ‘topophobia’ (fear or distaste of a place) and ‘topophilia’ (affiliation with a place; see e.g. Ruan and Hogben 2007). Countering the production of individualized, post-political ‘consumers’ in and through highly commoditized spaces such as retail parks, shopping districts and malls (J. Smith 1996), Exarcheia cultivates a subject position that is devoid of the consumption-centric social order. This is reflected in a variety of alternative consumption logics and practices centred on ‘degrowth’ (Latouche 2009) and voluntary simplicity (various posters), de-commodification attempts through solidarity and alternative trading networks, an Exarcheia-based time bank, gifting bazaars, numerous DIY projects and seminars, daily collective cooking events, regular free gigs and no-ticket cinema screenings. Similar to Portwood-Stacer’s (2012) study of anarchist movements in the US, these lifestyle-based choices can be viewed as ideologically motivated but also material and symbolic expressions of what it means to be an Exarcheia resident. Nonetheless, this place identity narrative relied more heavily on abstention from mainstream consumption

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 153 rather than alternative consumption choices, reflecting a highly diverse ideological and socio-demographic profile of residents that shared in common a distaste for ‘affluent consumer stereotypes and Hollywood-like entertainment’ (Papadopoulou 2010). As a participant in a residents’ committee put it, Exarcheia is not ‘the arena for wearing trendy clothes, ordering frapuccinos and engaging in celebrity gossip’. For those that do so, we observed feelings of ‘topophobia’, often avoiding passing through the area, dressing down, hiding luxurious items and placing expensive cars in private car parks: ‘. . . for the average Athenian, Exarcheia is still perceived as a dangerous zone, an area run by anarchists and in constant trouble’ (Anna, 53). To a large extent, consumption in the Exarcheian space reflects and reproduces logics of normative and ‘aesthetic revisioning’ (Soper 2008) that stand in opposition to those of mainstream society and are felt alike upon all ‘those that love Exarcheia truly, those that hate it and those that are simply passing by’ (leaflet produced by the park’s assembly, May 2012). Finally, Exarcheia can be viewed as the socio-spatial product of competing ideologies of public good consumption, embedded in everyday exchanges between urban residents, street artists, marketplace actors, city and state planners. For instance, residents’ ongoing struggles for their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1991) are echoed in a variety of spatial practices, from throwing bricks and firebombs to chain retail stores and symbols of affluent consumerism (e.g. expensive cars), to occupying buildings, decorating streets and protesting against the rise of anti-social behavior and drug trafficking in the area. Particularly illustrative of countervailing logics is Exarcheia’s ‘park’ or ‘Navarinou park’, the guerrilla park noted in the opening of this section. Countervailing logics to conventional public space consumption are also manifest in the relation between Exarcheia dwellers and street artists. Echoing a ‘collectivistic’ rather than ‘individualistic’ appraisal of public space (Visconti et al. 2010), much of the street art in Exarcheia is decidedly nonunidirectional, encouraging critical reflection and conversational involvement. Kostas, a 32-year-old graffiti artist expressed it thus: ‘It is an interaction, it’s not just you are passing by and you’re tagging your name, it is very important to understand what needs the place that you are in’. Similarly, photographic documentation of street art in Exarcheia from 2009–2012 (Spyropoulos 2013: 7) records how it is: . . . expressing this Exarcheia atmosphere more than anything, so emblematic and non-conformist. This art is not easy to ‘consume’. Some of it targets places that are secret and you must look hard in order to discover them. Many are misspelled and perhaps corrected by someone, something which is fun to watch in terms of how it’s perceived and what reactions it brings.

154 Chatzidakis More strikingly however, collectivist logics have begun to penetrate the traditionally ‘individualized’ marketplace, evident in the rise of various workers’ co-operatives that have begun to run places such as cafés and restaurants, bookstores, IT shops and courier services. In an area where shopping decisions are often made on the basis of political affiliation with the storeowner (various informants), the boundaries between public and private space are increasingly blurred. As Penny and Crabapple (2012), a couple of British journalists that wrote a novel about their week-long visit to Exarcheia, observe: Athens has an anarchist district in the way that other cities have their Chinatowns and Little Italys. You can find anarchists everywhere, but here the shops are all theirs, the iconography all theirs . . . Even if it is a great exaggeration to claim, in a literal sense, that ‘all’ shops belong to anarchists, some shops do indeed belong to them such as ‘Vox Squatted Social Centre’, a former café/bookstore at the central square of Exarcheia that is now occupied and all profits go in support of political comrades that face juridical charges.

A failed consumer city Fast forward five years, however, and theories and critiques of consumerist society and possessive individualism (Graeber 2011b) have to a certain extent been made redundant, both in Athens and within Exarcheia in particular. As Skoros, an anti-consumerist collective put it: When we started Skoros . . . everything was easier. It was much easier to propose anti-consumerism, re-use, recycling and sharing practices. Later however the economic crisis arrived – of course the social and cultural crises pre-existed – and made us feel awkward. How can one speak of anti-consumerism when people’s spending power has shrunk considerably? How can one propose a critique of consumerist needs when people struggle to meet their basic needs? . . . (leaflet by Skoros, December 2011) Indeed, Athens is now by and large inhabited by people who can no longer fully express themselves on the basis of what they consume and where. Their city is no longer a ‘world-class’ city for consumption (Miles 2010) and cannot pretend to be. After all, it is the capital and by far most populous city of the first developed country to be downgraded to ‘emerging’ market status.7 By 2014, the average Greek salary was reduced by 40 per cent.8 In many ways, the consequences are far more pronounced in Athens than anywhere else. The once well-to-do Athenian middle-classes now parallel the

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 155 world’s so-called ‘emerging middle-classes’ in reverse, experiencing everyday precariousness and the fears of ‘falling from the middle’ (Kravets and Sandikci 2014) – and straight onto the poverty zone – in an unprecedented magnitude and scale. Increasingly Athenians approximate Europe’s ‘defective’ and ‘disqualified’ consumers (Bauman 2007a, 2011), unable to fully define themselves neither in terms of what they consume nor what they produce: with unemployment rates hitting a record 27 per cent across the entire population and over 50 per cent among the youth.9 Present-day Athens is the world’s ‘failed’ consumer city par excellence: comprising ‘zombie’ retailscapes for increasingly disempowered consumers who still mourn the dramatic decline of their spending power and unfulfilled consumer desires that seem all the more unreachable. I have seen, for instance, various individuals visiting gifting bazaars and desperately trying to revive consumer fantasies and a ‘customer ethos’ remnant of a not-sodistant past where much of their leisure time was spent around department stores. I have heard of others that walk into stores and pay a small deposit to reserve items, pretending they don’t know that it is no longer possible to return and buy them. In a (European) society of consumers, ‘a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value’ (Bauman 2007: 124), both Athens and its residents have comparatively little, if any, status. To the untrained eye – and a remaining Athenian elite that still lives within secluded walls of excess and affluence – it may be difficult to fully grasp the depth and the breadth of such failure. After all it is still possible to consume Athens (and even Exarcheia) subject to (carefully) guided tours and the (fragile) success of various ‘re-thinking’ and ‘rebranding’ projects.10,11 According to the New York Times, for instance, the city is ‘surging back’, a testament that ‘vibrancy and innovation can even bloom in hard times’.12 Potential visitors are reassured that various neighbourhoods have witnessed a ‘resurgence’, are ‘quickly gentrifying’ and getting a ‘cultural lift’.13 Indeed, some streets of Athens are still buzzing and there are various new ‘entertainment zones’ where opportunities for hedonistic pursuits and ‘experiential consumption’ (e.g. Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) abide. But the proliferation of new cafés and budget eateries is also understood in the context of the heroic Athenian entrepreneur, who, facing dire prospects, invests in small businesses with a low start-up cost and (at least) some potential of reasonable profit margins. More profoundly perhaps, they can be understood in the context of the (failing) Athenian consumer, who having lost their ability to assert themselves through more traditional performances of conspicuous consumption, invest in ‘low-involvement’ yet symbolic daily expenditures. Put differently, these new sites of consumption represent a very last but much needed resort for consumption-mediated expressions of identity positioning and differentiation.

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Athens is calling: from solidarity across difference and distance to ‘in-group’ solidarity . . . How can we insist that ‘we are not a charity’ when poverty is next to us, around and above us and it is growing massively? How to counterpropose solidarity and community when the crisis isolates individuals and makes them turn against each other? . . . (leaflet by Skoros, December 2011) Against such a dystopian present, solidarity was bound to surface as a keyword. But it is hardly a new word in the streets of Athens. In my first systematic photographic recordings of graffiti, posters and various flyers around the city (back in 2008), ‘solidarity’ was already everywhere: from calls in support of comrades facing juridical charges to supporting underpaid (and non-paid) workers; from Athens to Mexico and into Palestine; from race to age and into gender. Soon after the crisis, however, discourses of solidarity diversified and multiplied. Various social actors began counterproposing their own solidarity logics and practices. The notion itself became a symbolic battlefield where even the most accountable for peoples’ misfortunes claimed part of the pile. The government, for instance, soon introduced its own version of additional ‘solidarity taxes’. It was now as if all other taxes did not have to do with solidarity. Meanwhile, in collaboration with various marketplace and religious actors, Sky TV – a proestablishment broadcaster – launched a relatively successful campaign titled ‘Oloi Mazi Mporoume’ (United We Can), comprising ‘actions for the collection of food, medication and clothes for those who need them as well as scholarships for those children that want to further their education but cannot due to financial difficulties’.14 Any willingness left to extend solidarity across difference and distance was therefore displaced into firmly depoliticised acts of pitifulness, supporting an implicit ontological understanding of the crisis as accidental rather than systemic (Harvey 2010), a temporary rather than prolonged state of being (Agamben 2004). Thanks to Sky TV’s campaign Greece’s youth could still further their education if they wanted to; and presumably enjoy a life of linear chronological progress (that is from education to full-time employment) once the painful years of crisis are over. Concurrently the strengthening of ingroup-outgroup categorisations and practices of othering undermined universal solidarity. For instance, Golden Dawn, a political party with explicit links to Nazi ideology and which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last national elections (July 2012), exercised solidarity through the creation of migrant-free zones (Vradis and Dalakoglou 2010). Among others, proudly Greek citizens concerned with the rise of migrant-led crime could now enjoy benefits such as guarded walks to ATMs. A kind of walk that for psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein could be read as the projection of paranoid-schizoid mechanisms into the other: including

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 157 migrants, anti-fascists and homosexuals. Soon Golden Dawn also introduced soup kitchens and solidarity trading initiatives ‘from-Greeks-for-Greeksonly’. As I have illustrated elsewhere (Chatzidakis 2013) the struggle was no longer only about urban space but also the phantasmic realm of commodities. From Zapatistas coffee to so-called ‘fascist rice’ (rice circulated in solidarity trading networks by right-wing producers) and ‘blood strawberries’ (named after the racist shooting and injuring of migrant strawberry pickers by their bosses) the Athenian’s shopping basket was full of streetlevel politics. For most Athenians, solidarity therefore failed to channel itself into more politically progressive realms. If anything, it was the family institution and the notion of intergenerational family solidarity that took centre-stage to firefight the gaps left by the dramatic cuts in standards of living and the demise of the welfare state. Moving back with the parents and grandparents, having extended family meals, sharing salaries and consumption objects and trying to get rid of things that were once a sign of freedom but had now become burdens (e.g. expensive cars) became part of daily life. In Athens and beyond, an increasing number of people had no choice but to rediscover the pleasures and the perils of (extended) family living.

Athens in the here and now . . . We are not sorry at all, quite the contrary, that the current socioeconomic system is in a deep crisis and we try, being part of the society, to put human lives above profits. In a capitalist system that is reaching its end, we are not going to feel nostalgic about the illusions of happiness offered by consumerist lifestyles but we are going instead to seek for novelty. We pose questions around degrowth, issues of scale and balance, and we deny the hegemony of financial profits. We propose small, ‘self-managed’ communities and not gigantic multinational enterprises. We believe in solidarity, social support and collaboration and not in charitable giving. We are part of society, not its rescuers. Our suggestion is simple. We produce and share goods, services, knowledge. We become independent of the old structures and develop new ones. These new structures will cultivate an environment that will allow a way out of the current economic, social and cultural crisis. A way out on the basis of equality and justice. . . . (leaflet by Skoros, December 2011) For those with an alternative vision of public and community life, one less mediated by consumption, the crisis represented a threat but also a welcomed opportunity for the cultivation of new ways of doing and thinking politics. An increasingly popular movement of ‘de-growth’ (Latouche 2009), for instance, called for redefining urban (and national) wealth not in economic

158 Chatzidakis terms but quality of life, social relations, equality and justice. But presentday Athens is far from having entered such a ‘virtuous circle of quiet contraction’ (Latouche 2009). Consumers of the spectacular Olympics and super-sized shopping malls were forced to embrace less materialistic lifestyles but not on the basis of voluntary downshifting or some kind of ‘alternative hedonism’ (Soper et al. 2009). Their way of living changed drastically but their political (consumer) subjectivities proved to be rather less versatile. Concurrently, a new politics of time and space stretched the Athenian antagonist movement to its limits. The utopian ‘here and now’, which largely inspired the formation of various ‘societies within societies’ (Papi 2003) and experimentations with doing things differently, was soon confronted by the ‘here and now’ of the crisis: a different kind of spatio-temporal logics focused less on ideological imperatives and more on here and now pragmatism, an urge to attend to people’s immediate needs. In their attempt to firefight the various gaps left by the welfare state and to respond to multiple calls for solidarity beyond traditional territories, some social movements went on ‘automatic pilot’ (emic term). Ideological principles had to be bracketed off, putting the emphasis on ‘urgency’. For example, although alternative and solidarity-based economies continued to proliferate the imperative for ‘fair’ and ‘transparent’ rather than ‘low’ prices became somewhat redundant. For most people participation in alternative trading networks simply made sense in their quest for lower prices. It was hard to blame them for doing so whilst watching them nearing (and falling below) the poverty line. Likewise, Skoros, the anti-consumerist collective who took a conscious decision to provide solidarity for all soon turned into a space of ‘over-consumption’, catering to an increasing population of failed consumers who kept coming back to acquire more stuff they did not really need but could no longer purchase in the conventional marketplace. There is currently widespread fatigue, anxiety, and an ‘overwhelming sense of futility’ (Roos 2014)15 in the streets of Athens. But some find it hard to stop thinking and dreaming rather more dangerously. After all, the history of their city is a reminder that there will always be potential turning points and critical junctures that can trigger radical upheavals.

Notes 1 A shorter version of this chapter was presented in Crisis Scapes: Athens and Beyond (May 2014; http: //crisis-scape.net/resources/conference-publication). 2 www.theguardian.com/travel/2005/mar/20/fashionandstyle.shoppingtrips.athens 3 http: //query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CEFD8163FF930A15756 C0A9669D8B63 4 http: //parkingparko.espivblogs.net/englishfrench/about-the-park/ 5 Ibid. 6 Human and cultural geographers have long insisted on a view of space that moves beyond its treatment as ‘container’ or background canvas to social activity. According to Agnew (2005; also Agnew 1987; Agnew and Duncan 1990), for

Consumption in and of crisis-hit Athens 159

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

instance, aside from the traditional understanding of space as location, a spatial approach incorporates at least two equally fundamental variants including space as locale and sense of place. Space as locale encapsulates the role that space plays as a setting or backdrop for a variety of social relations and activities, the ‘. . . where of social life and environmental transformation. Examples would be settings from everyday life such as workplaces, homes, shopping malls, churches, etc.’ (Agnew 2005: 89). On the other hand, sense of place embraces the more affective and experiential aspects, individual and group identifications with places and feelings of ‘belonging to a place, either consciously or as shown through everyday behavior’ (ibid.: 89). Paralleling Agnew’s distinction between space as location, space as locale, and sense of place, Cresswell (2004) identifies three key strands in geographical thought, namely the descriptive, the social constructivist and the phenomenological approach. These are to some extent resonant with triadic understandings of space proposed by other seminal spatial theorists, such as Lefebvre’s (1991) distinction between ‘spatial practices’, ‘representations of space’ and ‘spaces of representation’, Soja’s (1996) firstspaces, secondspace and thirdspaces, and Harvey’s (2004) distinction between absolute, relative and relational space. www.bloomberg.com/news/2013–06–11/greece-first-developed-market-cut-toemerging-as-uae-upgraded.html www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/22/us-greece-incomes-idUSBRE99L0I4201 31022 www.statistics.gr/portal/page/portal/ESYE/BUCKET/A0101/PressReleases/ A0101_SJO02_DT_MM_05_2013_01_F_EN.pdf www.rethinkathens.org/ www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite4_1_15/11/2011_414933 www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html?_r=0 Ibid. www.oloimaziboroume.gr/plhrofories/ http: //roarmag.org/2014/04/protest-austerity-graeber-lapavitsas/

11 The CV industry The construction of the Self as an active and flexible citizen Eleni Papagaroufali

In Greece today, a large and ever-increasing number of students, principally high-school graduates, but also junior high as well as university students, are trying, to use their words, to ‘fill up’ their CVs by participating in as many different ‘actions’ and initiatives as possible, e.g. European and international educational programs (under the auspices of the United Nations, the World Bank and the OECD), conferences, workshops, seminars, etc.1 Again, if someone peruses Google looking for titles such as ‘CV completion’ or ‘CV drafting’, he/she will find out that in the web pages of many Greek universities, as well as of many private firms, career-guidance and advice offices and consultancy agencies for labour market integration, instructions are offered to all those concerned about continuing their studies or working, about how to write ‘correct’, ‘smart’, or ‘strong’ Curriculum Vitae or Resumé, or, as they are called now, Euro-pass Curriculum Vitae.2 For jobs, either in the public or the private sector, it is now inconceivable not to ask jobseekers to submit their CVs, and for the latter not to rush out and learn how to fill them properly and ‘smartly’. The same applies for university training or research programs, at undergraduate and postgraduate level, at home as well as abroad.3 This CV industry has emerged and intensified over the last decade. It is indirectly but firmly connected with the imposition of a neoliberal political and economic model that, along with the high unemployment rate which it has created, has simultaneously promoted an ‘entrepreneurial ethos’ even at the level of school curricula. This ethos includes the idea of the self-active, energetic and ‘flexible’ citizen – in other words, of a person who is ‘a complete master of himself’, as if that self is, as Gershon aptly puts it, rather ‘a business,’ than a ‘property’.4 Modern ideal citizens must now learn to be independent from any kind of state intervention; they are thus obliged to keep themselves informed of the latest developments and acquire new skills and competencies (especially those that are connected with Information and Communication Technology [ICT]). Moreover, they must take responsibility for their choices which, preferably, should be managed with partners from other countries; and finally, they should be willing to be accountable for those actions through evaluations conducted by multinational companies or rating

The CV industry 161 agencies. Such evaluations are increasingly required for individuals and their workplaces (businesses schools, municipalities, non-governmental organizations [NGOs], etc.) to acquire a reputable and respected ranking on the national, European and international level, and to insure their development and progress, but, most importantly, their ‘sustainability’.5 In short, they must not let themselves be ‘caught by’ a cold but instead aim ‘to catch’ a cold, according to an overly individualistic propagation of ‘human agency’ currently found in various emancipatory narratives.6 Under the intense supply of and demand for advice on how to write a ‘smart’ CV lurks the desire to represent one’s self as capable of obtaining and producing ‘innovative’ knowledge. Today this capability is a prerequisite for all citizens, regardless of age, particularly through participation in ‘Life-Long Learning’ programs,7 so as to be ready at any given moment to adjust themselves to the ever-shifting socio-economic conditions.8

The illusion of the CV In his essay, ‘The Illusion of Biography’, Pierre Bourdieu observes that ‘the life history will vary, as much in its form as in its content, according to the social quality of the market on which it will be offered’.9 The sociologist Peter Alheit elaborates on this observation within the present context of job insecurity, by noting that the postwar ‘plan for the construction of the normal or typical biography’, which formerly consisted of three phases, the ‘preparatory’, the ‘productive’ and the ‘quietus from work’, has been ‘disorganized’.10 More precisely, because of the fact that within the framework of neoliberal capitalism the transition process from the one phase to the other was altered long ago into risk situations (well before the crisis’s eruption in Greece!), with the result of continuous changes of the social position – from just undesirable to plainly painful ones – in the ‘biographical course’ the importance of the productive-work phase (which constituted the core of the life course, especially that of men) has began to decline, and in its place the importance of the ‘preparatory phase’ has emerged, enriched by educational, ‘life-long’ learning actions,11 which not only intervene in, and overlay, the phase of the main working activity, but also determine the temporal organization of social life.12 Despite the established fact of the increased heterogeneity and fragmentation of the citizens’ biographical course in late capitalism,13 all citizens are obliged to obey to what Bourdieu has labelled ‘the rhetorical illusion of biography’.14 In order for them to become visible, that is, to claim their right to find a job in the free market, or to climb the career ladder, or even to participate at research programs and attend training or other actions,15 citizens are now obliged to provide a Curriculum Vitae. The more or less predefined structure of the CV raises the expectation for the men and women who write their autobiographies to ‘represent’ or, better, to ‘produce’ their selves. That is, to construct ‘an identity understood as the constancy to

162 Papagaroufali oneself of a responsible being that is predicable, or at least intelligible, in the way of a well constructed history’ – that has a beginning, a middle and an end – and ‘end, understood both as a termination and as a goal (‘He will make his way’ meaning he will succeed, he will have a fine career)’.16 According to Alheit, the need for patchworking17 this ‘discontinuity’ of life (intensified in late modernity) into a ‘more or less reasonable biographical sequence’, as well as ‘the necessity for a completely new life conduct form’, have proclaimed ‘biographical learning as an essential component of the social life in late modernity’.18 Indeed, Alheit, talking from the point of view of his own generation (he is a professor at a German university), expresses his concern that ‘the biographical journey seems to be transforming into a kind of “laboratory”, in which we should develop skills, but for which, we have not been prepared during our socialization process’.19 In contrast with the postwar generations in Greece, for which the CV was more or less predictable because of the almost ‘unique predictive value’ that the different positions had – class, race, gender, family, profession, even politics20 – in late neoliberal capitalism, the younger generations, having been the offspring of the embellished ideology that every individual has the right to have free access to every kind of ‘experience’ (‘for the sake of the experience itself’!), are tending to overlook the predictability of the previous periods (which has not been altogether erased) and gladly submit to the professional and educational ‘experiences’ that are perceived as securing for them various ‘skills and capabilities’ – of which ‘learn how to learn’ is the most prominent among them – in order to become flexible, ready for every possible change (and failure) in their lives.21 It is in this specific context they ‘learn’ that at any given moment in their lives they will have to submit their ‘CV’ to a certain professional agency or organization, and to ‘apprentice’ themselves in learning how to (continue to) enrich or ‘fill’ it up. Following the models of the CVs that are posted on the Internet, the potential applicants are in position to ‘construct’ or ‘reconstruct’ their ‘self’, in accord with the demands of the agency or organization to which they address themselves. As happens with all CVs, their point of departure is the most typical ‘institution that unifies the “self”’, the ‘proper name’.22 The proper name, according to Bourdieu, is the fixed point in a perpetually moving world, safeguarding for the interested parties (with the exception of possible biological or social changes) a stable identity ‘within the [innermost] self’ in all possible fields into which they intervene as ‘active subjects’, in other words, in all possible life histories – put otherwise, it secures ‘the costantia sibi required by the social order’.23 However, in contrast to those of us who claim that ‘date of birth’ and ‘family situation’ should be regarded as ‘personal data’, younger applicants rush to fill them in, knowing that their young age, and especially the ‘non marital status’ qualification, secure the image of an individual free from personal obligations, therefore master of itself and absolutely ready to take action.

The CV industry 163 The structure of the model CVs posted by universities and other agencies incites the applicants to immediately follow their personal data with a narration of any type of ‘professional experience’ they have acquired during their studies, or after their graduation as employees or workers: from the ‘seminars’ or ‘actions’ they have participated in, to their level of knowledge of foreign languages and computer skills to any possible ‘distinctions’ they have received, to having a ‘driving licence’, but also to the ‘general’ or ‘other interests’ they might have – e.g. volunteering, painting, music, theatre, creative writing, traditional dances, basketball, football, journalism (with particular reference to personal blogs). All the above are ‘documented’ with references to particular dates, thereby taking the form of historical facts left to speak for themselves and disguised by an implied third person used by the biographers.24 If, however, they want to further influence the CV’s assessors (their invisible yet not nameless audience), they are free to resurface themselves as a first person (‘I’), for example, by turning to the ‘individual characteristics’ – ‘I’m trustful and eager, with an appetite for work, I’m willing to learn, I’m noted for my politeness and team spirit’.

CV’s deceptive temporality The abundant training for, and disciplinarian approach to, the demand for a CV, as well as the readiness to supply hundreds of CVs that now can also be observed in Greece, function as a reminder of Lauren Berlant’s timely observation that, despite the economic crisis of the last two decades, the petty-bourgeois and middle classes in the Western states (both in America and in Europe) continue to ‘consent’ to, or ‘invest’ in, a ‘story that involves a desire to stay proximate, no matter what, to the potential openings marked out by fantasies of the good life, self-continuity, or unconflictness’.25 Berlant calls this ‘optimistic’ story a ‘fantasy’ because ‘the present’, related to the stability of all sorts of political systems, employment and social protection, ‘has become so uncertain that it devours the future and prohibits thinking about it except in fantasy’.26 The act of collecting and recoding one’s personal ‘data’ (in our case, in the form of CVs, reference letters and certificates) can be perceived of as a kind of ‘self-archiving’ – to use Allen Feldman’s apt term.27 Jacques Derrida, however, in his work Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, points out that ‘[t]here is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority’.28 By this he means a form of Sovereign Authority that has the right to archive: an Authority that includes some by naming and memorializing them; and excludes others, by making them anonymous and casting them into oblivion. Bourdieu, speaking of different kinds of biography, CVs included, also critiques that kind of ‘public presentation, thus the officilialization, of a private representation of one’s life’, which surrenders or consigns itself to sociopolitical mechanisms that have the right to support and prohibit the theory that interprets life

164 Papagaroufali experience as unique or total.29 Rereading Archive fever, Feldman notes that ‘to consign is to assign residence, to insert in a domicile, that is, in a political identity and normativity’; put otherwise, to consign is to become ‘a representative, memorandum, support, metaphor or double, and transport of sovereignty’.30 If we accept all the above, we may wonder whether those who are self-archived and submit their CVs to different institutions – industrial and educational, national, European and international – could have asked themselves if they ‘surrender’ their (illusory) faith or hope that they will find a job or that they will continue their studies in the hands of the intricate Authorities of the EU or OECD, the World Bank or the UN. Nevertheless, during the period that Greece’s exit from the Euro zone was widely speculated, one graduate, while she was showing off her completed CV, shouted: ‘We were born Europeans, we want to belong to the European family’. If, as Berlant and Bourdieu might argue, the writing of a CV represents the claim to the illusion of a ‘self’ that is cohesive and impervious to conflicting relations,31 and if, according to Derrida, ‘the archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge is a token for the future’,32 then we could suggest that the act of self-archiving by aspiring life-long students and potential employees entangles them not only in the inherent illusion of an active self that can decisively intervene in its life course, but also into its deceptive temporality. As Feldman holds, archiving, based on the power of the symbols, heralds, anticipates, presages, even ‘preempts’, namely, ‘buys the future in advance’, so as the promissory guarantees for a ‘good life’, as Berlant puts it, ‘attains a position but no determinate actuality’33 – it is no accident that, many years ago, long before the advent of the Greek crisis, the European Union had introduced the term ‘mobility’, which actively promotes it by using the euphemistic slogan ‘Europe on the move’. According to the above, and most particularly in the present conjecture of the global monetary war and the painfully high unemployment we’re experiencing in Greece, it is dead obvious that most of the abundant CVs of the Greek citizens are taking a ‘position’ (in several ‘sites of writing’) but do not attain a ‘determinate actuality’. Nevertheless, after every negative response, prospective applicants who apprentice themselves to the ‘seminars’ for CV completion have learned how to repeat or readjust it (the notion of readjustment constitutes one of the most vital ‘instructions’) in compliance with the demands of the next agent or employer. Besides, as Derrida observes, while the archive’s inherent possibility of repeating itself exposes it to (self) destruction, there are always countervailing techniques, different ‘excuses’ or ‘reinvestments in other ways of reasoning’, that manage to (re)present it ‘as the idol of its truth in painting’.34 Among those other ways of reasoning and the embellished truths which nourish us with the notion of truth (or, in CVs’ case, of plausibility), we may also include the instruction, which is new to the Greek reality (perhaps of American origins), to begin our CV with the ‘most recent’ professional experience, the ‘most recent’ seminar or

The CV industry 165 workshop attendance, the ‘most recent’ certificate for the competence in a foreign language, etc. This necessity for a totally new form of self-representation or self-archiving, a necessity which is increasingly enforced (although welcome), seems to take the age-old ‘natural’ linear-evolutionary narration of the life (from the self’s narrated past towards its present) as obsolete, as ‘a waste of time’. In other words, we are witnessing a retreat of the power of the ‘ends-means’ approach. The CV that begins with the temporal retraction as a coincidence between the present-immediate request (for work, for the continuance of the studies, etc.) and the most ‘recent’ achievements (previous experience, newly founded skills, etc.) raises the applicants’ present self into the position of the lead actor – since the traces of their past self are simply following suit! This reordering creates for them the sense that they are instantly present in this procedure of job or training seeking, that they are guiding it here and now, and, consequently, that their request has come closer to its fulfilment. At the same time, European programs, educational and otherwise, are permeated with the same spirit. Because their orientation is now not only ‘European’ but also ‘global’ (‘Irrespective of how small you are, act locally, think globally’), as much involvement with global partners as possible is demanded from (‘modernized’) member states, in order to overcome local nationalisms, now rendered ‘obsolete’; by means of such entanglements, it is implied that Europe will be able to move forward, ‘banish[ing] dead time and introduc[ing] new priorities, even if some of the latter are completely artificial’ – as Marc Abélès, among others, has observed concerning the EU’s plan to ‘go ahead’.35 All of the above, therefore, confirm most clearly Bourdieu’s statement, that neither the ‘form’ nor the ‘content’ of the public representation, or, better, of the public production of private life, can be separated from the ‘market’s sociopolitical quality’ to which the representation addresses itself. Nor do they leave enough room to conceal the fact that the CV (particularly in the present conditions of the globalized world market, job insecurity and Universities’ conversion into Limited Companies), does not refer only to the ‘I’/‘self’ that shields itself behind its father’s name, and consequently feels so unique and self-sufficient that it believes it actively intervenes into its life, but also to the ‘self’ which constitutes the field of intense competition with all those who participate in the same field of vested and general interests and whose possibilities to intervene in it are the same. Today, because of the current economic crisis in Greece and the financial problems that have hit Greek families, all those who ‘fill up’ their CVs, whatever their age, fully acknowledge that competition. At the same time, though, they (along with their families) appear to continue to consent to, and invest in, the fictive promises for a ‘good life’, self-continuity and cohesion. By complying with the internationally accepted guidelines for the completion of CVs, they have raised the Curriculum Vitae to the status of a supreme art form for exhibiting their ‘selves’ as ideal, autonomous and active citizens, those who seek to acquire for themselves all the possible ‘virtues’ which are being sold and

166 Papagaroufali consumed in the European as well as the international ‘market of the civic virtue’, according to Paul Rabinow36 – it is no accident that, for Greeks’ CVs, ‘volunteerism’ and ‘the connection with society’ now constitute two major competences.37 Those are the sort of skills that secure (‘for life’, as in ‘life-long learning’?) ‘what employers want now and in the foreseeable future . . .’, namely, ‘intelligent, flexible, adaptable employees who are quick to learn and who can deal with change’.38 On 11 May 2012, the television news of a Greek TV channel reported on a 15-year-old high school student who won a prize for the best school newspaper in Greece. Addressing herself to the public present for the occasion, she told them in tears: The economic situation in our country is awful, but we, the younger generation, are continuing to cherish hopes and are determined to continue living out our lives peacefully and to honour our country as an Europe’s equal member. The public, which was composed in the main of deeply moved parents, applauded with enthusiasm. Does this incident represent yet another instance of the old saying, ‘hope is the last to die’? Or, as Bourdieu would put it, is it an example of ‘collective misrecognition’39 which, as Berlant reminds us, ‘is not the same as being mistaken’?40 I would argue for the latter, although hope and misrecognition can be perceived as two sides of the same coin; that is, of one’s consent and reinvestment in old or new political identities and normativities, as, for example, in the CV industry which introduces us to the new rules of professional and other forms of ‘flexibility’.

Notes 1 For a more detailed presentation of the high-school students’ participation in multiple ‘actions’ and their concern for the completion of their CV’s, see Eleni Papagaroufali, Soft diplomacy. Transnational twinnings and pacifist practices in contemporary Greece, Alexandria Publisher, Athens 2013, especially Chap. 3. Apart from that, those of us who teach at Greek universities, are well aware of the high demand the ‘Certificates’ of participation in conferences or colloquia have among our students (though some of those ‘Certificates’ are offered to them by certain students’ parties for canvassing reasons). 2 Euro-pass Curriculum Vitae is a product of the European Commission, and it was established in 1998 (for its history until now, see http: //europass.cedefop. europa.eu/en/about/history). Its structure, which is more or less predefined, is connected with the institution’s intention, which has already been set forth: to secure for those concerned to ‘move around’ the EU member states the ‘transparency’ of their professional and educational qualifications via the ‘rationalization’ of the information they are going to submit. 3 For example, there is very high attendance on behalf of the students in the 3-day ‘Seminar’ which the Liaison and Career Office is offering at regular intervals at

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4 5 6

7

8

9 10 11

12

13

14 15

the Panteion University Athens, which consists of three sections: a) CV drafting and application letter; b) Emotional Intelligence’s role in the workplace; and c) Self-knowledge – Educational and Professional decision-making. Gershon, I., ‘Neoliberal agency’, Current Anthropology 52/4 (2011): 539. Garsten C. and K. Jakobson, ‘Transparency and legibility in international institutions: The UN global compact and post-global ethics’, Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale 19/4 (2011): 378–393. Gerk, F. Comments, on Graeber’s D. paper ‘Consumption’, Current Anthropology 52/4 (2011): 504–505. For the work ethic that has prevailed in Greece, especially from the 1990’s onwards, as well as the way it has been promoted on national level by the different consultancy agents, see Tsiolis, Giorgos, ‘The construction of the ‘employable’ – Considerations in response to an empirical research in the field of consultancy for the integration into employment’, in M. Spyridakis (ed.), Unemployment and Social Insecurity. Aspects of a persistent danger, Alexandria Press, Athens 2013: 151–185. The eight ‘skills’ or ‘competencies’ of the ‘Life-long Learning’ that have been approved by the Commission are: a) communication in the mother tongue, b) communication in foreign languages, c) mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology, d) digital competence, e) learning to learn, f) social and civic competences, g) sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, h) cultural awareness and expression. For further details, see http: //europa.edu. The apprenticeship in the completion of a correct CV for ‘the better presentation of the self’ is regarded necessary from the consultancy agents, thus permitting to the applicants their integration into the labor market; see ‘The Construction of Employable’, p. 166. Bourdieu, P. ‘The illusion of biography’ in Identity: A Reader edit. by Paul de Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman, Sage, London, 2000, p. 301. Alheit, P. ‘Prologue’, in Tsiolis, George, Life histories and biographical narrations. The biographical approach in sociological qualitative research, Kritiki editions, Athens 2006: 12–13. Alheit notes: ‘The power of the protestant work ethic which, according to Max Weber, constituted one of the most effective orientation models within capitalist modernity is waning. New ‘post-materialist’ orientations become visible – we could speak of a sort of ‘feminization’ of the typical biographical course. Anyway, it is possible that in the foreseeable future we will perceive our biographical courses on a case by case basis, as educational courses or biographies of selffulfillment, and on a secondary basis as work biographies or professional careers’, op.cit.: 13. According to Alheit, ‘it is difficult to locate a certain transition process from the one situation to the other, within the life course, which cannot feel the impact of pedagogical interferences. Again, their own particular pedagogical repertories correspond in every age group. Indicative of this evolution is the timeliness of the notion ‘Life-long learning’ and a result of it is ‘the extension of childhood into adulthood – or even the loss of childhood altogether’, op. cit.: 11–12. Among other things, they include the professional reorientation and retraining, the part-time employment and shift towards divergent professional fields, the participation in atypical forms of work, with unspecified duties and with no social protection coverage, the alternation among periods of employment and unemployment. See Τσιώλης, «Η κατασκευή των απασχολήσιμων», op. cit.: 175–176. Bourdieu, ‘The Illusion of Biography’, p. 298. For example, Practical Exercise (Stage), Comenius, Erasmus, Tempus, Heraclitus/ Thales, INTERREG, as well as programs concerning trade and other forms of unions.

168 Papagaroufali 16 Bourdieu, ‘The Illusion of Biography’, p. 297. As it will be shown below, the structure of the model CVs and the instructions given presuppose and guarantee, on the one hand, the ontological reception of the ‘self’, as a cohesive, natural and immutable presence, pre-existing the socio-historical factors – with the proper or the family name being the prime example; on the other hand, the phenomenological approach of the (auto-)biography as an individual’s intentional (self-)conscious act and means of self-knowledge. That is because those who decide to write down their ‘course of life’ should be considered as some who have the intention and the capability to look after and find their ‘true self’ in an ‘innermost’ level as well as within the time they so far ‘experienced’. Also, the fact that in the instructions to the applicants it is strongly recommended not to present ‘false’ qualifications and credentials and to have reference letters and certificates available in the case they might be asked for, raises the biographical note into the sphere of a ‘speech act’ with which those who write their biographies, having abided to the conditions or the rules for the CV’s completion, with the filling in of their proper name the most prominent among them, seem to tell to their recipients that they are taking full responsibility for the truth of the information they offer and, through their father’s name, they also guarantee them. Lastly, despite the fact that in the structure of the CV the qualifications and the actions seem to ‘come after’ of the pre-existent, perpetual self, the instruction to the CV drafters to (re)adjust them according to the demands of the organization or the agency to which they address them suggests that both the self and the life gain significance and value within the realm of the text and the act of writing; therefore, as the poststructuralists would have put it, both are ‘textual constructions’, open to review, to additional information, etc. For a brief overview of all the above epistemological positions that the theoreticians of autobiography have used, and are continuing to do so, but only as a form of ‘private literature’, see Γρηγόρης Πασχαλίδης, Η ποιητική της αυτοβιογραφίας, [Paschalides, Gregory, The Poetics of Autobiography] Σμίλη, Αθήνα 1993, especially pp. 17–37. 17 Alheit is using Keupp’s model of ‘identität als patchwork’ (see Keupp, H., & Höfer, R. (Eds.). (1997). Identitätsarbeit Heute: Klassische und aktuelle Perspektiven der Identitätsforschung (1 ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag). 18 Alheit, ‘Prologue’, op. cit.: 12. 19 Op. cit.: 14. 20 Op. cit.: 13. 21 In the survey that G. Tsiolis conducted nationwide in relation with the consultancy agents regarding ‘employability’, certain consultants deemed as more important than the employment itself, the process of learning from the interested parties of ‘how’ to look for a job and ‘how’ to locate within themselves the motivation for finding one. See Τσιώλης, ‘The Construction of Employable’, op. cit.: 163. 22 Bourdieu, ‘The Illusion of Biography’, pp. 299–300. 23 Op. cit., p. 300. 24 As Paschalidis notes (The Poetics of Autobiography, op. cit., pp. 245–246), according to Jean Strarobinski, the use of historical tenses during the autobiographical enterprise turns the narrated self into a kind of ‘half-third person’. This remark leads also Philippe Lejeune to claim that the author, by using the third person directly or indirectly, ‘speaks of himself as being someone else who speaks about himself, or as he is talking for someone else’. The alternation between first and implied half-third person that is also adopted in the CVs’ drafting, to the degree that represents the temporal and cognitive distance between those persons who write their autobiography and their own [narrated]

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

past, reveals the political and economical conditions as well as the related biographical prerequisites on which they are based for writing their CV and, therefore, it denaturalizes the fictional, ontological monism of the ‘self’/’I’. See also Lejeune Philippe, Je est un autre. Editions du Seuil, Paris 1980: 34; Starobinski, Jean, ‘The style of Autobiography’, in Autobiography; Essays Theoretical and Critical, J. Olney (ed.), Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton 1980: 79. Berlant, L. Cruel Optimism, Durham and London, Duke University Press 2001: 185–186. Op. cit.: 187. Feldman, A. ‘The Structuring Enemy and Archival War’, PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association 124/5 (2009): 1706. Derrida, J. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1998, p. 11. Also, for the varying forms and notions of the archive, see Papailias Penelope, Genres of Recollection. Archival Poetics and Modern Greece, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2005. Bourdieu, ‘The Illusion of Biography’, p. 301. Feldman, ‘The Structuring Enemy’, op. cit.: 1706. It must be noted that, in relation with the CVs’ completion, the ‘self-knowledge’ and the ‘self-consciousness’ constitute desiderata that the guided apprenticeship guarantees them, to the extend that the final text is perceived of as the ‘reflection’ of the consciousness, the intention and the volition of the CVs’ redactors (see also note nr. 17). Derrida, J. ‘Archive Fever’, op. cit.: 18. Feldman, ‘The Structuring Enemy’, op. cit.: 1709, 1710. Derrida, J. ‘Archive Fever’, p. 12. Abélès, M. ‘Virtual Europe’, in I. Bellier and Th. Wilson, (eds.), An Anthropology of the European Union, Oxford and New York, 2000: 34. See Rabinow, P. ‘Midst anthropology’s problems’, in A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2005: 49. According to Tsiolis (‘The construction of the ‘employable’, op. cit.: 180–183), the aim of all the ‘intergovernmental’ techniques that are being used by the job seeking consultants and agents is the ‘internalization’ of all the demands of the new work ethic. In the Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini of the 30th of June 2013, in an article with the title ‘Volunteerism: An unexploited experience’ (p. 10), it is alleged that volunteerism should be capitalized professionally, that is, become an important criterion for the selection and the employment of business managers, because volunteers are learning how to communicate with ‘people coming from different backgrounds’, how to resolve conflicts, to anticipate and manage change, to guide and persuade and, more generally, ‘they are learning how to improve their soft people-oriented skills’. Shore, C. ‘Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 18/1 (2010): 27. Bourdieu, P. 2001, Masculine Domination, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, op. cit., p. 185.

Part IV

Confronting crisis

12 Hetero-utopias Squatting and spatial materialities of resistance in Athens at times of crisis Giorgos Poulimenakos and Dimitris Dalakoglou

Introduction In March 2016, a demonstration different from any other in recent Greek history took place in the central Athenian neighbourhood of Exarcheia. The protest had about 1,000 participants, and at least a dozen of them were armed with pistols and machine guns. Towards the end of the march, masked demonstrators displayed their weaponry in front of a café that is allegedly the haunt of the local mafia. The demonstration was organized by the anarchist and anti-authoritarian squat K*VOX, which stands literally 20 meters away from the alleged mafia café on Exarcheia Square. The reason behind the protest was a knife attack against three members of the squat assembly by operatives of the organized crime networks in the neighbourhood. The most recent milestone in the history of squatting in Athens was the December 2008 revolt. The revolt saw the long occupation of many public buildings and led to a proliferation of the practice of self-organization and its establishment in the Greek social imaginary. The social condition produced in the squatted buildings and social centres during that period supplied participants in the revolt with new ideas, the determination to pursue autonomous forms of self-organization, and novel forms of struggle including the occupation and transformation of the urban landscape in everyday life (Dalakoglou and Vradis 2011). Those practices were echoed even in the postrevolt era, during which many neighbourhoods in Athens and other cities of Greece developed assemblies and horizontal decision-making structures to discuss their issues outside of existing municipal institutions (Petropoulou 2010). These processes became much more intensive after the so-called Syntagma Square movement of 2011. The brutal repression of this movement (Leontidou 2012, Dalakoglou 2013b), which occurred within the context of the emergence of new anti-protest police units (Dalakoglou 2012, 2013a), the imposition of curfews and the outlawing of public demonstrations during visits by EU officials (Christopoulos 2013), led to a diffusion of antagonistic political activities in relatively new spheres of social action, creating new axes of political reference in the process.

174 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou Nevertheless, the repression of public protests on the central streets of the major Greek cities was not the only area where state authorities flexed their muscles during the crisis period. Since 2010, when Greece entered the ongoing phase of violent austerity and neoliberal reform, the squatting movement proliferated its activities and solidarity structures in a deliberate effort to circulate its antagonistic modes of social existence (Yfanet 2013). However, the state unleashed its own form of antagonism. This started in September 2012, when an operation of special police units evicted the DELTA squat in Thessaloniki and arrested the squatters (DELTA squat 2012). In December 2012, similar operations took place in Athens, where the police raided and evicted one of the oldest squats of the country, Villa Amalias. They also evicted the Skaramanga squat, which was established in 2009 and was politically connected to the revolt of December 2008. The anarchist steki in the Athens School of Economics was also evicted. The governmental discourse reproduced in the mainstream media at that time was dominated by the term ‘anomie’. The Minister of Public Order summarized the idea as follows: ‘we can’t say that we are seriously opposing terrorism, but on the other hand allow phenomena of anomie like the squats. They both originate from the same matrix: the matrix of anomy that grew over all those years . . .’ (Dendias 2013).

Inside a space of ‘anomie’ The ethnographic fieldwork for this chapter took place in what is perhaps the most active and most well-known squat that remained open after the wave of police attacks in 2012: K*Vox (the K stands for Katalipsi, or squat). It is located in the Exarcheia district, the ‘anomic’ neighbourhood in the centre of Athens that has always hosted various nuclei of radical political activity. Originally the K*Vox building was a multi-purpose entertainment space that functioned as a café-bar, a reading place and a space for live concerts. It is the property of the Greek state, to which the owner of that multi-purpose space was paying rent – until he went out of business. The material infrastructures themselves encouraged the squatters to produce more activities than just the café, which was their original plan. The main goal of the café would be to gather money for the defrayal of political trials. The squat’s large basement houses the social clinic run by ADYE,1 as well as the room in which the assemblies take place. Moreover, because of its acoustics, the underground level usually hosts various talks, events and screenings arranged by the assembly and external groups. The ground floor hosts the kafeneio, while steps lead to a more elevated level where the library is located. The kafeneio works every day from noon to 11:30pm, except Saturday nights, when it goes on until later. The work in the kafeneio is done in shifts, two persons per shift, four people a day (a day is two shifts, one from opening time until 5:30 pm, and the other from 5:30pm until closing time). The people on shift are responsible for making coffees, drinks and pretty much anything

Hetero-utopias 175 one could find in a commercial café. They are also responsible for cleaning the place and refilling the stock, while everything is done in a cooperative and self-managed way. In order for someone to take a shift, he or she does not have to fully agree with the ideological and political framework of Vox’s assembly. People can work there insofar as they respect the principles of selforganization and, of course, are not members of the police or fascists. Except for the assembly of ADYE, the assembly of the library and of course the assembly of Vox, which are organic parts of the squat, the space is open to every political group that needs a space in which to conduct their assemblies. Various groups also use the squat as a space where they can store their brochures, communiques and posters and access them any time they want.

Spatial and political dilation and contraction Natural scientists refer to ‘dilation’ as the phenomenon in which the bulk of a material expands, and to contraction as the opposite, namely when a material shrinks. This law of physics, drawn from the natural sciences, can be used metaphorically to describe the symbolic expansion of the space of the squat beyond its material boundaries, something that happens precisely because of its spatial materiality, as we will show. This process can result from the discourses of those involved on what K*Vox really is, as well as from the way the social centre itself interacts with the wider neighbourhood. At the same time, depending on the momentum and on particular conversations and practices, the space can shrink and what the squat is can be equated with the room in the basement and even more so with the table where the assembly of K*Vox takes place – and therefore with the assembly itself. On Thursday 5 June 2014, the residents and collectivities of Exarcheia (K*Vox among them) called for a demonstration against the mafia and the drug dealers who in recent years have been preying on the neighbourhood in order to take advantage of its ‘libertarianism’ and anti-police sentiments. Organized drug dealing had been attracted to Exarcheia as a result of the neighbourhood’s high concentration of youth from all over Athens – as a place of many non-mainstream bars, clubs and entertainment in general – together with a distorted sense of ‘anarchy,’ which sections of those youth understand as the advocacy of every form of clandestine activity. The demonstration thus aimed to show that the people in Exarcheia itself had become fed up with what their neighbourhood had become. Two days before the demonstration, unknown persons had stopped outside Vox and opened fire at least five times with handguns at the front glassdoor that constitutes the main entrance to the squat. The glass door was completely shattered. Luckily, nobody was inside the squat at that time, so no one was injured. The bullets were interpreted by the squatters as a ‘message’ sent by the organized crime networks, conveying that they are a serious and organized force in the neighbourhood, and that whoever opposes them would

176 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou be dealt with by the use of firearms. In other words, they wanted to terrorize the neighbourhood two days before the demonstration against them. The choice to shoot at K*Vox demonstrates in a reverse way the role of spatial materialities in the concentration, the congregation and therefore the visualization of ideological, political and social tendencies that claim the radical identity of the neighbourhood. Despite the fact that the demonstration had been called for by various political collectivities and residents, and not only by K*Vox, the mobsters could not have sent their ‘message’ to the neighbourhood abstractly. Rather, the glass door symbolised Exarcheia more generally, so that the bullets would hit something concrete. Besides, the word ‘concrete’ in English can mean both the materiality of something and the specific, nonabstract idea. The ‘recipient’ of the bullets was not solely K*Vox, but rather everyone who is willing to oppose the mafia. However, through this hit the possibility of an antagonistic stance against the mafia had materialized, and therefore became visible through the materialities themselves. The mobsters might have wanted to concentrate everyone’s attention on something that is ‘hittable’, such as a wall or a glass-door, but precisely this led the various social agents of Exarcheia, who might have had abstract ideas about what is at stake there, to connect with K*Vox and therefore with its radical position on the problem. As Mr Manolis, a local resident, told us some days later, ‘the hit on Vox was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Somehow it made visible and patently clear that either we join those who want a free neighbourhood and fight, or we will have terror on our front steps’. This became clear on the day of the demonstration. The gathering point was arranged to be at the southern part of the square of Exarcheia, which is the most central and most symbolic space of the neighbourhood. However, spontaneously, the majority of the people started gathering just outside K*Vox. The door that was smashed by the bullets had become the entrance to the neighbourhood. At the threshold that the mafia first crossed those forces that sought to maintain the radical political identity of the neighbourhood now stood over the interests of the drug dealers. K*Vox had thus dilated and had become the entire neighbourhood. This dilation was not merely symbolic and ideological, something that would have undermined the role of its materiality, in actual fact the stand took place precisely because of this materiality. This incident also reminds us of something that Giannis, a resident of Victoria Square, the neighbourhood in which Villa Amalias used to stand, had said. Victoria Square borders on Agios Panteleimonas, a district with a high concentration of immigrants in which members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement have been pursuing racist pogroms in recent years (see Dalakoglou 2013a, Kavoulakos 2013, Dalakoglou and Vradis 2011). As Giannis put it: When the fascists started to come down to Victoria, many residents spontaneously gathered in the courtyard of Villa Amalias. This was our first gathering as a neighbourhood and after that we created the residents’

Hetero-utopias 177 assembly of Victoria, a horizontal structure for us to discuss and solve our problems. As with Exarcheia and K*Vox, the very solid infrastructures of Villa Amalias helped to concentrate and solidify progressive aspects of part of the residents of Victoria and led to further radical activities. Back in K*Vox, another incident is indicative of the symbolic dilation of the squat. One Saturday night in the summer of 2014, around midnight, there was a sudden tension in the area. From phone calls, it became clear that a small group of hooded people had attacked the riot police units permanently stationed on the borders of Exarcheia with Molotov cocktails. This force guards the offices of PASOK, a Greek social-democratic political party, that governed the country for over two decades since 1981. Successive PASOK governments were responsible for the so-called modernization of the Greek economy, namely the adoption of the neoliberal model, furthermore they were the party that struck the first memorandum agreement with the Troika in 2010. Their offices stand on Charilaou Trikoupi Street. The street is considered to be one of the boundaries of Exarcheia geographically, but also symbolically in the sense that it is marked by a permanent and powerful police presence. This, in a manner of speaking, ends the ‘different’ timespace that characterizes Exarcheia. The practice of small hit-and-run attacks, pesimo as we say (Greek slang for ‘assault’), is quite common and these assaults usually occur on Friday and Saturday nights when the district is full of people (See Astrinaki 2009). Immediately after we found out about the pesimo, the members of the squats’ assembly who were there at the time stormed out of the squat and sat down on the steps in front of the entrance. The road that passes next to the entrance is the one that ends in Charilaou Trikoupi Street. That night, Nikitas from K*VOX explained: Usually, after a pesimo, the cops use this as an opportunity to come down here. They are not looking for the perpetrators, they are just doing that as retaliation against the neighbourhood; they come here on bikes and terrorize people. Many times they have come here and smashed the tables of the kafeneio outside. They do not come for Vox, though, they come for Exarcheia. So if we spot them coming down from up there, we will go inside and close the doors. As in the case of organized crime, the police in this situation are using the materiality of K*Vox to perform an act of terror aimed at the neighbourhood in general. For the squatters, this police violation of the imaginary boundaries of the time-space of Exarcheia would mean shutting the doors. Once more, the entrance of the squat had dilated and had become equated both by the police and the comrades as the entrance to the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, depending on specific moments and conversations, the squat’s space can easily be retracted. In a debate between a man of radical

178 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou left-wing persuasion and Nikos, a member of the K*Vox assembly and an anarchist, Nikos was teased by his communist friend who said that K*Vox, as any anarchist group, has too many different opinions within, something that negatively affects its politics. Nikos replied: Listen, you can come here to drink your coffee – that does not make you Vox. You can work on the shifts – that also does not make you Vox. Vox’s ideological-political positions are those of its assembly, and there we have a common line. Similarly, when K*VOX had decided to form ‘self-defence groups’ to ‘patrol’ the neighbourhood in order to make the situation difficult for organized crime activities, especially drug dealing, as sometimes happens, people were targeted by mistake. During such an incident on the street just behind the squat, a group of anarchists were sitting on the staircase of a block of flats. Then a group of K*VOX members and members of the Exarcheia neighbourhood assembly asked them whether they were smoking weed. While the company did not smoke, they challenged the other group’s interference and its ethical and political significance. When it became clear to the ‘patrol’ that this was a mistake, the group from K*VOX referred to the decisions of the squat’s assembly to protect the area from the mafia. Almost an hour after the incident started, the argument was elevated to the ethical and political significance of the decision on the right to decide and act in a de-centralized anti-authoritarian manner. In other words, it became a discussion that touched the very heart of the squat and its internal decisionmaking processes. This was an unequal battle that the patrol could not win over the better-read group of anarchists, who were deeply involved in squatting and anti-authoritarian decision-making. Thus, when it became apparent that this conversation touched upon the very essence of what VOX is, the ‘patrol’ abandoned the conversation, inviting the others to join the next assembly to discuss the issues at hand. In such instances, it became visible that when the political persuasions of the squat were confronted with those of others, the space of the squat shrank and included only the members of the assembly and, therefore, only the room in the basement where the assemblies take place. This is perhaps the basic contradiction of K*Vox. On the one hand, there is the opening it seeks to make into the wider society as a social centre, and on the other there is the very specific radical ideological and political stance of the people who run it. However, maybe this is not a contradiction at all. As Maevious once said when he was asked what K*Vox is: If we can use a metaphor, I would say that we want Vox to be to society what the armed guerilla groups are to a social movement. Something that will refer to the movement, be part of it, but that will also try to push it forward down the revolutionary road.

Hetero-utopias 179 The success of the demonstration against the mafia (with more than 2,500 people participating) convinced the residents of Exarcheia that it was time to create some structures that would allow them to fight to permanently get rid of anti-social behaviour and the mafia that encouraged such behaviour. Thus, the People’s Assembly of Exarcheia was created, a horizontal assembly that would meet every Friday evening in order to discuss and arrange further actions. The assembly consists of individuals, residents of all ages, and political collectivities of Exarcheia (with anarchist and leftist persuasions). K*Vox, which of course participated in the assembly as part of Exarcheia, suggested during the first meeting that the neighbourhood should proceed from mere discussions about the problem to fighting everyday practices. In keeping with this line of thought, it proposed the creation of omades perifrourisis (‘groups of safekeeping’, a kind of unarmed civilian militia) that in a first phase would march throughout the neighbourhood informing people and chasing away the drug dealers, with force if necessary. The first reaction of the assembly to such a radical proposition was circumspect, but after discussion and several arguments the assembly agreed on this line of action. In addition to the omades perifrourisis, the residents decided to have a permanent public appearance in the street of Themistokleous, a street with a high concentration of drug dealing. At night, when the residents came home from their jobs, they transformed the street into a self-organized public festival. They brought food and drink from their homes, and transformed the entrances of housing blocks into makeshift bars, while musicians played music sitting on the steps. As Mr Manolis told us: We are here every night. While we are here they [referring to the drug dealers] do not come. But we have to come every night. If we are absent for one night they will come again, they will sell and the road will be as before. We do not have any problem if a couple of youths smoke a joint, but the dealing and the organized crime is something else. . . . Besides, the very fact that we can self-organize these meetings here is something that gives us pleasure. And it seem to be working. Dimitris, a member of the K*Vox assembly, was asked why Vox seems to have gained a hegemonic position in the People’s Assembly. He replied: Comrade, it is not only a matter of us having the better political proposition. Do not forget that apart from our words, we are a squat that visibly stands here. They see us. They see that what we do is possible. Once again, it seems that the very materiality of the squat helps to concentrate and visualize small-scale radical practices that can set an example and make the principles of self-organization intelligible. In a sense, therefore, the residents’ desire for the right to their own city (see Lefebvre 1977 [1968]) is influenced not only by the ideological beliefs of the anarchists (our words), but also from their spatial and material dimension (visibility if nothing else).

180 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou

The boundaries of everyday life In order to work and help at the kafeneio, one should advocate the principles of self-organization and solidarity, and of course know or learn the job of the bartender. Through the participation in the shifts of the kafeneio, however, and through informal talks with members of the squat, it became obvious that another feature is crucial in order for someone to be a reliable ‘bartender’ – a feature that exemplifies the relationship between the everyday life of the squat and the ever-present state terror. Several informants confirm that the most important thing for someone who is at vardia is not the job per se, but to know and be able to deal with a state of emergency, meaning a police raid of the squat: ‘He or she who is in vardia is responsible for the whole squat, is responsible for activating the protocol’, as Jackson said. By the ‘protocol’ he meant a series of codified actions that the squatters undertake in such cases, actions that have been codified empirically, namely through the repetition of the threat. The ‘protocol’ involves those on duty informing the people who are in the social centre at that time about any imminent or probable attack, telling them that the doors will shut so that those who want to stay to protect the squat can do so, and that others should leave immediately. The exigencies of the emergency situation are located within normality itself, insofar as a prerequisite for the execution of ‘everyday work’ is the ability to respond to the state of emergency. The parallels and the coexistence of ‘normality’ (looseness, daily social time) and ‘emergency’ situations are pronounced in the everyday life of the squat. At almost any given time the members of the squat can be heard whispering to one another about some emergency that has just occurred or planning how to respond to an imminent threat. Simultaneously, however, they participate in the ‘regular’ talks we have together about random things. Likewise, we could be sitting at the tables of the kafeneio in the same way that people sit and have their drink in any other café-bar, and suddenly two or three squatters get up to go to the street above to chase away a drug dealer, and then come back for another beer. Thus, the boundaries between everyday life, leisure time and entertainment on the one hand, and political time and emergency conditions on the other, are not just fluid, but are dovetailed in such a way in the space-time of the squat that the distinction loses its meaning. The space of the squat and the participation in its activities thereby contribute to the politicization of every aspect of daily life. It trains, through the very flow of everyday life, the community in a radical and politicized perception and experience of the everyday, by placing the emergency (which in the final analysis is always a political issue) as a part of normality. This functions as a constant reminder of the ongoing social antagonism, even in the so-called ‘relaxed’ hours. Being in the social centre therefore gives every action (from drinking a beer to clashing with the police or the drug dealers) a political dimension, not because

Hetero-utopias 181 this is the ideological framework that the squatters have made, but because of the dialectic of the everyday life of the space itself and the ongoing ‘state of emergency’ in the wider society. This pattern of addressing the various different aspects of life from a political perspective can also be found in the discourses and practices of the project of ADYE, which is housed in the basement of K*Vox. This selforganized social clinic consists of volunteer physicians, psychologists, paramedics, pharmacists and residents. Its basic position is that the issue of health is a political issue, and that the project has nothing to do with philanthropy or with the mere provision of free services. As Chloe, a comrade who participates in ADYE stated: I do not get satisfaction from the fact that I am helping a poor guy. I get satisfaction from promoting the idea that health is part of a more general political practice, of the will for society to be organized differently. The doctors here don’t have the central role, and the patients do not just passively accept the doctors’ orders, nor are easy solutions provided. The doctor–patient relationships are not those between the professional and their client; rather, there is a relationship of reciprocity. Since we recognize the social and political causes behind various medical problems, we believe that those problems concern all of us and not just the patients. Therefore, providing training in the idea that health is a social good and identical to anti-hierarchical, collective structures is the most important thing we can do. Arif, an immigrant from Pakistan who has lived in Greece for a decade and who participates in the project, said in reference to people’s response to the project: Yes, they are coming . . . not as many as we wish, but we are still a new project. For now it’s mostly immigrants who come here. When they realize the nature of the space and that it is safe they feel free to talk about other problems too – you know, problems at work, racism and such. We talk to them and many of them also show interest in our general political activity. Thus, the way that ADYE promotes health transforms the space from a mere social clinic into a space where various subjects who articulate political issues and have the potential to be shaped into a political collectivity are concentrated. In the space of the squat, the identities of the doctor, the patient, the local and the immigrant all partake in a broader framework of social relations that is not only alternative to, but also in an antagonistic relationship with the existing neoliberal, bourgeois social order.

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Hetero-Utopias Through the ethnography of one of the few remaining squats in Athens presented in this chapter, we have demonstrated the significance of space and materialities for the creation of potential resistance, and therefore have exposed the spatial aspects of the new repressive strategy of the neoliberal state. During the ‘time of crisis’ in Greece, we find the implementation of a set of neoliberal ‘shock’ policies with severe repercussions in the subalterns’ collective comprehension of their condition. The huge amount of unemployment, especially among the youth, and the precarious forms of labour and the insecure lives people have been experiencing the past few years, have impacted on the realization of concrete collective identities that can envisage antagonistic ways out of the terror of the loan agreements and their anti-social policies. In such a context, we argue that the neoliberal Greek state is aware of the crucial role a disciplined spatial continuum can play in keeping people isolated or individualized and deprived of representations of possibilities for resistance. As the squat illustrates, the material dimension of the ideological formation is answered by the state with the ideological dimension of material repression. Since the squats signify an antagonistic meaning of public space, and since they have been relatively firmly established in the Greek social-political imagination since the December revolt, the state has used their significance not only in order to intercept the practices of resistance that take place inside them, but also to radiate its vision for a dead, anti-social public space in general. A public space that on the one hand will increasingly be privatized and whose non-commercial dimension will be characterized as ‘anomie’, and on the other will turn into a field of control and formation of subjectivities. The Foucauldian notion of heterotopias can provide an interesting perspective on the ethnographic findings of this research in terms of revealing prevalent political strategies and interpreting contemporary socio-spatial phenomena. The concept of heterotopia refers to spaces and places in which social relations are articulated differently from the dominant, ‘normal’ arrangements, or alternatively spaces that challenge the rational-functional social organization of space. In contrast to ‘utopias’, Foucault developed the idea of ‘hetero-topias’, as: . . . places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. (Foucault 1984: 3–4) In a state of heterotopia, a lot of different cultural, social, economic and political complexes can be situated. Foucault thus formulated a typology of heterotopias, and provided examples for each one. One of the characteristics

Hetero-utopias 183 that Foucault attributes to certain kinds of heterotopian sites is that they can have a function in relation to the space that remains (Foucault 1984: 8); that is to say, in relation to the space that is external to them. With this principle Foucault places heterotopias in the wider field of social antagonism and underlines the role of space and materiality in the circulation of power, the construction of subjectivities, and also either the reproduction of or the challenge to the existing system. Foucault then distinguishes between two types of heterotopias in relation to the space that remains. The first is the heterotopia of compensation (1984: 8). This refers to spaces that are so perfectly organized, pedantic and disciplined that this designates the remaining space as irrational and disorganized, thus being in need of intervention. A good example of such a heterotopia of compensation can be found in Foucault’s, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995 [1977]). Although he does not explicitly refer to the ‘heterotopia of compensation’ in this work, his analysis of the phenomenon of the modern prison reveals a similar logic. For Foucault, the rise of modern capitalism is accompanied by an emerging anthropological type that places the human at the epicentre of the universe. However, this product of liberal-humanistic ideology does not correspond to a Hegelian-like progress of the human spirit that inclines towards better modes of existence; rather, it simply marks a new, emerging need. Thus, an economy that is based on the exploitation of one human by another human is obliged to produce a deep knowledge for man and his body. As a result, the human is at the ‘epicentre’ because he forms a new object of scientific knowledge. This scientific knowledge is located in what Foucault calls ‘laboratories’, which have to exist in specific conditions of power, ‘truth’, and authority. In so far as prison meets those conditions, it can be said that it is not just a place for punishment but also constitutes a ‘laboratory’ that obtains certain functions in social production and reproduction. Foucault analyses this process by paying attention to the particular architectural schema that characterize total institutions in the post-Enlightenment era. Adopting the term from Jeremy Bentham, he calls these ‘Panopticons’ (‘seeing everything’). Thus, the ‘Panopticon’ is a certain circular spatial arrangement that allows for the constant surveillance of prisoners in such a way that the latter could not say if they are being watched at any particular moment, and thus have to internalize the possibility that they are being watched and disciplined at all times. For Foucault, this technology, which would not have been possible without the specific space-laboratory that is the prison, inaugurates the modern modality of power that is based more on self-inspection than on force. Accordingly, Foucault states: . . . among all the reasons for the prestige that was accorded in the second half of the eighteenth century, to circular architecture (referring to prisons and clinics), one must no doubt include the fact that it expressed a certain political utopia. (1995: 174)

184 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou However, utopia cannot exist in any pure form, and it can justifiably be said that the prison is ‘effectively an enacted utopia’ (Foucault 1984: 3). In contrast, a heterotopia is one in which one does not accord to the dominant forms of social relations, but in which one instead accords to a kind of total discipline that produces new knowledge and technologies for the further ‘economic’ utilization of the human body is necessarily a space-experimental site for the configuration of the totality of the social body. In this way, this is a heterotopia of compensation. The usefulness of the techniques that are produced in a ‘laboratory’ such as the prison become clearer if one attempts to locate their methods and effects in the way that other fields of social life are organized, such as the school, the factory and even entire cities. The ‘panoptic’ configuration of social subjects cuts across those fields; thus, the Foucauldian argument is concluded: before any kind of ‘mental’ ideology, ‘discipline proceeds with the distribution of the individuals in space’ (Foucault 1995: 141). The second type are the heterotopias of illusion. In this case, Foucault refers to spaces in which, consciously or unconsciously, the naturalization and the validity of the dominant spaces and the dominant articulations of social relations are mocked, challenged and defied, thus appearing as an illusion rather than an unquestioned reality (1984). Foucault gives the example of the brothel, a place in which the norms regarding sexuality and the ‘sanctity’ of the bourgeoisie family are mocked and inverted. Another example of this Foucauldian notion is given by Doron in his work Those Marvelous Empty Zones on the Edge of Our Cities: Heterotopia and the ‘Dead Zone’ (2008). Doron discusses the abandoned spaces that are usually encountered at the limits of a city which do not have a specific function and therefore have somehow ‘escaped’ the dominant social production of space. These are places that tend to attract unofficial social occurrences, such as sites for illicit sex, makeshift playing fields and so forth. The very fact that those spaces are so ‘outside’ of the official urban planning functions exposes the social construction and the bias of the space that remains, thus de-naturalizing the capitalist concept of urban planning. Returning to the ethnographic field, it can be said that a careful and ‘customized’ application of the notion of heterotopia in relation to the space that remains can produce interesting answers regarding not only the space of K*Vox itself, but also the repressive strategy of the sovereign power in relation to the contestation of public space in general. Firstly, although Foucault clearly distinguishes between heterotopias of compensation, which mostly connect with power, and heterotopias of illusion, which connect to resistance, the case of K*Vox shows that a heterotopia of compensation does not necessarily have to be a state-derived institution that ‘reflects’ reactionary examples to the ‘outside’ world. As the ethnographic findings of this research on the squat and its neighbourhood have shown, the radicalization of the People’s Assembly of Exarcheia and the proliferation of direct actions and practices of self-organization among the residents was partly the outcome

Hetero-utopias 185 of the material existence of the squat and the implementation of antagonistic forms of social relations in a specific space. Therefore, the squat managed to realize and exemplify a possibility which, without such a material essence, would have remained merely an abstract discourse. Thus, K*Vox emerges from this research as an ‘effectively enacted utopia’, a heterotopia of compensation, a ‘laboratory’ which mirrors possibilities of self-organization at the local level. Furthermore, K*Vox also fits into the category of ‘heterotopias of illusion’. As a space in which non-commercial relations, non-hierarchical structures and solidarity prevail, the squat helps to expose the capitalist environment as an illusion – a social and historical construction and not part of a supposed human nature. As a result, K*Vox concentrates elements of both of Foucault’s types, showing how a heterotopia can be part of existing social antagonisms by fully affecting the space that remains. It is precisely this attribute of heterotopias to concentrate in specific space elements that functions as a model for the remaining space which makes the squats a crucial aspect of the repressive strategy of the state. That is, not only does the state attempt to erase a ‘threatening’ dissemination of meanings regarding public space, but also, by using particular material spaces as sites of repression, to create its own. In other words, by repressing a space that already has social significance, the state is publicly performing an inversion of the ‘heterotopia of compensation’ from a realized model of antagonistic social arrangements, to a realized-through-repression model of a fully controlled, disciplined general public space. Just as K*Vox or Villa Amalias could function as real, material spaces that enable flows, concentrations and re-negotiations of identities, so the state is counter-creating a suffocated public space in which those conditions remain unimaginable. This turns a hetero-topia into a u-topia: a non-space which by its non-existence contributes to the perpetuation of the social fragmentation that is evident in Greece as a result of the imposed neoliberal reforms (Dalakoglou 2012, Veloudogiani 2013). As Bourdieu (1998) argues, the precarious and flexible forms of labour and social existence that accompany neoliberalism deprive people of the means to articulate concrete collective identities, which are a crucial prerequisite for any form of resistance. This process can drive people into a passive understanding of their condition as they cannot meet in any social space and collectively envisage alternative possibilities (Papageorgiou 2013). As shown through the ethnographic research present here, space and its materiality can play a role in the concentration and the solidification of dispersed subjects, practices and ideas that lead to radical activity. Therefore, it can be said that the strategy of the sovereign power is not (only) to hit the resistance when it is fully formed, but also to erase the very prerequisites of it; namely, the antagonistic use of public space. Discussing the increased police presence in the public spaces of Athens during the last years, Fillipidis notes that:

186 Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou The territorial inscription of the demand of public security carries with it the reproduction of a new plexus of meaning-giving, one which re-structures the meaning of public presence in itself – at the precise moment when the operations in question take place. The permanent police presence in public space comprises, in this sense, an essential element of meaning-assigning for public space per se. (Fillipidis 2013) Police repression in contemporary Greece functions in a way that makes the Althusserian distinction between the ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus (Althusser 1971) lose its meaning. For Althusser, those two components are in large part responsible for the reproduction of dominant social relations by on the one hand installing ideological representations (the ideological apparatus), and on the other one hand by practising force when necessary (the repressive apparatus). In Greece, however, police repression is not merely the material treatment of an already-formed ‘enemy within’; rather, it aims at the ideological-psychological formation of terrorized subjectivities. This repression bares and conveys a particular habitus, to borrow Bourdieu’s term (1990); namely, a combination of representations and (non-)movements within space that people must become accustomed and used to. Returning to Foucault, one could say that in contemporary Greece, characterized as it is by an excessive loss of consensus, ‘discipline proceeds with the distribution of the individuals in space’ (Foucault 1977: 141). Resistance, in Bourdieu’s terms, can be viewed as another form of capital (1986, 1991), which does not emerge merely from the objective conditions (like the economic crisis), but mostly has to be obtained through ‘training’ in techniques, material forms and representations of resistance. It is this ‘training’ as a prerequisite of resistance that is intercepted by the state through the interception of the space that the former can take place. This is how a space of resistance like a squat becomes a ‘space of anomie’. As Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms . . . it destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedoms, which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space’ (2004: 466, emphasis added). In this way the state proceeds to a kind of preemptive counter-insurgency. The popular depiction of neoliberalism as the ‘rolling back of the state’ is a far cry from what is actually happening in Greece today. The state not only is not ‘rolling back’, but is actively pursuing the ‘invisibility’ of social subjects and their integration into the neoliberal paradigm. Neoliberalism cannot by itself lead to social fragmentation, as people will always create structures of solidarity among them, and they will resort to informal forms of sociality, economic transactions and health care as the example of K*Vox showed. This is exactly what the squats aim to achieve. To proliferate the belief that people can organize their lives without need for the state’s institutions and that if there is such a thing as a human nature, it is about

Hetero-utopias 187 solidarity and dignity and not about cannibalism. This is exactly what the state's aim is; to eliminate places such as squats and thus ‘empty’ people of such beliefs – to turn hope into a utopia. Thus it is not a coincidence that the people who participated in the demonstration on 5 June 2014 in Exarcheia repeatedly shouted the following spontaneous slogan: ‘If we don’t resist in every neighbourhood, our cities will become a modern prison’.

Note 1

ADYE stands for ΑΔΥΕ Self-organised Health Structure of Exarcheia (Αυτοοργανωμένη Δομή Υγείας Εξαρχείων).

13 Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus Migrant deportability and the radicalisation of solidarity Katerina Rozakou

Solidarian: the making of a noun January 2015. A group of five people approach the guard at the gate of an immigrant detention centre and introduce themselves. ‘We are allilegyoi (solidarians), and we visit the detainees in the centre’. They quickly add that the director of the centre has granted them permission to pay visits twice a week. The policeman seems unable to grasp their identity and asks for clarification. ‘Where did you say you come from?’ The visitors repeat that they are solidarians and they add that they all live in the vicinity. They explain that they visit the detainees in order to help them in any way they can. ‘So, are you an NGO?’ the officer asks only to receive a negative answer. These people are not a non-governmental organisation, they say. However, in order to reach a point of some mutual understanding, they add ‘We are something like an NGO; we are people who live in the gheitonia (neighbourhood)’. Apparently the only ones expected to visit the detainees are a few NGOs providing services or – seldom – their lawyer, friends and relatives who reside in Greece. The guard, still puzzled, calls the front office of the detention centre and speaks with one of his colleagues. As it starts drizzling, the group moves under the shed in front of the guard’s cubicle. It is only ten minutes later that a chubby police officer in a vest, armed with a rifle, exits the main building and walks the thirty-metre distance in order to accompany the visitors to the detention centre. The solidarians joke among themselves about the excessively armed look of the officer – the ‘uzi’ gun that he carries – and his clumsy walking. The scene of misunderstanding is repeated in the front office of the centre. The police officers look perplexed and clearly unable to take in the selfidentifying noun solidarian. They look completely unfamiliar with the word. The visitors are asked to present their identity cards and provide personal information such as their home address and phone number. They hand in their identity cards with an overt discomfort. In the end, the police officer in charge decides to write the bizarre word ‘solidarian’ in the description

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 189 section of the visitors’ book. Although the group has been visiting the centre for more than a month, they are still received the same way every time. The centre is one of the preremoval facilities that were put into operation in 2012. In the first years the centre was designated for male illegalised immigrants. After November 2014, it became the only preremoval centre for women under administrative detention awaiting deportation. The centre was an exception to the placement of preremoval centres in isolated areas (cf. Cheliotis 2013). It was situated very close to the centre of Athens, in the residential area of Elliniko. The detention sector was at the back of the police station that hosts the passport issuing service for the entire Southeastern Athens (Aliens’ Bureau). Nevertheless, neither the citizens who visited the police station nor the people living in the nearby houses and the children who attended the neighbouring school were aware of their proximity to a preremoval centre. A sign on the wall at the back side of the plot was the only vague indication of the identity of the place: ‘Readmission (deportation) to cops and Nazis; we stand with immigrants.’ Allilegyos (solidarian) is a neologism. In recent years the solidarian has turned from an adjective to a noun; this grammatical shift signifies the radicalisation of solidarity that took place in austerity-ridden Greece and the flourishment of solidarity. The diffusion of the notion is interrelated with the reconfiguration of the conceptions of the notions of ‘social’ that has taken place in the country. The expansion of solidarity, and solidarity with immigrants in particular, is an essential element of the political content of sociality in this particular historical conjuncture. This chapter is based on many years of fieldwork (between 2002–2004, and 2010–2011) about solidarity with refugee/ immigrant groups and on my most recent research (since 2014), about state and non-state actors’ involvement in the deportation and the detention arena in Greece. Apart from the state functionaries’ perspectives and practices, my research explores the workings of anti-deportation campaigns and pro-immigrant groups.1 I discuss the case of a group of solidarians who visited the detainees in a preremoval centre as well as other ‘solidarity initiatives’ as they are widely known. The focus of the study is not on immigrants and refugees themselves, but on the solidarians and the materialisation of solidarity in everyday life, especially in a time of severe measures against irregular immigration. Following the presentation of the historical genealogies of the term and its relation with the anarchist movement in post-dictatorship Greece, this chapter proceeds with the radicalisation of solidarity and the theoretical discussion on the cultural formation of sociality in Greece. This conceptual framework helps us explore how solidarity with immigrants and refugees challenges established ways of managing alterity. Social centres, flourishing in Greece under crisis, are a crucial locus for the realisation of political projects of sociality; ‘solidarity socialities’ (Rozakou 2016b).2 Solidarity emphasises lateral and anti-hierarchical relatedness. In this sense it contrasts both hospitality (the dominant cultural code of dealing with alterity) and bureaucratic frameworks of assistance to immigrants and refugees.

190 Rozakou In Greek the solidarian refers to ‘he/she who stands in solidarity’. The subjects towards whom this solidarity is addressed differ in time. In the 1980s and 1990s the term had a distinctive political content related to the anarchist and anti-authoritarian political movements of post-dictatorship Greece. Solidarians at the time identified with support to anarchist inmates. A decisive moment in the history of the anarchist movement was the 1995 occupation of the Polytechnic School in Athens, following the annual 17 November march. The events ended with violent clashes between anarchists and the police, and more than 500 arrests of – mainly – young people and imprisonment of the occupiers (Giovanopoulos and Dalakoglou 2011). Despite its initial identification with the anarchist movement, the term acquired new connotations and it became broadly used by groups supporting refugees and immigrants in the 2000s. A turning point to its contemporary meaning was the hunger strike launched by approximately 300 immigrants from the Maghreb on 26 January 2011 in Athens. The protesters demanded residence permits and legalisation for all immigrants. Severely hit by the financial crisis, most of them had been unable to gather the stamps required for the renewal of their residence permits. The role of solidarians was central in the immigrants’ protest: solidarians participated and co-ordinated press conferences, provided medical services, guarded and controlled entrance to the buildings where the protest took place, accompanied hunger strikers to the hospital and so forth. The hunger strikers first found shelter in the Law School of the University of Athens and a few days later they were transferred to the Hypatia Mansion at the centre of the city. The mansion was allotted to them by the owner of the building following long and strenuous negotiations between the government and the Ministry of Citizen’s Protection, on the one hand, and a committee that included both immigrants’ representatives and solidarians. On the last night of the negotiations the police banned traffic in several streets around the Law School and there were police squads outside the university and on every corner in the broader area. At the same time, hundreds of people demonstrated in the adjacent streets in solidarity with the immigrants. The Minister of Citizen’s Protection3 and several columnists in the daily press4 referred sarcastically to the role solidarians played in the immigrants’ struggle, accusing them of being ‘inciters’. The rhetoric about the solidarians’ ‘guiding’ role and the political ‘speculation’ of the immigrants’ struggle reappears in similar events. This recurrent theme produces immigrants as powerless subjects devoid of agency and merely manipulated by political opportunists. In March 2011, on the 44th day of the hunger strike, the protesters decided to end their struggle after reaching an agreement with the government.5 The immigrants’ struggle adopted well-established political symbols that drew upon recent Greek political history. Interestingly enough, it is the university in Greece that is seen as a sacred place and locus of asylum, compared to churches where sans-papiers often locate their struggles all over Europe.6

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 191 Choosing university space as the location of their protest, the group made reference to post-dictatorship Greece and the loaded political significance of university asylum. Whether immigrants and refugees were themselves actually familiar with this history or they took on strategies already adopted by previous demonstrators; whether they were ‘guided’ towards university space by solidarians or not, the importance is that they not only appropriated culturally and historically informed forms of political struggle, but they in fact broadened both the meanings of the political and of being political in contemporary Greece (McNevin 2011). Asylum thus acquired a novel meaning that enriched its content and updated it in the contemporary political setting of Greece where immigrants and refugees are the subjects par excellence of political and institutional exclusion.7

In the land of Xenios Zeus In August 2012, three months after the national elections, Nikos Dendias, then Minister of Public Order and Citizen’s Protection, launched ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’. The operation, named after ancient Greek god Zeus – king of gods, patron of the stranger and God of hospitality – aimed at controlling irregular immigration. According to the minister, the operation’s twofold purpose was to ‘restore order and security’ in the centre of Athens and to ‘close the country’s borders’ to flows of lathrometanastes (illegal immigrants) from Asia and Africa. ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’ initiated document checks in the streets of Athens (and other areas of the country), during which people were stopped on the basis of racial profiling and ethnic difference, their documents were checked, several people were taken to police stations and those without residence permits were transferred to detention centres. The government adopted the practice of ‘sweep operations’ against immigrants in the 1990s and ‘upgraded’ it to generalised policing and control over public space, and to massive persecution of immigrants. The operation included the filling of several preremoval centres already constructed by the previous government; locations of administrative detention pending deportation. Gradually the detention period was extended from three to six months, 12 and finally 18 months. In March 2014, the Legal Council of the Greek State issued an opinion that allowed for further extension of the detention period. Apart from preremoval centres, immigrants and asylum seekers were detained in police stations all over the country. Since access to these facilities was limited, the exact total number of detainees remains unclear with estimates ranging from 5,000–7,000 people in late 2014, whereas for the period 2012–2013 alone, approximately 37,000 immigrants were detained (Angeli et al. 2014).8 Operation Xenios Zeus implemented the broad use of preremoval detention as a deterrence and punitive measure, rather than merely as an effective measure towards returns. Nevertheless, it was in fact the previous government that had introduced a shift towards restrictive measures as far as the management of irregular

192 Rozakou immigration is concerned. Only a few weeks before the national elections in 2012, Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, launched a campaign which targeted undocumented sex workers for allegedly transmitting HIV to Greek family men. Photographs of accused women were publicised in the Greek media and the minister declared his intention to deport all HIVpositive illegalised immigrants who worked in the sex industry. And it was the predecessor of Nikos Dendias, then Minister of Citizen’s Protection Christos Papoutsis, who outlined the new framework aiming to combat ‘illegal migration’. In 2011 he announced the building of an enormous fence alongside the country’s north-eastern borders with Turkey. The creation of the ‘Evros wall’ was part of other measures that were implemented in accordance to pertinent EU legislation. Greek policies towards irregular migration and asylum are interrelated to the country’s strategic geographical location at the external borders of the EU. For many years, the Greek state has been criticised for its porous borders and/or a malfunctioning asylum system by EU bodies and human rights organisations. Since 2010, Greece had been planning a set of measures directed at addressing challenges in the asylum system and to combat irregular migration. In line with the EU Directive (2008/115/EU), the Asylum and Return Law of 2011 (3907/2011) initiated the reformation of the first reception, asylum and returns procedures, and formed the legal basis for migration and asylum policy in the following years. It is the same law (3907/2011) that defines practices of voluntary repatriation and mandatory deportation. Even before the ‘Greek crisis’ broke out, there was already an established and long-lasting ‘asylum crisis’ in the country (Cabot 2014): asylum applications were slowly examined, the refugee status was rarely attributed and the reception infrastructure was practically non-existent. As I note elsewhere (Rozakou 2012), a ‘politics of invisibility’ prevailed in this era: for many years, the vast majority of people who irregularly entered Greece remained undocumented and poorly received. Upon arrest on the borders, they were issued with a deportation order to leave the country within a month. However, none of them abided by the order and they either remained undocumented (in an effort to continue their journey to another European country) or filed an asylum request to the Greek authorities. ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’ signalled a shift from this politics of invisibility to one of proclaimed total institutional visibility and control. Immigrants would no longer be undocumented. They would be thoroughly recorded, detained and, finally, deported. Minister Dendias’ idea to code-name the operation after Xenios Zeus, the ancient Greek God of hospitality and suppliant of the stranger, and to refer to preremoval centres as ‘hospitality centres’, is anything but a novelty. Elsewhere I elaborate on how this is not merely a paradox and a distortion of a generous value but a declaration grounded on the hierarchical character of hospitality itself (cf. Rozakou 2012). Established and historically defined cultural codes, such as filoxenia (hospitality) inform the official discourses

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 193 on immigration. Moreover, the expansion of the model of hospitality to contemporary immigration policies and mobility-flows management is not a Greek particularity (see for example Rosello 2002, Shryock 2012). When the Greek right-wing minister referred to hospitality generously offered by the state to ‘illegal immigrants’, he was drawing on a long-standing nationalist discourse and the production of the modern Greek state as the descendant of ancient Greece. The image of Xenios Zeus infuses the stereotypical representation of national attitudes towards different categories of strangers. When accused of distorting a cultural code with a disinterested and generous offer, Minister Dendias defended the code-name, claiming that the campaign was planned to restore the basic human rights of ‘illegal immigrants’. At the same time, it aimed at restoring Greece as a place of hospitality for tourists who fail to enjoy a generous Greek reception due to irregular immigration and the criminality that, by definition, accompanies it. In the setting of Operation Xenios Zeus, hospitality still appears as an act of generosity towards the stranger. Yet in that case the stranger is conceived as an uninvited guest who has ‘invaded’ Greek territory and has broken the rules of hospitality. Expulsion is thus the only possible procedure designated for this unwanted guest. In the level of everyday life, hospitable practices are essential in the relationships Greek people form with immigrants as they enact the culturally and historically informed ways of dealing with alterity (Papataxiarchis 2006). One should not mistake this analysis of hospitality as an idealised concealment of inequality. In reality Greek ethnography has long demonstrated the hierarchical elements of hospitable practices and has underlined its character as a conditional inclusion of the stranger (Cowan 1990, Herzfeld 1987, Papataxiarchis 2006). The stranger is socially acceptable as long as his/her difference does not threaten the host in a setting where the ‘other’ is perceived as a threat to the principle of ethno-cultural similarity (Papataxiarchis 2006: 33–39). The host himself/herself holds the monopoly of agency and power. In the pre-Xenios Zeus politics of institutional invisibility, immigrants and refugees formed relationships with indigenous people through ruptures that their (official) invisibility opened. The new politics of invisibility, however, aims to transform immigrants into socially invisible and non-existent beings. In the land of (Operation) Xenios Zeus, the guest is no longer placed in the social universe of the host. He/she is the guest who is expelled, detained, and shut in a space far away from sight (in a space to which no locals, citizens, journalists and, in some cases, even humanitarian organisations have access). In a non-social place. Operation Xenios Zeus leaves little room for ruptures and social possibilities, contrary to everyday encounters where the stranger is incorporated in the broad, though conditional, pattern of hospitality. ‘The Greek crisis’ of the last years has caused the rapid impoverishment and the violent decline of the middle classes. There has been a notable rise in xenophobia and racism; areas in the centre of Athens were patrolled

194 Rozakou by civilians and numerous attacks against immigrants were recorded (Dalakoglou 2013c, Kandylis and Kavoulakos 2011). At the same time, the central political scene has undergone intense changes and traditionally strong political parties have lost public support. The Far Right has been gaining ground and for the first time in Greek history neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party members have been elected in the Athens’ municipal elections in 2010 and in the Greek Parliament in 2012 (Bampilis in this volume). It is no coincidence that the election of Golden Dawn members to the Parliament, the inauguration of ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’ and measures against irregular immigration have taken place in the same period. In fact, they all signal the broader criminalisation and illegalisation of immigrants (Coutin 2005, De Genova 2002) in crisis-ridden Greece and the strong link between the crisis and restrictive immigration policies. Papataxiarchis refers to these phenomena with the term ‘the crisis of hospitality’ and explains how the xenophobic climax ‘politicised’ hospitality. As he claims, the austerity measures and the public disdain led to a generalised devaluation of the central political system and opened the way to Golden Dawn. Racist and violent acts towards immigrants became overt and were widely tolerated. Hospitality as the dominant way of dealing with alterity and a terrain of social (yet hierarchical) incorporation, gave way to xenophobia and to the rejection of the ‘other’ (Papataxiarchis 2014a). The plea to ‘unconditional hospitality’ that Jacques Derrida sketches (2000) is embraced by activists in solidarity with sans-papiers in different places of the world.9 The limitations of adopting hospitality as a value by critics of (anti)immigration policies is however unavoidable: being tenaciously fortified behind a reified category does not protect one from the paradoxes inherent to it. Meanwhile the cultural mode hospitality is challenged by activists themselves who scrutinise its hierarchical connotations (cf. Rozakou 2012). At the same time as this ‘hospitality crisis’, a counter-development took place. Solidarity with immigrants became radicalised and widespread. This was based on the broader flourishing of solidarity in austerity-ridden Greece and on the reconfiguration of the social. Furthermore, solidarity with immigrants challenges established modes of social relatedness such as hospitality and embraces alternative anti-hierarchical visions of society.

Solidarity radicalised It’s Monday morning, 22 December 2014, at the Mixed Criminal Court of Athens. Today is the last day of the trial of 65 migrants accused of revolt in a detention centre 16 months ago. In the night of 10 August 2013, immigrants detained at the Amygdaleza preremoval detention centre attacked police guards with plastic bottles and stones, set fire to mattresses and the cargo containers where they were detained and tried to break free. The detainees had just been informed that the time of their confinement would

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 195 be further extended and that even those who had already reached the limit of 12 months of detention would be detained for six more months. At the time, there was no running water or electricity and the temperature in the containers reached 50˚C during the daytime. The riots soon escalated in the Amygdaleza detention centre (the largest in the country, with approximately 2,000 immigrants detained, 25 km from the centre of Athens) and clashes broke out between the police and the detainees. The uprising was soon suppressed and 57 immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Morocco were arrested and transferred to police stations in Athens. In the trial that started on the 3rd of November 2014, 65 immigrants face severe sentences as they are accused of felonies: riot, attempted escape, violent physical injuries and attacks to guards, unprovoked damage of property and insult of officials. If convicted, they will be imprisoned for numerous years. The courtroom is full of people. One side of the five-row seated area is occupied by the accused. There are 25 men, mostly young, out of the 65 charged. The rest of the accused have either been deported or escaped arrest. In each row, an interpreter sits among them in order to provide direct translation. The other half of the courtroom is occupied by the audience, mostly solidarians as they commonly self-identify; people who are part of anoihtes synelefseis (open assemblies) or anoihtes protovoulies (open initiatives) of allilegyi (‘solidarity’) to the accused; collectives and groups that stand against detention centres. More than 15 policemen are present, either standing between the two groups (solidarians-migrants) or sitting at the back of the room. Some of them belong to the standard police force of the Criminal Court and others work at the Transfer Section of the Greek police and accompany the accused from prison to court. They are mostly young men in their early 20s and only one or two policewomen of the same age. The criminal court is comprised of three judges and four citizens-members of the jury. The secretary of the court and the public prosecutor are seated in the two sides of the court bench. Between the members of the court and the audience, more than ten lawyers are here to represent their clients. Most of them have been appointed by the state in order to provide legal services to individuals accused. However, there are also lawyers providing pro-bono legal aid to more than one accused. Throughout the trial the latter worked closely with Solidarity Groups who accompanied them during their visits to clients, provided important information for their defence, and gathered money for the trial costs. A few journalists sit in assigned seats in the front of the audience but when one of them attempts to take a seat in the row in front of the accused, the head of the policemen turns her away ‘for safety reasons’. The woman says tensely, ‘I remember you from the previous trials; you were always bad-tempered’ as she moves unwillingly to the adjacent row. The trial begins with the public prosecutor’s statement, who notes that the police guards who testified in the trial were all ‘young and inexperienced’

196 Rozakou and had only recently been transferred to work as guards at the Amygdaleza centre. She then says that the only evidence of guilt submitted during the trial are their testimonies which are ‘unreliable and dubious’ and fail to support the accusations convincingly. On hearing her statement, the audience becomes restless, people squirm in their seats, talk to each other and try to exchange glimpses with the accused – to record their reactions to such a positive and important statement. The accused still wait for the translation of this important statement by the interpreter and appear to be trying to guess what has just been uttered. In the meantime, more people arrive at the courthouse and since there is no room left in the seated area, they stand by the door or behind the seats of the audience. The head of the police guarding the room looks annoyed by the disorder and the noise and asks the judge to forbid a standing audience. However, the judge quickly turns down his appeal. The policeman strongly reacts and claims that the number of the people accused is large and there is not a sufficient police force in place to secure order and safety in the courtroom. The judge openly disagrees with him and claims that there are more than enough policemen and policewomen in the courtroom. She waves her hand as if to indicate ‘do not make a fuss out of it; let’s go on with the procedure’. The head of the police force looks discontent whereas the audience visibly enjoy the moment, smile sarcastically and exchange comments. The lawyers present the cases of their clients on two grounds: either on the individual innocence and non-involvement of their client in the riots, or on the collective innocence of all the accused and the denouncement of Greek state policies towards immigration. The latter lawyers refer to ‘concentration camps’ rather than ‘detention’ or preremoval centres as is the official term, making a direct reference to the hideous historical experience of World War 2 and the Nazi concentration camps. This is a common symbolic scheme evoked by solidarians during their campaigns as it appears in their slogans, public discourses and speeches. Often drawing directly upon Giorgio Agamben and his theorisation of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), this metaphor manifests the deprivation of political rights by the sovereign in contemporary crisis-ridden Greece. ‘These are concentration camps and not hospitality centres’ says one of the lawyers who then refers to one of the testimonies by a police guard in the previous hearings: The guard referred to the detainees as filoxenoumenoi (guests) and when the prosecutor protested ‘how can you call them guests? Are they allowed to enter and exit the compound on their free will?’ The guard looked perplexed and unable to grasp the meaning of her question. ‘But they are guests’ he mumbled . . . The audience again responds approvingly, and even members of the court cannot hide a grin.

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 197 One of the appointed lawyers however reacts to the above-mentioned statement during his speech that follows: They are detained on their own will. Once they agree to present their passports, their detention will end immediately and they will be able to return to their countries. I am talking as a Greek citizen. I cannot accept the statement that we (sic) are concentration camps. The lawyer’s comment fuels reactions from the audience and a young man responds aggressively: ‘What are you talking about? You must be joking!’ Others mumble that he is apparently a Golden Dawn supporter in the wrong position – defending a man from Bangladesh and asking the court to acquit his client of all charges. The head of the police immediately asks for order in the audience and has a brief tense dialogue with the young man. The solidarian and the lawyer look each other in the eyes aggressively. The judge intervenes to end the tension and threatens the young man that if he keeps disrespecting the procedure and making comments he will be removed from the courtroom. Finally, the courtroom is back in order. Early in the afternoon the court announces its verdict and unanimously acquits the accused of all the charges. People in the audience are content with the result and some of them directly post the news on their Facebook and Twitter accounts with photos they managed to sneak despite the prohibition of photographies. Solidarians exit the court and gather in the entrance of the building. A group of five people unfold and hold a banner against detention: ‘Shut concentration camps down’. Other groups of solidarians stand and wait for the immigrants to come out of the building. Although found innocent, the 25 men will not be released but will return directly to the Amygdaleza detention centre. As they exit the court handcuffed in pairs and accompanied to the police van by policemen, solidarians greet them and applaud. They then start chanting the word freedom in different languages – Greek, English, French and Farsi – until the men disappear inside the police van. Solidarians directly address the immigrants; they are the subjects and receivers of their slogans and of their broader political involvement. This is evident by the selection of the languages of the slogans itself. Demonstrations customarily head to the entrance of detention centres and despite the fact that they try to mobilise and inform the local community, they are primarily addressed to imprisoned immigrants. The visual contact between solidarians and immigrants, the exchange of gestures, eyesights and greetings through raised arms, chanted slogans, as well as placards raised by protesters and slogans written by detainees on cardboards that hung outside detention bars, are all attempts to communicate. Reaching out to immigrants is mediated and obstructed not only by the human barriers of the police officers who stand between the two groups, but also by the fact that these two groups will most probably never actually meet again after the trial.

198 Rozakou On that day, I did not know that some of the solidarians I encountered during the trial would be the same people with whom I would visit the detained women at the Elliniko detention centre only one month later. In late 2014, this small group of anarchists had been granted permission to enter the Elliniko preremoval centre and have regular contact with the women detainees. It was the end of Operation Xenios Zeus and detention centres in the country were overpopulated with illegalised migrants. A few months earlier the death of a man who had been detained at the Elliniko centre had sparkled revolts by the detainees and protests by solidarians. The decision of the police commander to allow these visits was interpreted as an attempt to keep the anarchists’ activities under close monitoring in order to prevent any ‘extreme’ interventions and violent protests on their part. The group’s goal was to inspect the living conditions in the centre and press police authorities towards their improvement. Yet, their ultimate aim was the closure of all detention facilities and the release of all illegalised immigrants. They organised demonstrations and public campaigns against detention. Most of the detainees received no visitors either because they were alone in the country or because their relatives and friends were also illegalised and thus risked being arrested by visiting them. Solidarians brought phone cards for the detainees or clothes and medicines and they often bought these items on their own expenses, although most of them were unemployed or worked in part-time and low-paid jobs. Through their visits to the detention centre, solidarians socially interacted with the detainees. The conditions under which these encounters took place were not exactly accommodating: sometimes they occurred under the constant surveillance of police officers in the narrow corridor of the detention centre and at other times in the restrictive structure of visiting rooms. In these places communication was mediated by a half-broken telephone and a window with bars that separated the visitors from the detainees and obstructed bodily contact. Although the broken phone evoked suspicion – ‘police officers must be breaking the phones in order to hear our discussions with the women’ – solidarians were well aware of the way bureaucracy worked and the general abandonment that prevailed in bureaucratic settings. The group tried to keep in touch with detainees after their release and often invited them to events they organised in their local social centre. Immigrants were encouraged to join collective kitchens, social centres and other places run by solidarians all over Athens where they would be accepted and free to enter a zone of sociality with locals and other immigrants. Solidarians wanted to set things clear for the invited immigrants: such centres were more than places where they would find food and services for free. These were places of social interaction and loci where they were encouraged to participate actively and in equal terms.

Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus 199

Solidarity lessons Solidary has gained significant momentum as an indigenous notion that unfolds in various spheres of social life in crisis-ridden Greece: in the antimiddleman movements (Rakopoulos 2014b), social health clinics (Cabot 2016b) and food banks (Theodossopoulos 2016).10 These initiatives are so extensive that they are even considered to indicate the ‘expansion of social solidarity’ (Sotiropoulos and Bourikos 2014). Collectives and various citizens’ initiatives with a formal (institutional) or informal character adopt the term koinoniko (social) in order to identify themselves: social haunts, social centres, social groceries, social health clinics, social pharmacies, social or collective kitchens, etc. The ‘social’ in Greece under crisis embraces diverse activities and forms of public sociality and delineates spheres of disinterestedness, solidarity and subversion to the state. As many of these initiatives are spatially grounded in local gheitonies (neighbourhoods), the ‘social’ evoked is a sphere of sociality that has a potent localised element (Rozakou 2016a, 2016b). It seems that the ‘social’ has become the alternative all-encompassing notion that replaces the disdained political. Mary Poovey has investigated the appearance of the ‘social’ as a new conceptual entity in early nineteenthcentury Britain. Scientific knowledge and technologies measuring and regulating populations (census, statistics, transportation, etc.) are part of emerging forms of governmentality targeting populations, this new unifying whole (Poovey 1995). Different to the official conceptual appearance of the ‘social’ that Poovey explores, contemporary Greece is the setting of the reformation of the ‘social’ in everyday life by people themselves. In the last years when immigrants were persecuted, became the victims of racist attacks and were evicted from public space, there were also places of sociality where they were encouraged to participate and interact with locals. Sociality in these spaces occurred beyond legal requirements and bureaucratic procedures. Immigrants were not ‘clients’ as in the common NGO vocabulary of ‘services’ (Rozakou 2012). There were no requirements for their entrance there. No enrolment, no identity checks, no stories narrated in order to prove their ‘eligibility’ (cf. Cabot 2013). The solidarian emphasises lateral and antihierarchical sociality and the contrast to bureaucratic frameworks.11 The principle of egalitarianism and horizontality fuelled everyday sociality in these spaces. Of course, this doesn’t mean that sociality surpassed all kinds of credentials, nor that these were havens of equality and acceptance. In addition, solidarity became a lesson, very similar to the lesson to cultural similarity of hospitality (cf. Papataxiarchis 2006). Open solidarity assemblies were rituals that constituted political lessons; lessons of solidarity and of being ‘collective’. Despite their horizontal essence, the assemblies often had a strongly personalised element and were coordinated by the same stable members. During the discussion, priority was always given to the immigrants/refugees and there was direct translation in

200 Rozakou both Arabic/Persian and Greek. Arabic/Persian-speaking young men interpreted for the rest of the group; a hectic and emotionally strenuous endeavour amidst cigarette smoke, people entering the premises and participants intervening. The interpreters’ role was crucial and their language skills astonishing. Observing them from a distance, the ways in which they were dressed, moved around space, talked, smoked or addressed their comrades, it was hard to tell whether they were Greek or immigrants. Immigrants/refugees who spoke to the assembly presented their ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ issues as these were interpreted by the solidarians: the loss of their passport during a police raid, their homeless state, specific health problems, etc. The solidarians would carefully and respectfully listen to all of them and attempted to provide practical solutions to these problems. However, when they took the stand, they would try to orient the discussion to more ‘political’ subjects, such as the continuation of the political struggle and the public expression and communication of their demands. Moreover, immigrants/refugees were encouraged to think beyond their personal predicament and to expand their protest in order to include larger segments of the immigrant/refugee population. Laura Agustín writes about a group of outreach social workers who approached immigrant sex workers in the street in Spain (Agustín 2007). Agustín analyses the tensions between the two groups and suggests that the activists were actually imposing solidarity to immigrant sex workers. This solidarity was twofold: it referred to the activists’ solidarity with the immigrant women and, also, to the solidarity they tried to promote among immigrant ‘prostitutes’. Despite the fact that these women came from diverse national, ethnic and gender lines, the activists overlooked all these differences and, rather, saw them merely as immigrant ‘prostitutes’. Very much like the activists Agustín describes, solidarians seemed to be trying to instil some sense of collectivity among refugees and immigrants. The distinction between the personal and the political in the assemblies is indicative of a tension, diverse priorities and goals. Refugees and, at times, refugees and immigrants together, are constructed as a unifying whole; a reified category that is defined by its marginal position towards the state. The solidarians’ solidarity is not grounded on humanistic terms but draws upon the legacy of the anti-authoritarian movement and it is conceptualized in anti-statist terms. The ‘solidarian’ as an indigenous notion followed an interesting path in this trajectory: it started as a concept narrowly identified with the anarchist movements in post-dictatorship Greece and then it expanded to the terrain of pro-immigrant movements. The notion retains some of its initial meaning and people often appear hesitant to adopt it; yet the solidarian has been embraced by – almost – the entire terrain of the solidarity field in Greece (cf. Cabot 2016b, Rakopoulos 2016a, Theodossopoulos 2016).

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Notes 1 The research has been conducted as part of the research project ‘The Social Life of State Deportation Regimes: A Comparative Study of the Implementation Interface’ of the University of Amsterdam. The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC-Starting grant 336319). 2 The principles of horizontality, anti-hierarchy and egalitarianism pertain both the local and the global manifestations of such endeavours (cf. Sitrin 2006; Sitrin and Azzellini 2014). In this chapter I do not explore the international aspects of the solidarity movement in Greece and the connection of the phenomenon with the broader anti-globalisation movement although I believe they are highly significant and merit their own attention and examination. 3 Christos Papoutsis, Minister of Citizen’s Protection, interview in the newspaper To Vima, 5 February 2011. [Χρ. Παπουτσής, «Όλοι οι παράνομοι μετανάστες θα απελαθούν» (www.tovima.gr/politics/article/?aid=382703)]. 4 See for example Kathimerini 29 January 2011 («Η ζωή στη Νομική παρέα με τους «τριακόσιους» της Μαρίλης Μαργωμένου) and Ethnos 28 January 2011 («Θέατρο Σκιών με κομπάρσους λαθρομετανάστες»). 5 See Pistikos 2016 on the hunger strike of the 300 sans-papiers. 6 See, for example, the emblematic squat of the St. Bernard church in Paris in 1996 by 300 sans-papiers that mobilised a broad solidarity movement by activists, intellectuals, artists, scholars (Rosello 2002). 7 It was only months after these struggles that the new university law was adopted in 2011. The law, making no reference to university asylum, actually abolished this institution that was first implemented after the end of the military dictatorship in Greece. 8 Since 2012 various NGOs (Amnesty International 2014a, FIDH, Migreurop and EMHRN 2014, HRW 2013, MSF 2014, ProAsyl, the Greek Council for Refugees and Informobile 2012, WGAD 2013) and independent authorities (Greek Ombudsman 2013) have published reports denouncing the living conditions in preremoval centres and police stations all over Greece. 9 See Rosello 2002, for example, for the French pro-immigrant movements in the 1990s and their plea for hospitality. 10 Intellectually, solidarity has been proposed as a ‘bridge concept’ and a tool in ethnographic understandings of the Greek crisis (Rakopoulos 2016). In 2015 the solidarian became a key figure in the grassroot responses to the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. See for example, Papataxiarchis 2016a, 2016c and Rozakou 2016b. 11 See Rozakou 2016a on the tensions between the notions ‘solidarian’ and the ‘volunteer’.

14 The future of solidarity Food cooperativism as labour Theodoros Rakopoulos

Introduction1 This chapter will investigate a popular social response to austerity and recession, focusing on informal cooperative organisation and ideas on social change based on a case study from contemporary Greece’s anti-middleman food distribution movement. This form of activity is based on a set of principles, dubbed by the people participating in it as ‘solidarity economy’.2 The chapter will test the validity of the scholarly category by the same name (Laville 2010; Dacheaux and Goujon 2012), through the analytical prism of labour. The term ‘solidarity economy’ implies economic activity put to social use in a perspective critical of conventional access to resources (Miller 2010). However, its conceptualisation could benefit from an approach based on seeing this set of actions as ‘labour’. Following recent takes on Polanyian double movements (Hann 2007, Hann and Hart 2009: 5) or counter-movements (Burawoy 2013: 534), we need to look at the grounded, popular responses to capitalist crises. In Greece, these can range from the rising shades of reactionary euro-phobia in the form of neo-fascism, to the emergence and development of a solidarity economy movement that has been established as a form of ‘hidden welfare’ (Rakopoulos 2014c, 2015). The analytical prism of economic solidarity will be applied here to investigate ‘society’s protection’, in the fashion put forward by Polanyi (1957: 150), in the particular context of the ‘Greek’ crisis.3 There are two interrelated lines of investigation followed here. The first concerns the formalising of solidarity economy into co-op institutions. The second explores the wider alliances and allegiances of those involved in the solidarity economy movement. They both attest to the future-oriented feature of the Greek solidarity economy, in the face of economic and social degradation at home and the underlying Greco-pessimism of many scholarly analyses in academia (Krugman 2013, Lapavitsas 2012). The chapter therefore systematises the conceptual framework of solidarity, relevant in current anthropological discussion (Lem 2008), by evaluating how participants locate it within ideas of labour. I shall then try to show that

The future of solidarity 203 people envision the development of their social economy movement as work, while solidarity is understood in terms of labour invested in their activities. Based on this, I argue that we need to pass from analyses of seeing social economy4 as a set of ‘socially concerned’ activities, to assessing the long-term plans of our research participants, where the idea of work and imaginative schemes around it is central, and often highly politicised. This implies tracing how new forms of sociality and possibly consciousness emerge within the informal networks of solidarity arising in the crisis. This way, I also partly address the current gap in the relevant literature on the relationship between the social and solidarity economy, as well as assess their relationship with cooperatives on the position of labour, especially during crises. The crisis in Greece, with its shock statistics,5 reminds us of the need to address the broader picture of social activities on the ground in response to such crisis. This implies not to see the crisis as a deep cut in the body historical and decolonise it of its ‘exceptional’ features (Rakopoulos 2014d), but to pass from the episodic to the epidemic, as it were, and see the crisis not as effect but as social context. Following from this, the chapter aims towards a contribution pertaining to economic anthropology more broadly: to situate labour in the realm of social activities branded ‘the distribution sector’. There is a tradition in economic anthropology of attention to distribution, stemming from Polanyi (2001 [1975]) and Thompson (1971; 1991), and largely associated with the moral economy. We need to decidedly re-link labour within distribution’s meanings, re-instigating the focus on labour invested in the distribution process, and therefore enriching the scholarly study of labour itself.6 To juxtapose, as in much of classic economic anthropology (from the early work of Strathern to that of Sahlins), reciprocity-based activities to the realm of labour (a commodified aspect of human endeavour and social life at large) and negation of the labour-driven aspect to them, would shy away from the facts that the Greek crisis brings forward to anthropological concern. It would imply a substantivist reading of Polanyi, which would not do justice to the solidarity economy under scrutiny here. Therefore, in my analysis, I do not contrast reciprocity to labour: instead, in speaking of solidarity, cooperatives, and the space covered between them from the anti-middleman movement, I underline their interaction. Our task as anthropologists includes explaining how participants in these grassroots responses are extending the scope of their activity into imagining alternative modes of economic conduct and interaction in the country. Paying attention to the sector of goods’ distribution, the labour invested in this activity and the imaginative schemes extending the scope of it into alternative future modes of economic conduct and interaction in the country is one such step. The dynamism of this movement and the loose understanding of the term ‘solidarity’ (Rakopoulos 2014c) allow, of course, for a vast range of developments, which might seem contradictory. Both in Thessaloniki and on a country level, there are at least two routes, one

204 Rakopoulos currently opting for informality and even hibernation of the movement (Rakopoulos 2014c, 2015b) and one pursuing, as described below, alternative futures of cooperativisation, throughout the movement’s further formalisation. These routes should be seen in conversation, as they are dialectically complementary.

From trickster-down economics to labour in distribution The development of a ‘solidarity’ economy in Greece is original in a twofold sense. Firstly, in the context of widespread austerity-driven policies and what we could call trickster-down economics, the phenomenon has been more widespread than in other countries hit by the sovereign debt crisis (Lieros 2012). Moreover, it has been more rapid than anywhere else, mushrooming out of an assumed ‘unknown’, if not indeed ‘weak’, civil society tradition (Sotiropoulos 2004) and a recorded minimal social economy field (Toia 2008). In order to situate the social economy and solidarity as a native term on the grounds of which people are mobilised in Greece today, I am proposing a slight shift in the scholarly focus. Specifically, I suggest a move from prioritising production relations as often happens in work-related ethnographies of the ‘social economy’ (Bryer 2011, Kasmir 2005, Hillenkamp 2013) into an attention to distribution. This move also marks a shift in the general literature focusing on labour, predominantly centred on production (for instance, Ngai 2005, Parry 2005, Mollona et al. 2009, Carswell and De Neve 2013). In Greece, it is precisely the modalities of labour in the distribution sector that encourage subjective projections of change. Unlike examples in small-scale production (Rakopoulos 2014b), anti-middleman groups operating in distribution have a wide-reaching scope in thinking about labour. Recalling Polanyi (2001), distribution works out as a bridge; it invites imaginative schemes of scale and integration that either separate or bring together. My findings from Greece suggest that the distribution sector thrives in accommodating the current, or by now erstwhile, and radicalised elements of the crisis’ solidarity economy. This context is also valid for the distribution of foodstuffs, the locus of a vivid social movement, that aims to ‘cut out’ market brokers altogether, to make sure agrarian produce is sold directly from farmers to urban folk. The middleman/broker has been a concern for economic and political anthropology as of late, with certain authors advocating the need for the renegotiation of a term largely identified as a relic of ‘out-fashioned’ Mediterranean anthropology (for example, in Sicily alone, Boissevain 1966, Blok 1985). The ability to manipulate labour markets has associated brokers with mafia-like organizations in different contexts, from broker capitalism (Schneider and Schneider 1976) to exploitation of daily workers (Gill

The future of solidarity 205 2001). Deborah James has pointed out that the ‘return of the broker’ is associated with the capacity of middlemen to operate in multiple forms resembling at once the state (in that they offer protection), the market (in deploying deregulated conditions of exchange) and ‘traditional’ forces on the ground (in being patrons of social coherence) (2011: 319). The Greek ‘anti-middleman’ movement aims at eliminating brokers’ influence, in order to make food more financially accessible in a dramatically critical market configuration. In the multifaceted relevant literature committed to labour-based analyses, there is a growing interest in cooperativism, understood to spearhead the social and solidarity economy (Bryer 2011: 19). Despite the polyphony, or possibly because of it, cooperatives seem to be the one point where intersecting and dissecting analyses of the ‘social economy’ converge. This has been taken up in recent contributions mainly focusing on production (VargasCetina 2005, 2009), sometimes concerning production processes recovering from crises, as in the case of Argentina (Sitrin 2012). Another article, focusing on Argentina’s post-crisis empresas recuperadas, notes that the social economy of cooperatives relies on value-processing. This process is at once objective (producing objects, but also being cautious of the structural framework of profit-seeking) and subjective (promoting new forms of consciousness through the cooperative experience) (Bryer 2011: 22). Bryer notes how ethnographic approaches to relations pertaining to social economy: emphasize that objective socialization also implies subjective socialization – the creation of new ideas and expectations – which, while faced with constraints relating to profitability, can in some cultural and institutional settings motivate new modes of action. (2011: 6) My ethnographic discussion takes up these questions and aims to highlight a more nuanced tension between the social and solidarity economy and cooperatives. In this regard, it demonstrates an appreciation of concerns relating to counter-movements or double-movements: societal responses to neoliberal crises that instigate and inspire reciprocity-driven organised activities. There is an urgent need to rethink social and solidarity economy through processes leading to the formation of cooperatives and therefore the valuation of the participants’ labour. This evolves in a context where work and labour have been traumatised, as austerity has been destructive. Recent contributions address the scars on social cohesion that the social spending slash have brought about, specifically as regards the deterioration of health services (Stuckler and Basu 2013; Kentikelenis et al. 2014). Austerity has led to massive political shifts in support for both established political parties and those assuming unprecedented levels of power, like SYRIZA and Golden Dawn. It has also

206 Rakopoulos fomented the development of grassroots political formations that aim to tackle the immediate consequences of the crisis on the ground. To one such occasion I now turn my attention.

‘Gefira’: anti-middleman action In Thessaloniki, I was in long-term contact with ‘The Gefira Commission’ (hereafter: Gefira), an informal network group that comprises people living in the vicinity of a district immediately to the east of the city centre. The area is dense, mainly populated by lower-middle-class people, heavily hit by the crisis. Gefira is a group comprised primarily of young, unemployed people who organise the distribution of agricultural products in their communities directly from farmers. This is done without the mediation of market middlemen; those organising distribution gain no profit for themselves. Gefira belongs to a coalition of anti-middleman groups in Thessaloniki, called ‘Open Network’ and has loose relations with other such organisations around Greece. The vast majority of the 60 or so anti-middleman initiatives across Greece have been established since 2010. The association operates like an informal network, organising the collection and distribution of agrarian produce directly from producers to consumers. These commodities are then sold to community members at prices far below retail cost. Gefira is one of many informal associations that cater for the distribution of agrarian produce this way. Its members aim to make it a cooperative. However, there is another level to the scope of their activity, which became clear only after extended fieldwork, which transgresses food concerns and focuses on the ways they think about their activities as labour. I followed several meetings of the group. On one of the first of these occasions, I spoke with Anna, who had been involved with the commission for almost three years. Her analysis of the social situation of social economy participants was an important introduction to the politics of the organisation. We are doing all this and invest a lot of our time in managing this flow of people, and things, and ideas . . . it is not easy. There is a moral pay, if you will, yes. But people benefiting from this should understand we are not doing this for a living. Giorgos, a 40-year-old mechanic also told me that ‘our work is to mobilise people; they ask us when the next distribution will be, and we respond: when you will be a part of it’. Gefira is one of the successful anti-middleman organisations, as it serves a large number of consumers of fresh foodstuffs in Thessaloniki. They organise their meetings in the Community Centre for the Blind every Wednesday.

The future of solidarity 207 This enables the organisation to work with a larger group of people from across the political spectrum in the ‘Anatoli’7 area of the city, not far from the centre. In organising the distribution of basic foodstuffs, its members strive for an ‘immediate’ trade that is distinct from ‘fair trade’, in that it is used as a method of political education rather than an end in itself. Every Sunday there were (in 2013) 5 to 6 such markets organised somewhere in Thessaloniki. Every second Sunday, the public park of Andritsou, in the Anatoli district, became a site for food distribution organised by the group. The park is quite spacious and sleepy, with not much social presence apart from pensioners sitting on benches, eating pumpkin seeds and chatting about football and politics throughout the week. As one pensioner pointed out, ‘this place changes completely when the distributions take place’. Residents of the district converge on the park from all sides to take part in this event. They pay the farmers directly at their makeshift tills, while Gefira members help with the delivery of the produce and the accounting process. Many stop to have a chat with the organisation’s volunteers, during and after the purchase of food. Conversations include a wide range of topics revolving around the food, its distribution process and its consumption. Many people complain that their wages and pensions have been slashed and that their household food budgets are increasingly limited. It was in these discussions and along such issues that people recognised the need for antimiddleman action. The next Sunday I joined that gathering. The meeting place had been set a few days before, in the Gefira’s weekly meeting. I found myself standing at the corner of the park where a small church meets with the main road, in the Botsari area, at 6 am. The day was going to be clear, you could tell this from the sunrise that had taken place only half an hour before. I recall, since then, many such sunrises in the Sundays of my fieldwork, each one in a different place, as food distributions imply early wake-up times and mobility for the setting-up of the impromptu food markets. The Gefira group organise their distribution of food every second and fourth Sunday of the month, after negotiating with the Botsari group, in the district just to the east. If my watch was right, the participants would be here at any minute. First, Anna shows up. In our recent conversations she has been mentioning her work, as things are not going very well in the Psychology Consultancy where she is employed. A fully trained psychologist, she works ‘for an older and more established practitioner, alongside three other female psychologists’. She has pointed out several times in previous conversations how annoying it is to be 37 and still considered ‘too junior’ to claim any improvement in her career, but ‘this is Greece, and I’m glad to even have a job in the first place’. Giorgos arrives a few minutes into our conversation. He tunes in immediately, pointing out how ‘this is a job as well, only we don’t get paid. On Sundays it’s the day when we really wake up early’. In a matter of

208 Rakopoulos minutes, most of the other members of the group have arrived, including Mr Takis and Mr Leonidas. These two gentlemen are the only ones in the group not currently working or seeking work, as they are both in their early 70s, pensioned manual workers, with a history in the Left and union politics. They had been manual workers in the port of the city, for around 35 years each. ‘And now we’re back on the job, another type of work,’ Mr Takis points out. We all walk to the bus stop, take the bus at around 7 and reach the square a few minutes after that. This time the meeting point was not set at the square, in order to leave leeway for the first arriving farmers to arrange their stalls, a task for which the Gefira members have spent a lot of effort in the past and now wanted to avoid. By the time we were there though, only 4 of the expected 26 farmers had arrived. We spent the next hour accommodating the arriving agrarian producers in their pick-up tracks, and helping them to set their stalls. There was an arranged division of labour for participants. Maria inspected the order, according to a sketch map they had drafted, with the agreed layout. Dimitris was the only one from the team who was absent, but for a good reason: he was in the city centre, at a similar event, assessing whether the police would arrive and impose the law (as the occupations of the squares for the impromptu farmers markets were illegal). The police were expected there first; Dimitris would call his colleagues on their cell-phones and let them know. People were aware that they would need to dismantle the whole operation in 10 minutes maximum, in that case. By 11 o’clock, the square was bursting with life. People of different ages had rushed into it, some from a couple of districts away, but most from around the neighbourhood. As usual, the volunteers of the Gefira organisation were receiving enquiries from many about different details and were busy responding. Giorgos noted how ‘we’re in for an 8-hour shift again’. This reference to a fairly long, but unpaid working day was something I became accustomed to hearing throughout my fieldwork. In their assemblies, the Gefira activists project their future configurations, and direct their everyday activities, towards the prospect of organising their work further. Their plan is to establish a constellation of cooperativist initiatives in order to find a way to sustain their project and even value the labour they invest into it. ‘We don’t believe in volunteering; it’s an idea that does not apply to our principles,’ Maria stressed to me once. In the words of Mr Takis, ‘we might need to create a system to support our activity through time, and a shift in government might provide the right framework for this’. Many agreed with this idea, especially those more sympathetic to the then rise of SYRIZA, the major left-wing party of post-crisis Greece (that eventually disappointed these interlocutors). They would welcome a state that supports this system and endorses cooperativism in a wider legislative

The future of solidarity 209 framework. They also embrace the idea of a different market configuration. This is due to the fact that they wish to transform their informal networks into remunerative cooperatives to guarantee the sustainability of their project as a labour source, not as the appeal of cheaper food bought direct from producers. What Gefira activists did and thought was not limited to distributing cheaper food. Gefira’s activities were key because they ‘set people in movement’, in the words of Giorgos. In other words, the organisation was a tool to mobilise fellow co-residents of Anatoli, working within the broader social context of the area. Many Gefira members express sympathy towards, or outright allegiance with, parties of the Left, while those more senior in age derived their ‘activist experience’, as they put it, from their ‘years of struggles in unions’. Gefira’s members reject neither the state nor the market. Rather, they strive to link with similar activist initiatives around Greece, to ‘get rid of middlemen in the wide sense of the word’. In the idea of the middleman, Gefira’s activists often find an allegory for their broader political claims. A younger activist, Elena, pointed out to me that the Greek government ‘is, in a way, a kind of middleman itself, as it lets the Troika’s Memoranda to speak through it’. Another participant went as far as to claim that the government were ‘appointees’ of the Troika, to occupy a middle-ground between the people and ‘the Economy’.

Materialising social economy: cooperativism as the future of solidarity? In this interesting, albeit colourful, set of metaphors, the problem of the middleman is illuminated further, and indeed located within the range of different concerns that participants in Gefira entertain. This includes cooperativist critiques applied to neoliberal regimes of labour (Macpherson 2008). In a certain sense, Gefira is a cooperative-in-the-making, because such informal solidarity networks envision themselves as operating as cooperatives in the future. This direction includes their ongoing concern about the remuneration of their labour invested into the direction and management of food distribution. This labour is conceived as forming bridges between production and consumption, as well as between rural and urban settings. Spending time alongside Gefira activists soon made it apparent to me that their political planning encompasses a wider picture of political activism and is rooted in the future prospect of establishing anti-middleman activity as work. Local peripheral actors imagine themselves as part of a larger, international community of discontent (Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou 2010). But their imaginative projections extend towards their own future, too: here, this imagination regards the well-founded possibility of formalising into co-ops which might pay workers’ shares.

210 Rakopoulos I found that the closer one got to Gefira members, the more one became aware of the bigger picture, one stressing beyond ‘solidarity’ as a form of disinterested reciprocity. The political programme they identify themselves with and the general allegiance to leftist politics that they locate their activity in, became clear only after continuous, in-depth fieldwork. A tenet that emerged as central in these discussions was the concept of labour. In several Gefira meetings, members were excited by the prospect that their informal solidarity network might transform into a cooperative association of anti-middleman groups that spanned the country. Members argued that their mobilisation ‘should’ acquire some tangible economic effects, to reflect their efforts. A common desire was for some of the activists (those unemployed) to make a living through their labour. This view of anti-middleman cooperativism as labour and as a potential source of income breaks with the idea of similar movements being voluntary coalitions (Rozakou 2008). However, the idea of anti-middleman groups turning into cooperatives was linked to sustaining the livelihoods of the people organising food distribution. It was also associated with a broader critique of the current configuration of Greece’s recession and potentially the politics of austerity at large. But how, as Kasmir asks (2011), can cooperatives move away from what Raymond Williams has called ‘militant particularism’ (1989) and embrace a broader concept of social movements (and tentatively, an economy of solidarity)? This is not a ‘defence of privileges’, as Harvey would have it (2001); we need to move towards studies that transcend the dichotomies such as particularistic claims and wider, cosmopolitan horizons (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008: 17–18). If they emerge, as they do in Argentina, Greece and elsewhere, from struggles associated with neoliberal crises,8 how do they intersect with broader concerns within these struggles? Surely, conceptualising the social economy as an alternative route to development may not suffice, since its ‘social’ features imply that it is entangled with broader responses to neoliberalism – especially in the current fiscally obsessed anti-austerity climate in Southern Europe. Cooperatives embed social arrangements around labour and are embedded in them; their activity’s relation with the wider social setting is dialectical. Kasmir (2005: 90–91) raises the issue of subjective transformative processes put forward by novel labour organizations. She asks how cooperative forms of production can unleash ‘new forms of consciousness’. At the same time, the historical ethnography of unionism has shown how contemporary unions are embedded in community mobilisations and therefore are taking up concerns that are broader and wider than their trades, have managed to root and radicalise further (Mollona 2009), developing ‘cultures of solidarity’ (Fantasia 1989). In Greece, it seems that many see wider social relations that include labouring in the solidarity economy materialised in a future of cooperativisation; this future both inspires and springs from the current development of the solidarity economy.

The future of solidarity 211 It is widely understood that the social aims of these organizations are located within the civil societies in which they operate – and the underlying currents of political culture. Cooperatives are, by and large, incorporated in these broad social environments, and their members have responsibilities and social obligations outside the cooperative context that include activities both based in reciprocity and in commodification. It seems then that, co-ops materialise the social economy, in that they are both embedded in, and re-embed, aspects of civil society and everyday life. In this way, they might formulate a future-oriented scenario, alternative to the current economic configuration, which has stagnated Greece’s present.

Marx and Mauss and future-present To see the possibility of cooperativism as a future vector of work is significant, especially as political cooperativism has often been identified with the process of doing away with wage labour (see Mauss in Fournier 2006: 125–126). Of course, cooperativism’s politics are not born of ideologues, but of (often politicised) practitioners, as ethnographies of agrarian cooperatives have pointed out (Vargas-Cetina 2005, Stephen 2005). The Gefira case, with its left-leaning tendencies, offers a prism through which to explore responses to the economic effects of crisis in Greece. On this point, it might be worthwhile to remember – and put side by side – the future-oriented features of cooperativism that concerned both Marx and Mauss as theorists and activists themselves. Marx criticised but did not condemn the cooperative movement. In its attempt to subvert capital to labour, he saw a preliminary victory of the latter over the former. However, for this transformation to be complete, Marx thought that control of the national state, rather than local-level political formations, was required. His interest in cooperativism was therefore underpinned by a dialectical conceptualisation of the relationship between state, society and market. For Marx, cooperatives were founded on a historical contradiction: he saw in cooperatives the dialectics of present contradictions and the seed of future developments, a kind of future-present. Similarly, the Gefira participants are trying to reflect and project future possibilities of formal labour onto current informal networks. On the other hand, Mauss’ appreciation for the cooperative movement presents a slightly different perspective: one of emancipation through the practical, present experience of labouring in cooperation. In this regard, Gefira also bears a striking resemblance to Mauss’ concept of cooperative socialism, as documented in his biography as a cooperativist and his writings as an anthropologist (Fournier 2006, Mauss 1997). According to David Graeber, Mauss ‘felt that existing popular practices provided the basis both for a moral critique of capitalism and possible glimpses of what future society would be like’ (2004: 18). Graeber, himself interested in the notion

212 Rakopoulos of ‘futures still to come’ (2011c) elaborates more fully on this point elsewhere: Mauss himself had always favoured a vision of bottom up cooperativisation aimed at the ultimate abolition of the wage system. He argued that both communists and social democrats were equally guilty of ‘fetishising politics’ and the role of the state; rather, he saw the role of the state as being largely limited to providing a legal framework within which workers could more easily take control over their industries. (Graeber 2001: 156) Mauss maintained this position as a cooperativist practitioner. The Gefira members are similar in this regard. Cooperativism aims to produce horizontal relations in the workplace and supersede the capital/labour distinction. This is not accomplished via direct government control of the means of production, but through collective management by autonomous workers. It is nevertheless not an anarchist project. As Mauss emphasised, cooperativists see a role for the state in the provision of a friendly legal environment. Following this conceptualisation, cooperativists seek to create ‘a state within the state’ (Mauss 1905 cited in Fournier 2006: 126). The Greek anti-middleman movement embodies both the ‘practical socialism’ that Mauss advocated and the ‘future-present’ that Marx recognised in cooperativist practice. A solidarity economy response to the Greek crisis seems to have produced the most tangible version of this collaborative vision. As per Whyte and Whyte (1991: 202), the pragmatism of Gefira’s politics serves no kind of -isms. Gefira’s activities recall Mauss’ vision of the horizontal organisation of cooperativism, as activists envision these possibilities during the enactment of their practice of anti-middleman food distribution. There seems, then, to be a sort of paradox emerging. Gefira resonates with both Marx and Mauss’ idealised visions of cooperativism, but it is not (yet) actually a co-op! Following their line of thought, Gefira is a cooperativein-the-making, as members of the network envision work in a cooperative setting in the future.9 The here-and-now of anti-austerity action in the form of anti-middleman activism is then invested in a future of cooperativisation.10

Towards a conclusion: responses in labour This chapter has sought to respond to two pressing questions: where is labour situated in Greece’s solidarity economy?; and how is this configuration envisioning a future-oriented prospect for people hit by the crisis? My answer to both these questions, drawing from the data above, lies in assessing

The future of solidarity 213 labour as precisely the bridge between cooperatives and the solidarity economy. While the latter has been mainly seen, often unproblematically, as a volunteer-based set of services, relying on the goodwill of participants, the case of Greece indicates that the horizon of cooperativism offers alternatives such as remuneration and the potential for reproducing these initiatives. Linking labour to cooperatives elucidates how a recognition of labour offers a work prospect that can act as a binding element among the different activities and desires of those participating in the solidarity economy. In that sense, what is being proposed in the anti-middleman movement is not cheap food, but an alternative politics. The major problematic that the social and solidarity economies bring forward does not pertain to the present (bettering people’s livelihoods today) so much as to shifting current dynamics for the future (building alternative economic institutions for tomorrow). The Greek saga seemed, at some point (around 2013–2015), to be taking, potentially, a political turn not to a mere critique of austerity, but towards an imaginative polity that not only endorses social economy but might revolve around it (Kouvelakis 2011: 29; cf Laskos and Tsakalotos 2013: 138). Indeed, those in the anti-middleman movement who are more involved in left-wing politics are willing to engage government to make a framework for formal co-ops as a way to get things done, and to provide (paid) work for members. However, as hinted in the introduction, because of the movement’s complexity, not fully depicted in this chapter (where I’ve chosen to focus on a group oriented towards cooperativisation), there is still ground to cover in our investigation of solidarity as a native term reinforced by the crisis (Rakopoulos 2014b: 110–111). For instance, how can new tensions between informal groups and formalised cooperatives inspire articulations between economy and civil society ‘after’ the crisis (Touraine 2014), which pose alternatives to the current political scenario of austerity? And how, if at all, can they instigate ‘new forms of consciousness’ in the midst of recession? Moreover, how are the aims and claims of the social economy initiatives taken by members tackling material recognition of their efforts in a legislative framework that is friendly to their endeavours? Establishing grassroots social and solidarity economies during neoliberal debt crises is associated with aspirations relating to cooperativism. The way people in Greece react to hardship is configured in meticulously planned political schemes. In such circumstances, people demonstrate admirable social organisation skills and implement political education by mobilising their fellow citizens. But they are aware that this means labouring: what they do, they consider as work. It should therefore not come as a surprise that they chose to operate on the middle ground between production (in rural areas) and consumption (in Thessaloniki). By developing activity that is directed at once at livelihoods and political awareness, they promote an integrated system of social interaction. The strategic significance of doing away

214 Rakopoulos with middlemen lies in the potential of the distribution sector, where they locate their labour. It is within this interplay that they evoke what is known as ‘solidarity economies’. In Greek solidarity economy, participants envision the resilience of their project through fixating their reciprocity-based activity into the category of ‘work’, via projecting it to forms of cooperativism. One could argue that, in the very idea of the solidarity economy, there is a reciprocal move: the implicit expectation of people’s activism is that it will some day in the near future transform into valid work. This expectational bridge from socially concerned labour into valorised work is a main factor in their political imagination and a signifier in their everyday lives. It can teach us a lot, in terms of our own anthropological discussion of the relation between reciprocity and labour: what appears as a distant relation in the present (due to the misrecognition of activists’ labour) might become a point of the two notions’ collision in the future. Moreover, the case of the Greek anti-middleman cooperatives necessitates that we consider everyday practices as carrying with them the possibility for radical social change. Polanyi’s double movement, society’s protection from the market’s aggression (1957: 130), and the views of Mauss on what form this movement may take, are points to consider here. The Maussian perspective is that cooperatives become vectors for people’s lived practices and models of economic activity that offer alternatives to hierarchies of power in labour relations. While cooperativism historically arose to combat divisions of waged labour and the resultant social inequalities, it was also a response to labour markets that often left people without jobs and never developed in an outright rejection of markets and states. In this respect, the horizontalism of cooperatives is framed in dynamic configurations ‘creating’ small-scale markets and welcoming friendly state policies. Future co-ops become an avenue of struggle for a different valuation of labour; possibly for a different understanding of work.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter have benefited from the feedback of Keith Hart, Patricia Matos, Elaine Forde and Tim Martindale. I am grateful to all. I am also indebted to the editors of the present volume, Giorgos Agelopoulos and Dimitris Dalakoglou. I also wish to acknowledge the help of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in financing part of the fieldwork on which this chapter is based (fieldwork grant: 8856) as well as the Human Economy programme (University of Pretoria) and its people, for their overall collegiality and support. 2 The analysis operated here, is not, by way of extrapolation, applicable to all the forms and networks of the ‘solidarity economy’. The anti-middleman movement is part of a wide constellation of networks in which many of the same people are involved. This includes time-banks, social doctors’, social pharmacies, the can’t pay won’t pay movement, to name but a few instances (mentioned, for instance, as a new social economy, in Laskos and Tsakalotos 2013: 142–143).

The future of solidarity 215

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

As the prospect of cooperativisation, as well as its political audacity does not seem to pertain in social doctors and time-banks as much as in the anti-middleman network, it should be stressed that the anti-middleman movement articulates with such other practices and often, as in the current (since mid-2014) hibernation of the movement, some of the practitioners’ enthusiasm is channeled through these other practices. Of course, the Greek crisis is not exceptional (Rakopoulos 2014a: 191–194; 2014c: 97–100). Since the early 1980s, ‘developing’ countries have had similar measures of structural adjustment forcibly implemented by external forces. As with this first wave of debt crises, Greece’s sovereign debt only came to the fore due to external factors. The Greek economic downturn was triggered by the 2008 global financial crisis’ local configurations, traced to the consumer-driven growth bubble of the mid-2000s, especially concerning the country’s 2004 Olympic games, and the grievous budgetary flows towards military spending. The terms have been associated in a range of contributions, and the abbreviation SSE is often used, in that regard (Miller 2010; Hillenkamp 2013). The term ‘solidarity economy’ arises mostly in French sociology, with the anglophone literature more reluctant to adopt it (Dacheaux and Goujon 2012). As I have pointed out elsewhere (Rakopoulos 2013 and 2014b), the latter term concerns the specifics of a social economy focused on social reproduction through cooperativism. Following the imposition of fiscally austere policies, Greece’s GDP has shrunk by 25 percent (Smith and Imman 2012). Concomitantly, the official unemployment rate has reached 28 percent, with youth unemployment figures climbing to 68 percent – with real figures in fact allegedly standing way higher, as most unemployment goes unregistered. Moreover, we can benefit from recovering the sector of distribution from approaches recently entangled with studying how things reach people from production through to consumption. Attempts at studying this major domain of social life usually start with the analysis from the ‘flow’ or from the ‘thing’ distributed; they have been largely associated with the term ‘circulation’, in the tradition of the ‘Social Life of Things’ (Appadurai 1986). We have come, as a consequence, to relate studies of this activity with routes in anthropological thought that have steered away from a political economy approach, wiping work off the analytical arsenal. For lack of space and a different focal priority I will not delve into this route for this chapter, but this might open new research horizons. All toponyms and other names are pseudonyms. Contemporary anthropological scholarship has noted the roles the ‘actually existing’ set of social practices of the neoliberal ‘Centaur’ state (liberal at the top, paternalistic at the bottom) has acquired (Wacquant 2012: 73). Similar approaches reframe the discussion, critiquing the political denial of the current crisis (Kalb 2012). Accepting the multiplicity of neoliberalisms, and attempting to steer away from a ‘shared empirical vision’ on neoliberalism’s spread (cf. Goldstein 2012), helps to elucidate how places (like Greece) respond to debt crises (Jessop 2013). Admittedly, this is not the case for all anti-middleman groups at all. Often the projection of paid work does not coincide with embracing formalisation, as many networks strive to retain their informality and reject cooperativisation (Rakopoulos 2014b, c). Moreover, during fieldwork, I have come into contact with other groups whose members do not fully share the viewpoints on labour with Gefira’s members. Therefore, this chapter’s argument is not generalisable to all solidarity economy groups in Greece.

216 Rakopoulos 10 A minor part of the movement in Thessaloniki has opted for setting-up a shop (the Bios co-op) and thus formalise more fully. As noted elsewhere for Athens (Rakopoulos 2015), many have deemed that the reproduction of the movement is a priority. Such forms of formalization were already emerging as themes in the periodic meetings that these networks hold.

15 Put the blame on potatoes Power relations and the trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis Georgios Agelopoulos

‘Gentlemen, please sit in the back seat of the car’ the police officer told us. We made no fuss, our priority was to allow the market to go on. It was about midday, Saturday 19 January 2013. I heard Nikos explaining to an old lady: ‘the matter will be solved at the police station, no reason to worry . . .’. Three police cars and two police motor bikes had blocked the two entrances to the field where our open market was taking place. About 150 people were at the market at that moment. They all looked anxious. Out of our 21-member group of organizers, Theophilos and myself were taken into custody. It was Theophilos’ idea. ‘Giorgos and myself will take responsibility’ Theophilos said. ‘I play backgammon with some of the police officers at the coffee-house, they will not harm me. And Giorgos is a professor, so he will manage’ he explained to the rest of our group. Theophilos was one of the most experienced activists in our group, it seemed logical to me to follow his instructions. On the way to the police station Theophilos called our lawyer from his cell phone and received instructions. The officer in charge requested our ID cards and took us to the office of the deputy head officer of the Police Station of Zesti. ‘Listen’, the officer said, ‘this is an awkward situation. What kind of documents can you submit to prove that this open market is legally operating? I have received a call from the lawyer of the Organization of Open Markets of Thessaloniki who claims that your market is illegal. Are you the organizers?’ Theophilos was the first one to reply. ‘I am now in my sixties. See this corner in your office next to the window? In 1973, during the dictatorship, I was beaten up for one hour in that corner. Three of my ribs broke’, he said. ‘Theophile, don’t start like that’ the officer replied. It was obvious to me that they knew one another. The police officer was looking at us with both

218 Agelopoulos sympathy and pity. After participating in unloading 11 tons of potatoes from the lorry, both of us were covered with dust and dirt. ‘I had no intention of bringing you here on a Saturday morning. Actually, I am off duty today. I was called in to the station due to the importance of this case. I know nothing of this potato movement. Could the other gentleman reply to my question regarding who organized this market today and what kind of documents are available? And please could you inform me of your name?’ I took one of my visiting cards out of my wallet and handled over to the officer. ‘My name is Georgios Agelopoulos, a resident of Zesti and assistant professor at the University. I am a member of the group of organizers, the Initiative of Residents of Zesti. We hold an official authorization by the Mayor’s Office to occupy this field today and all farmers of our “without-middleman” market hold their papers with them’ I said. ‘Sir, I am sorry to tell you but you don’t really look like a university professor to me’ the police officer replied. Urban farms, self-organized markets without brokers, new solidarity networks that aim to cover human needs outside the established paradigm (or with alternations of the known paradigm) and more widely a new moral economy of crisis has been shaped since 2010 in Greece. The flows of currency and of products in the city of crisis have been transformed radically, transforming spatially and socially the urban condition and functions. The production, circulation and consumption of goods under crisis seem to be different in comparison to the pre-crisis situation. Are we in a position to outline these new functions of crisis? And are we in a position to talk about changes in the way that people cover their needs? This chapter, based on autoethnographic account, is an attempt to discuss the so-called ‘potato movement’ in Greece. The potato movement provides me with a context to discuss wider issues related to the Greek crisis. Understanding the context of the crisis requires overcoming some conceptual difficulties in approaching what has been happening in Greece during the last decade. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the different experiences of individuals in the crisis and the extent of the violence they lived through. Austerity, poverty, unemployment, brain drain and repression are forms of extreme violence. In addition, it is rather demanding to communicate the experiences of the crisis with non-Greek audiences without being apologetic or without romanticizing local resistance against austerity politics. Finally, the most crucial difficulty lies on what I call the teleology of the crisis. This is a version of the neoliberal T.I.N.A. (‘there is no alternative’) syndrome. Most T.I.N.A. narrations focus on the present and the

Trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis 219 future. Interestingly enough, the teleology of the crisis expands its analytical value beyond the past and the present in order to cover the past. The simplest way to understand it is to ask questions such as: ‘was a different course of developments possible in Greece?’ The teleology of the crisis provides a simple answer to this question: ‘No’. It implies that the present-day disaster was inescapable due to certain factors. Name it: capitalism; neoliberalism; imperialism; industrial society; consumerism; Mediterranean amoralism; the Germans; the Jews; the Turks; the Papandreou and the Mitsotakis political clans; alien forces aiming to destroy Hellenism, etc. Such an approach implies a linear causality model between the crisis, its causes in the past and its effects in the future. What is also interesting is that quite often the teleology of the crisis is based on a culturalist approach to Greek society. I argue that in order to escape the teleology of the crisis we need to shift our attention from a linear causality relating the past with the present. In order to understand the causes of the crisis we need to comprehend the various accounts of the future already developing in the present. Solidarity economy initiatives may indeed be one of these possible accounts of the future. A number of anthropologists have offered inside knowledge on the development of solidarity economy in Greece (Cabot 2016b, DouzinaBakalaki 2016, Papataxiarchis 2016a, b, c, Rakopoulos 2014a, b, c, Rozakou 2016a, Theodossopoulos 2016). My analysis of solidarity economy initiatives in Greece aims in approaching them not only from the view of those who support them, as it happens in most of the above-mentioned studies. I am also interested in pointing out the presence of those who are critical to them or who clearly oppose them. I am choosing this perspective because I want to stress that the process we call ‘crisis’ includes not only those who suffer but also those who take advantage of it, who celebrate it, who enjoy it in many different ways. Quite often we tend to forget these people simply because in times of crisis they develop a defence mechanism to conceal their existence (Agelopoulos 2016). When talking of winners in times of crisis, we should not always think of wealthy bankers and multinational firm managers. The winners and the losers may actually belong to the same social strata. In the current ethnographic example, those who sell and those who buy the potatoes from the open market of the Committee as well as those who attempt to block the market (that is the Organization of Open Markets of Thessaloniki) belong to the middle class of Greek society. In addition, by pointing out the presence of those who support and those who oppose social and solidarity economy we minimize the danger of romanticizing resistance attitudes. Taking into account the multiple views of all sides removes the focus from resistance itself to the power dynamics which dominate the specific historical context and produce internal differentiations inside the various groups (Gledhill 2000; Ortner 1995).1 My self-ethnographic experience refers to the town of Zesti in Northern Greece.2 Zesti is a suburb of Thessaloniki, and has a population of less than 15,000 people. It is the centre of the Municipality of Zesti. Until the mid-

220 Agelopoulos 1980s, Zesti was a village of farmers mainly originating from families which settled down in the region after the 1920s exchanges of populations between Greece and Bulgaria and between Greece and Turkey. The population of the area rapidly increased over the last 25 years, attracting middle-class and petty bourgeoisie families who wished to move out of the nearby city of Thessaloniki, which has a population of one million. Since the late 1990s, the municipality has been controlled by a coalition of political forces associated mainly with the socialist party, but also with the left-wing party of SYRIZA. On 7 November 2011, a group of left-wing locals organized a meeting at the Cultural Centre of Zesti. Their aim was to establish a committee in support of those who opposed paying additional property taxes. The committee was established, took the name of Committee of the Citizens Initiative of Zesti3 and organized another larger meeting in the main square of Zesti. This second meeting was attended by 500–600 inhabitants.4 The main topic of discussion was the reaction against paying additional property taxes. It was the time when all over Greece citizens reacted against the introduction of new taxes imposed as part of austerity politics. It is crucial to remember that the new property tax introduced in September 2011 was included in electricity bills and thus threatened access to electricity for all households unable to pay their bills.5 In addition, it is important to point out that the tax was introduced by Evangelos Venizelos, the then Finance Minister who came from from the PASOK party, one of the politicians who attracted severe criticism for his policies during the Greek crisis. It is not accidental that Greeks called this new tax ‘haratsi’, a scornful tag from taxes during the days of the Ottomans rule.6 The Committee of the Citizens Initiative of Zesti operated from November 2011 to September 2014. It provided legal aid for all citizens unable to pay the ‘haratsi’ tax, organized demonstrations and media campaigns, organized ‘without-middlemen’ open markets, participated in nationwide social and solidarity economy networks, organized music concerts and theatre plays to financially support its activities, collaborated with groups against the gold mining activities at the nearby area of Halkidiki,7 engaged in discussions about the use of water resources at the Municipality of Zesti, and collected and donated food to local families in need. In October 2013, the Committee opened its social clinic8 covering, free of charge, primary health care needs and providing medications to thousands of patients who had no access to the Greek NHS.9 I have participated in the Committee since its first meeting. The narration I am producing is not a form of anthropological advocacy. I have been engaged in the Committee as a citizen. Like other Greek and non-Greek anthropologists who produce auto-ethnographic accounts,10 I do not write about the crisis. I live with it alongside my family, my friends, my neighbours and my students. In that respect, any attempt to impose a distinction between my roles as an activist and an ethnographer presupposes analytical categories which are not always relevant in the local context.11

Trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis 221 By January 2013 the Committee was already established as an influential actor in the local domain. It had organized a number of ‘without-middlemen’ open markets and had attracted the attention of nationwide media. These activities caused a lot of anxiety to the Organization of the Open Markets of Thessaloniki, which was controlled by pro-right-wing supporters. The Organization, responsible for all open markets in the wider area of Thessaloniki, severely opposed the ‘without-middlemen’ markets. In order to cope with the situation, the Committee cooperated with lawyers and other initiatives from all over Northern Greece. It ensured that farmers participating at the 19 January 2013 market had all the necessary documents to legally sell their products. It issued a special permission from the Mayor’s Office to occupy for one day a field of land owned by the municipality. In addition, the Committee demanded all farmers to handle a 5–10 percent surplus of their products in order for this to be donated to the food bank of the municipality of Zesti.12 Thus, it imposed a discourse of morality on the overall process.13 All of the products sold at the ‘without-middlemen’ open market came from Northern Greece. Most of the locals who came to the market were interested in buying the potatoes produced in a highland area, 120 kms away from Zesti. Potatoes were sold at the price 0,45€ per kilo. The same quality of potatoes was priced 0,70€ at local Super Markets and 0,65€ at the market of the Organization of the Open Markets of Thessaloniki. Back at the police station, I replied to the officer, saying: ‘I don’t know what university professors look like. I just know that we are completely legal and in a few minutes time other members of our group will submit to you the original copy of the permission issued by the Mayor’s Office.’ ‘In any case we are preparing your arrest papers’ the police officer replied. Theophilos started raising his voice, he looked at the officer with a very hostile smile and pointed out: ‘We are the first potato movement initiative in the eastern region of Thessaloniki!’ The potato movement, Die Kartoffelbewegung, Le mouvement de la pomme de terre as reported in international media, became headlines in many European newspapers and on TV stations.14 It has been a key moment in the development of social and solidarity economy in Greece. The escalation of recession in Greece is linked with the rapid development of collective ventures engaged in a number of social and solidarity economy activities. These ventures eventually developed into citizens’ committees or citizens initiatives or residents’ committees. The various ventures related to social and solidarity economy activities (such as the ‘potato movement’), consumers’ cooperatives, social greengrocery networks, social education institutions and social medical centres (clinics).15 The main slogan of the potato movement is

222 Agelopoulos ‘without-middlemen’. Hostility towards middlemen is a very old idea in Western societies dating back to the days of John Stuart Mill, Saint Simon and Marx. The potato movement does not simply imply the demonstration of preference based on certain ethical considerations practised on an individual basis, it is not a form of ‘buycotting’ (Lekakis 2012). It is not a form of consumer activism that Bauman (2007b) discusses as ‘a symptom of the growing disenchantment with politics’. The potato movement does not fit with any of the periods discussed in the literature on consumer activism (Lang and Hines 1993, Lang and Gabriel 2005, Nicholls and Opal 2005). Actually, its similarities refer to social and solidarity economy processes developed in Latin America in the 1980s and in Eastern Europe since 1989. Ethnographic studies of anti-austerity initiatives and anti-xenophobic movements in Greece have all pointed out that any moment in the people’s reactions to the Greek crisis capitalizes upon a cumulative know-how gained in the past.16 As Dalakoglou explains ‘the new socio-political dynamics created after each moment of revolt will become the social infrastructure in order for the next spontaneous (or not) long lasting situation’ (2012: 541). Solidarity economy in Greece builds upon the experience of the piazzas, the ‘exasperated’ (Herzfeld 2011), the Greek indignado. The variety of solidarity economy activities which developed during the 2010–2015 period is impressive and not all of them present the same degree of radical perspectives.17 However, radicalization was an ongoing process for those involved in such initiatives. What is more important is that ‘without-middlemen’ open markets, social clinics and social pharmacies experienced restraints and hostility from the state until 2015. Merchants Chambers, Local Unions of Open Markets and large business corporations oppose solidarity economy initiatives. Newspapers and other media affiliated to the ND conservative and the PASOK socialist party published articles arguing that the quality of products distributed in ‘without-middlemen’ open markets was the worst possible. We had already spent an hour in the officer’s office. Our lawyer had contacted us pointing out that there was no need to worry. The mayor furiously entered the police station. With a cool style and a big smile, he approached us and addressed the police officer: ‘What have you done to them? Don’t you know that 800 cars parked today in the field of the open market they organized? This counts for one family out of four in our town! I personally came to submit the permission my office has issued.’ The mayor’s voice was clear and loud. He handled the paper to the police officer. The officer took the paper but he did not bother to look at it. He replied apologetically:

Trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis 223 ‘Oh, in that case, everything is OK! It’s all confusing. It’s all this with the crisis . . . We don’t really know who is to be blamed for all these things we go through on a daily basis. But in this case, no one is to be blamed . . . Or even better, in this case, we will put the blame on potatoes!’ We all laugh. On our way out from the police station, the police officer turned to us and asked: ‘Are the potatoes good enough? What else do you suggest I buy today from your open market?’ A number of anthropologists have pointed out the centrality of food in conceptualizing the Greek crisis.18 The potato movement was so successful not only because of the lower prices it secured for citizens but also because of the meanings attributed to the potatoes. The potatoes of the potato movement were considered to be of higher quality because they were authentic and they were Greek. They were both good to eat and good to think about. Most important is to ask for whom and why they were good to eat and think about and for whom and why they had to be avoided both as food and as thought. Buying and consuming such potatoes entailed multiple and strong political implications. This is the reason why many people bought a bag of potatoes to offer as a gift to friends or relatives. Despite the efforts of the media, controlled by business corporations, the meaning of these potatoes was highly positively appreciated. This explains why the government in 2014 issued a legislation prohibiting most attempts of ‘without-middlemen’ open markets.19 These potatoes composed a crucial challenge for the interests of supermarket owners and the wholesalers of the Organization of Open Markets of Thessaloniki. In addition, these potatoes posed a challenge to the interests of pro-austerity political forces. They represented a different possibility for the future, they offered an alternative perspective both for the distribution of goods and for relations of production. The potato movement was a live example of such an alternative perspective. Goods entail social relationships. The trajectories of goods from production to circulation and consumption not only involves but also produces multiple power relations. Social relationships not only produce goods but also provide meaning to them. Social and solidarity economy activities in Greece influenced the perceptions of the past, the understanding of the presence and the visions of the future. This was more than evident on our way out from the police station. We were returned to the field where the open market was taking place with the very same police car. The officer ordered one of the policemen: ‘Take the professor and my friend Theophilos back to the open market and buy fifteen kilos of potatoes for me.’ Both the drive back in the police car and the buying of potatoes were clear indications that the state’s monopoly of violence was not challenged

224 Agelopoulos by our ‘without-middlemen’ open market. A few days later I came across the police officer at the main square of Zesti. I am sure he was well aware that the Saturday incident had been widely reported in the local media. Our ‘initiative’ made a lot of fuss about it, issued a public statement20 and had attracted the attention of other ‘initiatives’ throughout Greece. 21 He approached me first. ‘Mr Agelopoulos’, he said, ‘these were the most tasteful potatoes I have had since my childhood years’. I waved politely. I did not wish to comment on this. I had also bought and fried some potatoes. It seemed to me that they had an average taste. ‘You know’, he said, ‘maybe the crisis has different causes from the ones I was previously thinking of . . .’.

Notes 1 In his analysis of the ambivalence of anti-austerity indignation in Greece Theodossopoulos (2014) offers access to the views of those whispering a cryptoneoliberal and apologetic support for the ‘good old days’ of the 2000s. However, he does not contextualize the criticism of anti-austerity initiatives. 2 Fifteen years ago I attempted another self-ethnographic approach to my experiences of living at the north-western Greek frontier town of Florina (Agelopoulos 2003). 3 See Papataxiarchis in this volume for an analysis of ‘the shift from protest to initiatives’ during the 2010–2015 period in Greece. 4 See https://denplironothermis.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/kατάθεση-δικαιολογη τικών. 5 Many reports have been published in international media about this tax. See, for example, http: //greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/14/the-haratsi-here-to-stay/ #sthash.Tzw3AXDh.dpuf. This form of taxation was similar to household charges introduced in 1989–1990 by Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax and by the Irish government in 2012. 6 The term ‘haratsi’ derives from the Turkish word Haraç and the Arabian word Khara¯j (‫)خراج‬. The Harac was a taxation system developed in the early days of the Ottoman Empire and was only payable by non-Muslims. The system ceased to exist in the 1834 tax reformation of the Ottoman Empire. 7 See http: //soshalkidiki.gr/. 8 See www.facebook.com/Κοινωνικό-Ιατρείο-Αλληλεγγύης-Θέρμης-1678705567 53356/ and http: //kiallithermis.gr/. 9 The activities of the clinic have expanded all over central Greek Macedonia and since 2015 the Committee ceased engagements in other fields of social and solidarity economy. Despite the fact that political changes in Greece lead to the reestablishment of free access to the NHS for all Greek citizens, documented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, the clinic still continues operating. It provides support to undocumented migrants, refugees and poor Greeks who are unable to secure food and face hardship to pay the minimum contribution for their medication. 10 For further analysis, see Papataxiarchis’ chapter in this volume, Papataxiarchis 2016a and 2016b, Cabot 2016a. 11 Actually, given the complexity between ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals’ and the difficulties of differentiating knowledge from understanding, such distinctions may not be

Trajectories of goods during the Greek crisis 225

12

13

14

15 16 17

18

19

20 21

relevant in most contexts (Agelopoulos 2003). For a critical approach on ‘engaged’ or ‘activist anthropology’ see Eriksen 2005, Ortner 2016a and 2016b. Food banks are called ‘social groceries’ in Greece. Very few food banks existed before the establishment of austerity policies in 2010. Food banks are today operated by citizens’ ‘initiatives’, NGOs, local authorities and religious institutions. The importance of morality in such contexts is reported by all ethnographic studies of social and solidarity economy activities in Greece. See Gkintidis and Papataxiarchis (in this volume) regarding the overall moral reframing of politics during the Greek crisis. See, for example, the various accounts provided by Bloomberg (1 March 2012), France24 (8 March 2012), Le Soir (12 March 2012), BBC (14 March 2012), The Guardian (18 March 2012), Euronews (19 March 2012), Die Zeit (3 May 2012) and Aljazeera (11 June 2012). Rakopoulos (2014a, b, c) offers an overview. See Cabot 2014 for an ethnographic analysis of social clinics in Greece. See Agelopoulos 2015, Cabot 2016b, Dalakoglou 2012, 2013a, Knight 2013, Rozakou 2016a, Rakopoulos 2014a, b, Papataxiarchis 2016a, b, c. The various forms and degrees of radicalization in these activities are widely discussed by Cabot 2014, 2016b, Dalakoglou 2012, Papataxiarchis 2016c, DouzinaBakalaki 2016, Rakopoulos 2014b, 2016a and Rozakou 2016a. Papataxiarchis (this volume) outlines this process by pointing out the dilemma between Pragmatism and austerity. The metaphor of food and eating plays an important role in native conceptualizations of the crisis in Greece. One of the most provocative answers regarding the ‘who is to be blamed for the empty state budget’ question was provided in September 2010 by Theodoros Pangalos. Pangalos, a prominent politician of the socialist PASOK party, stated that ‘We-All-Ate-It-Together!’ His statement became headlines and a motto by many pro-austerity Greek politicians. The importance of the metaphor of food and eating in this context is also documented by a number of studies. See, for example, Sutton 2011 and 2016, Krava 2013, Argenti 2014, Stasinos 2016. Law 4264/2014 imposed a number of serious prohibitions in organizing ‘withoutmiddlemen’ open markets. Rakopoulos (2016b) points out that legal obstacles, alongside with other factors, led to the ‘hibernation’ of such activities. Actually, many initiatives turned their attention to creating legally acceptable versions of social and solidarity economy such as cooperatives (for example the BIOS supermarket at Thessaloniki). In February 2017, the left-wing government proposed new legislation abandoning prohibitions and establishing a permanent framework for ‘without-middlemen’ markets. https://denplironothermis.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/δελτίο-τύπ ου-ανεπ ιτυχήςπροσπάθεια-π/. See, for example, http: //ecology-salonika.org/2010/01/23/initiative-committeeof-thermi-residents/; https://denplironothermis.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/δελτίοτύπ ου-ανεπ ιτυχής-π ροσπ άθεια-π /; http://alterthess.gr/content/thermi-anepityxisprospatheia-parempodisis-tis-diathesis-proionton-xoris-mesazontes; http://nosferatos. blogspot.gr/; http://aristrouth.blogspot.gr; www.xekinima.org/arthra/view/article/ anepityxis-prospatheia-parempodisis-tis-diathesis-proi/; http://gazakas.wordpress. com/; http://prasino-hamomilaki.blogspot.gr/; http://nedacy.wordpress.com; http: //mantzios-antonis.blogspot.gr/2013/01/blog-post_7608.html.

Afterword Pragmatism against austerity: Greek society, politics and ethnography in times of trouble Evthymios Papataxiarchis

1 Words in trouble: multiple temporalities, alternative paradigms1 (i) Making sense of the Greek ‘crisis’ Greece is in trouble. Its public finances, its ‘labour market’, its democratic institutions, its social state, its major political parties, and, most important, its people – the elderly pensioners and the young graduates, those at the margins and those at the centre, the multitude of the unemployed and the precariat, the lower and middle social strata – have been for some time now and still are in trouble. The economy has reached the threshold of collapse, the political system is in a state of instability, society is in flux and the country has experienced an unprecedented uncertainty for several years now. The chapters in this theoretically diverse and methodologically variant collective volume offer a rich and multifaceted anthropological account of the effects of the current predicament on Greek people, society and polity. They explore the breakdown of the middle classes and the emergence of the ‘new poor’ (Panourgiá, but also Arapoglou et al. 2015), the institutional malaise and the deep legitimation crisis that transfigures mainstream politics (Kallianos), the ‘migration/refugee crisis’ (Green) and the violence that it generates (Tsimouris and Moore) and the collapse of the dividing line between the official and the unofficial and the new forms of protest that it engenders (Bampilis, but also Papataxiarchis 2014c) They discuss the blurring of boundaries between the emergent social forms – the informal collective ‘initiatives’, the Facebook collectivities or the NGOs – and the ideological muddle that arises out of the mix of opposites – of ‘pure ideology’ with pragmatic concerns, of anti-consumerism with consumerism (Chatzidakis), of anti-hierarchical solidarity with philanthropy and the idiom of gift (Rozakou, but also Theodossopoulos 2016). They also address the semantic confusion between the spontaneous and the strategic responses to the current predicament, between the disinterested offer and the interested labour

228 Papataxiarchis (Rakopoulos), the increasing mixture of politics with morality and the generalized moral reframing of politics (Gkintidis), the recourse to metaphysical means of empowerment (Sutton, but also Bakalaki 2016 and Yalouri 2016) and the mental state of ‘national depression’ that pervades every corner of the country (Apostolidou, but also Davis 2015). Yet trouble (and the subsequent confusion) has been productive. It has generated a massive response at the grassroots of Greek society and new spaces and potentialities of critique, revision and reframing. The chapters in this volume also unravel the incipient dynamism of these turbulent times. They report the energetic reaction of all different kinds of people to the challenge (Agelopoulos), not just the myriad of collective ‘initiatives’ that aim at dealing with the perils of austerity and the recovery of the social bond in an increasingly polarized and politico-ideologically divisive environment (Bampilis) but also the creative energy with which the shape of the ‘next day’ is slowly and steadily crafted: the new subjectivities (Papagaroufali) and ‘bodies-in-solidarity’ (Athanasiou), the new professions (Rakopoulos), the social and ideological experiments (Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou). The ethnographic fragments presented here are testimonies of these troubled, yet also exciting, times. On the methodological front, the book exhibits the difficulties of doing ‘ethnography in unstable places’ (Greenhouse 2002). As long as the crisis unfolds, it is very hard to make good sense of the blurred picture. The deep disturbance that pervades all corners of social life is particularly manifest in our cognitive project and the very words with which we – as anthropologists – often try to make sense of the current Greek predicament. Trouble has invaded our epistemic domain, destabilizing our analytical vocabulary. The semantic terrain of terms such as ‘resistance’, ‘solidarity’, ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘crisis’, to take a few examples that are popular among critical anthropologists, seems to suffer from the same kind of flux that invaded the social and political processes.2 As these terms, which often provide the cornerstones of our analytical framework, have been creatively absorbed in the everyday to become important politico-ideological markers, and as the boundaries between their analytical and popular usages have collapsed, their etic function has been increasingly undermined by the inflation of their emic value. The powerful mix of moral arguments and political agendas, which is deeply ingrained in their popular usages, dominates the sphere of analysis, resulting in a general confusion of the doing of politics with the task of analytical understanding. Take ‘resistance’, for example, a term with a heavy ideological legacy, which is often reified into an endemic property of people or action, thus turning into a vehicle of romantic idealization rather than a tool of understanding. The emic emphasis on ‘resistance’ as opposition to something fails to acknowledge its constructive and conformist side, as Ortner (1995) once accurately noted.3 Therefore, the ‘compromising ambivalence’ (Theodossopoulos 2014b) of ‘resistance’ is a major analytical challenge.4

Afterword 229 Or take ‘solidarity’. This key metaphor coming out of the current Greek predicament, a word that is all around has lost most of its semantic affinity with the sacred symbol of the structural functional, Durkheimian theory of society. In its folk usage it designates action rather than structure (Papataxiarchis 2016c). Its great popularity among the most diverse circles (Rakopoulos 2014b, Cabot 2016b) and its identification with a wide range of projects of engagement with the ‘crisis’ have opened up enormously its semantic terrain and seriously undermine its analytical usefulness.5 ‘Neoliberalism’, the most prominent and challenging term, together with ‘market logic’, risks becoming a passe-partout in exercises of theoretical reductionism. The recent anthropological debate on neoliberalism in Social Anthropology (vol. 20, 2012) among structural (Wacquant), historicist/ cultural (Hilgers) and governmentality (Collier) approaches is suggestive of the danger of reducing the crisis to ‘market rule’ or ‘neoliberalism’, the ‘big Leviathan’, ‘a macro-structure or explanatory background against which other things are understood’ (Collier 2012: 186). The methodological inflation of neoliberalism, which posits neoliberalism as a ‘context of contexts’, actually diverts us from the imperative of conducting the in-depth ethnographic analysis which would allow us to grasp what is particular in the crisis’. Last, but definitely not least, the term ‘crisis’: in the case of Greece, krisi, which also means 'judgement', has become a most powerful trope in informal everyday discourse – a trope for collective mobilization and change at the national level (Knight 2013a) or for directing the blame at the victims of austerity and spreading uncertainty and fear at the European level (Knight 2013b). At the same time, it retains its prominent position in historicalphilosophical theorizing as a designator of ‘a moment of truth’, suggesting a historical turning point, a ‘blind spot’ (Roitman 2013) that merely indicates ruptures and deep discontinuities. It should be clear that when we analytically adopt the term ‘crisis’, we indirectly acknowledge the dramatic upgrading of the present vis-à-vis the past that the acceleration of economic and political time has produced. Yet we face the danger of ignoring the historicity of the manifestations of the ‘crisis’. Is it enough to be reflexively aware of the function of these terms in directing our imagination and framing our analysis? I would say it is not! Some of these terms, together with a few prominent others, capture the defiant spirit of the era. In this capacity, they belong to the core of what is to be studied rather than being the analytical means to study it. As anthropologists, we should pay close attention to local, on-the-ground usages of the above terms. To do so, we need another vocabulary, of distance, that would avoid the emic/etic confusion and allow us systematically to grasp the rich semantic terrain of the emic vocabulary of the ‘crisis’. This strategy of distancing becomes more necessary when the imperative of engagement dominates our cognitive project, as in the case of ‘engaged’ and ‘activist anthropology’.6

230 Papataxiarchis (ii) Generalized trouble and the multiple temporalities of the ‘crisis’ In what ways, then, and with which words can we describe what has been happening in Greece since the signing of the so-called 'Mnimonio', ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the lenders, the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF, in 2010 and the beginning of an era of economic and political dependence on the country’s creditors? How can we make sense of the instability and the flux that has prevailed in Greek society and politics since then, when the policies of ‘structural adjustment’ started being applied under a regime of ‘supervision’ by the lenders? One way to deal with this challenging task is by recognizing it and giving it space in one’s analysis. This is what I have tried to do through the use of the term ‘trouble’ as an analytical metaphor (see Butler 1990). I use ‘trouble’ as a multi-dimensional trope that allows the simultaneous consideration of many different facets – economic, social, political, ideological, mental/psychological – in the production of antagonism. I understand trouble as ‘cognitive disturbance’ and as a traumatic experience of exclusion or marginalization, as ‘political disorder, materialized in actions destabilizing the normative and political arrangements, and producing disarray in the dominant taxonomy of actions, rules and representations’ and as a ‘structural unsettlement of all those powers subsuming individuals in the political order’ (Papataxiarchis 2014c: 26). Trouble is both a deconstructive force and a generative power. As a rather descriptive term, with small theoretical intensity and modest analytical ambitions, it leaves room for the ethnographic investigation of the emic vocabulary with which Greeks speak about their predicament. My main argument is that trouble has been around for a long time and that it preceded the ‘crisis’ (also see Dalakoglou 2013a). The current ‘crisis’ is the spread of the trouble that was long suspended in the sphere of the informal, the upgrading of trouble as an all-pervasive factor in the decomposition and/or reconfiguration of mainstream, official political and economic forms and the generation of new ones. In the course of the ‘crisis’, trouble deserted the social and political margins where it was contained and turned into a general condition. Since 2010, we, citizens and denizens of Greece, have lived in times of generalized trouble. Thinking about the current predicament in terms of trouble allows us to situate it in medium- and long-term processes – to approach the ‘crisis’ in terms of both process and event. Trouble unfolded in accordance with the different temporalities7 of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ (that is, the different ways in which they respond to change). In the course of the last decades and until 2010, formal political structures in Greece had shown a remarkable resilience and the bipolar democratic regime had exhibited an immense ability to cope with challenges – for example, the challenge of ‘the moral corruption’ that earlier had had destructive effects elsewhere in Europe. Its apparent endurance was due to its firm foundation in a ‘regime of difference’, which

Afterword 231 is organized around the sharp and well-guarded differentiation between the informal/unofficial and the formal/official level (Papataxiarchis 2006), or, in Herzfeld’s (1997) terms, between the lived experience and the official representation. This regime allows for the unofficial toleration of difference and dissent from the established social and political canon insofar as difference does not aspire to achieve formal recognition. The disemic quality of the Greek regime of difference had historically offered great elasticity to the political system. It allowed it to cope with social and political dissent by accommodating it at the unofficial margins where it was reproduced, at best as an inchoate and, thus, politically non-dangerous alternative. Sociopolitical tensions and antagonisms were stored at the informal level, waiting there to be eventually settled or diffused in the middle term (Papataxiarchis 2014c). The economy, however, had been much more responsive to short-term changes, and in this regard it became the catalyst in the generalization of the trouble that was lurking in the unofficial political margins. The crisis of Greek public finances – a phenomenon with multiple causes that was also a follow-up of the crisis in the global finance markets in 2008 and a symptom of the unequal core–periphery relations in the EU – and the neoliberal policies of ‘structural adjustment’ had a strong impact on the foundations of the democratic regime. In Greece the debt situation was perceived as a symptom of the prolonged fatigue of the political system and thus backfired on the mainstream political actors, who were unable to deliver the ‘traditional goods’ and were held responsible for the bankruptcy of state finances. As the until-then firm articulation of the formal with the informal levels of political action broke down, the financial crisis quickly escalated into a crisis of political legitimacy of the two main parties, ND and PASOK, which had been running the country for 35 years. In this way, as a rich, multi-layered phenomenon, both economic and political, the Greek ‘crisis’ adopted its idiosyncratic character. This becomes more evident when we compare its developmental cycle with the relevant crises elsewhere in Southern Europe. For example, it is comparatively more prolonged because economic recovery has been entangled with the restructuring of the political system. In this respect, one cannot ignore the long-term trajectories of the (postcapitalist) economy or the (liberal democratic) political system in Greece and their different temporalities. Nor can one diminish, the deconstructive and the formative power of an ‘event’ of such immense proportions as the near bankruptcy of the Greek public finances, the state of political and economic dependency and limited sovereignty into which Greece has entered after the signing of the ‘Memorandum’ with the lenders, in 2010, and the effects that the policies of ‘structural adjustment’ have had on Greek society. We have to achieve a theoretical economy that will score the right balance between the acknowledgment of long-term tendencies and the detection of the forces of change, while also remaining conscious of the multiple limitations of our

232 Papataxiarchis endeavour. The achievement of the ‘right balance’ between ‘the structural and the episodic/conjunctural’ (Rakopoulos 2014a) is not just a cognitive objective but also a political project – and a rather complicated one, considering the ambivalent ideological tones of the transformations that are under way. In these days of trouble, one cannot side with ‘change’ without taking into consideration that its direction is fiercely contested by opposed ideological agendas. The shape of the future is highly uncertain. (iii) Alternative perspectives The Greek ‘crisis’ has attracted a lot of attention from many different disciplines, theoretical angles and epistemological paradigms. In terms of the handling of its temporalities, we could distinguish two schools of anthropological thought.8 First, the ‘short-term approach’: it clearly delineates the period that starts with the signing of the Memorandum in 2010 from the rest of the long epoch commencing in 1974 with the fall of the military dictatorship and the foundation of the Third Hellenic Republic; it delineates a separate phase, ‘the crisis’, with distinctive characteristics that contrast it with what was happening before. Depicting this period as a major break with the past and a new beginning and bracketing the experience of all that has happened in Greece since 2010 in the term ‘crisis’ is an analytical and a narrative strategy that privileges grasping what is assumed to be a unique characteristic of this phase: the breakdown of public finances, the generalized social unrest, the liquidation of major parties, the radical renewal of political personnel, etc. The short-term approach gives emphasis to the sudden speed-up of historical time and the subsequent flux of established social and political forms. It deals with the ‘crisis’ as a generative event and tries to capture its unleashed energy and the novel forms it produces.9 Second, the ‘long-term approach’: it analyzes what is happening in this period as an aspect of long-term processes of change, thus leaving ample room to detect continuities between the present and the past as well as to consider transformations and reconfigurations. It puts the current Greek predicament in historical context; it historicizes the crisis at multiple temporal levels, trying to unravel its multi-factorial causality by looking more deeply and in the long run. To the extent that it recognizes the ‘historical embeddedness’ (Kalantzis 2016a: 7) of the many different facets of the ‘crisis’, the long-term approach demands that we take seriously the past ethnography of Greece in order to discern the historically established ways in which Greek citizens cope with the current challenges and consider the old cultural materials that are put to new uses side by side with the cultural innovations that are currently generated.10 Both approaches have been applied in recent attempts to make sense of the Greek predicament, and both are represented in this volume. The first approach may lean towards exceptionalism; the second is more open to

Afterword 233 comparativism.11 Both have their weak sides, particularly as they are exposed to different kinds of reductionism – theoretical for the first, and cultural for the second. The short-term approach, particularly when it strives to be ‘critical’, is more open to deductive reasoning at the interface with political philosophy – thus leaving room for conversations with and borrowings from ‘high theory’ – whereas the long-term approach has a greater inclination towards inductive work of the kind we find in classical historiography or ethnography. If the short-term strategy is to deliver the goods, it has to go into ethnographic depth – that entails systematic observation, problematization of emic categories, maintaining an analytical distance from the romance of resistance. Otherwise, it faces the danger of ‘ethnographic refusal’; can easily turn into a politico-ideological exercise and potentially become trapped in a solipsistic theoreticism. The long-term approach, however, also risks reifying the Greek predicament as a pathology that is endemic to the longue durée of Greek society and culture, reducing the ‘crisis’ into a kind of manifestation of long-term structure. Yet the cultural coordinates of action change as well. Only the ethnographic grasp of the generative power of the ‘crisis’ can counteract the cultural reductionism of the long-term approach. Ultimately, short-termism suggests not only breaks on the ground but also paradigmatic shifts, a turn of the page at the cognitive level as well. If the ‘crisis’ is a big rupture, then past ethnography cannot provide us with the keys to unlock it. We need new tools to grasp this radically new reality. Long-termism, however, in depicting continuities acknowledges the value of past ethnography and, therefore, confirms the longue durée of Greek ethnography.12 We need the combination of the best versions of both approaches, their synthesis at the meeting ground of solid, in-depth present and past ethnography. After all, the ‘crisis’ is an invitation for anthropological ‘revisions’ (Papataxiarchis 2013) that have to be ethnographically grounded. In this afterword, I want to consider the contribution of the chapters of this volume in understanding the unfolding of trouble from the ‘social’ to the ‘political’, from the informal margins to the political ‘centre’. Also, I will comment on some of the themes raised in this book from the viewpoint of my current involvement on the frontline of the refugee crisis and my understanding of an ‘initiative’ of ‘refugee solidarity’ in Northern Lesbos. I am particularly interested in the ethos that governs the many different kinds of practical response to the ‘crisis’ and the social and cultural groundings of engagement.

2 Greek society in trouble: the challenge of austerity (i) From ‘occupation’ to ‘squat’: forms of constructive ‘resistance’ The revolt of December 2008 in Athens and other major Greek cities was the climax of a wave of massive protests that had started at the end of the

234 Papataxiarchis first Karamanlis government as a reaction to the dramatic failure of the state apparatus to cope with one of the worst natural disasters in the last 60 years – the forest fires during the summer of 2007. The informal margins, where for some time trouble was gradually contained, exploded against the government and the political establishment. The protests brought to the streets forces from the anti-globalization and anarchist movement as well as younger generations of disillusioned citizens from a wide political spectrum. They employed innovative practices as they relied on digital forms of mobilization and transcended traditional political party affiliations. When, in the aftermath of the December revolt, the editorial collective of a Greek critical review argued against the demonization of the revolt in acknowledging its thoughtful and imaginative side, we could not envisage the constructive aftermath of this massive and exceptionally violent demonstration of social discontent.13 The December revolt marked a turning point in the expression of the discontent that was accumulating at the margins of social and political life. During this conjuncture, a historical form of protest, the ‘occupation’, which originated in the emblematic Polytechnic uprising, and its offspring, the ‘squat’, a more permanent, spatialized structure of dissent, grew in popularity. Squats, as permanent occupations, suggested a deeper, more ideologically ambitious and politically energetic form of dissent than mere protest. They referred to alternative ways of being in an otherwise capitalist world that deserved a sort of spatial recognition, particularly in the more receptive urban context. Squatting became a trademark of the Greek anarchist movement under the influence of situationist ideas on the ‘liberation of everyday life’.14 Squats often became closely linked to the ‘autonomous stekia’ (informal, frequented place) and, later, to ‘self-administered’ alternative parks that spread in various neighbourhoods of Athens and other big cities. These alternative ‘spaces’ provided the ground for cultivating different socialities of egalitarian ‘solidarity’ and alternative values based on ‘autonomy’, ‘selforganization’, ‘horizontality’ and ‘disinterested-ness’. As the spatial points of reference of these values, they provided the constructive side of resistance. Some of the chapters of the volume tell the story of the development of how squatting spread in urban, particularly student, quarters to the extent that they provided the tone of whole neighbourhoods such as Exarcheia. Out of these practices ‘counter-sites’ were formed, of the kind Foucault has called ‘heterotopias’, in which the anarchist utopia was effectively enacted in opposition to core values – such as the prevailing consumerism and monetary exchange. Consumption has been one of the victims of austerity, despite the interesting exceptions of conspicuous spending of money in venues of accumulation of symbolic capital for the elite that were reproduced during the ‘crisis’. Chatzidakis examines how the decommodification and abstention from mainstream consumption during the ‘crisis’ gave a push to anti-consumerist collectives and practices (playing consumer fantasies) in Exarcheia and

Afterword 235 strengthened its heterotopic identity as the place where core values are challenged. Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou discuss one of the ‘spatial legacies of December’ (also Dalakoglou and Vradis 2011), the squat of K*Vox, a multifunctional space at the very heart of the main square in the student quarter of Exarcheia. The authors analyse the developmental cycle of the squat, which in typical segmentary fashion revolves around two instances, ‘symbolic dilation’ and ‘contraction’. In the first, the squat reaches a high level of (moral) unity and encompasses the whole neighbourhood, thus turning it into an alternative (or ‘autonomous’) ‘village’. In the second, the squat regresses into typical segmentary opposition to other squats, thus retreating into itself. (ii) The shift from protest to ‘initiatives’ After 2010, these spatial contestations mixed more with constructive forms of resistant action, thus turning into sources of alternatives. They worked as ideological generators, providing alternative schemes of life that constituted the positive, constructive side of the wider disturbance of normality. The ‘crisis’ was another turning point for the informal margins, in many respects. First, with the massive rallies against the ‘Memorandum’ and, later, the ‘squares’ movement, the informal margins, now saturated with ‘disobedience’ and ‘indignation’, were densely populated by an increasing number of ‘indignant’ citizens from the whole range of the political system who were deserting the mainstream political parties. Particularly in the ‘squares’, anarchists came together with activists from the Radical Left and people of varying ideological persuasions, a very challenging and eventually productive mixture. This ‘multitude’ – if I am allowed to use the term – became the human source for the recapturing of society. Second, in the course of this period, protest was quickly transformed into positive action, in what has been coined as ‘protovoulia’ (initiative) – a term that captures the spirit of that era. The ‘crisis’ marked an explosion of informal as well as formal projects that aimed to deal with the ills of austerity. Prominent among them were the many ‘initiatives’, that often had cognate characteristics with the anarchist stekia – they were informal, had a loose organizational structure, usually operated on egalitarian principles and relied on digital forms of communication. They aimed, in some way, to deal with the ills of austerity, to provide the means of survival, particularly in the fields of sustenance and health, for those who were deprived of the essentials (see Douzina-Bakalaki 2016), but also to fill the vacuum, which was created by the failure of traditional clientelistic structures to deliver the goods and the subsequent break of the clientelistic bond. Anti-middlemen initiatives, such as the ones described by Agelopoulos and Rakopoulos, together with ‘social kitchens’, ‘social wardrobes’ or ‘social pharmacies’ (Cabot 2016a), increased in numbers. The term ‘social’ gained a new cur-

236 Papataxiarchis rency as a popular adjective with which these initiatives assumed their identity: the recapturing of society from the ‘bottom up’, as it fundamentally differed from its historic structuring from the ‘top down’, was equivalent to its remaking (see Rozakou 2016b). ‘Initiatives’ – both as concept and as practice – are particularly worthy of our anthropological attention. Their cognitive value definitely exceeds the grasp of some available theoretical frameworks. Projects of this kind often involved people who identified neither as aktivistes (activists) – they were newcomers to the ‘kinima’ (movement) – nor as ethelontes (volunteers). We need a ‘humble’ (Cabot 2016b) ethnography to listen to their low voices and grasp their inchoate identities. To classify them solely under the label ‘social movement’ does not do justice to the great diversity of motives, means and orientations that are energized in their context.15 Equally so, to approach them as instances of ‘civil society’ misses their key characteristic: they are not spaces for dialogic, democratic deliberation but rather vehicles for highly interested and targeted action. I think that it is productive to approach them as indices of a long-standing cultural propensity for collective action, which was especially marked in the period after the dictatorship, of an extrovert way of dealing with social problems and of an insistence to do so together with fellow human beings who share the same predicament or pursue the same agenda.16 Third, despite the great diversity of their origins and their ideological foundations, ‘initiatives’ were often employing a single marker to identify themselves – the word ‘solidarity’, an umbrella term that opened so much that it meant practical interest in the predicament of the ‘other’ (which, after all, is my own predicament). ‘Solidarity’ grew in popularity to become the hallmark of the day. Its semantic terrain was expanded in many different directions. As Rozakou notes, among anarchist activists, the initial meaning of ‘solidarity’, as horizontal, egalitarian comradeship and support for jailed comrades was extended to a particular category of vulnerable people, the sans-papiers. Yet the term was also appropriated by many different actors – activists of different persuasions, Christian philanthropists, politicians, journalists, businesses, the church or NGOs – in order to describe a stance of support for the ‘victims’ of austerity (Rakopoulos 2016a, Papataxiarchis 2016a, Chatzidakis). And eventually, with the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, it was broadly applied to all categories of vulnerable people irrespective of ethno-national identity. The new ‘patriotism of solidarity’ with the refugees (Papataxiarchis 2016d), with the banalization of the once sacrilegious ‘solidarity with migrants’, was the highest point in the use of the term. All this does not mean that the ‘multitude’ lost its agonistic orientation against the political forces, Greek or foreign, that were held responsible for the ‘crisis’. For some time after 2010, ‘solidarity’ was the other face of an important political struggle at the grassroots of Greek society. In particular the ‘social initiatives’ and other collective moves at the grassroots worked as a laboratory for the engineering of political alternatives that eventually

Afterword 237 took the shape available within the democratic process – that is, the form of a political party, SYRIZA. Yet solidarity, particularly with migrants without documents, was also the ground of another battle, between the ‘solidarians’ and the xenophobic Right that was capitalizing on fear and insecurity to promote a purist version of the nation and a highly exclusionary vision of society (Bampilis, Rozakou and Papataxiarchis 2014a). We have to consider closely the developmental cycle of these social and political processes, particularly as they are affected by the changing articulation of the informal with the formal as well of the social with the political.

3 Greek politics in trouble: the reconstruction of the political system from below The ‘crisis’ as a distinctive phase, as a moment of rupture and discontinuity, is more recognizable from above (Papataxiarchis 2015). At the level of the political system, the institutions and formal policies, the signing of the ‘Memorandum’ in 2010 really marked a clear break, particularly because, under a rhetoric of ‘emergency’, the government compromised further the already limited sovereignty of the country, which was entering a prolonged state of dependence on its lenders. The functioning of the government, the parliament and important institutions of the democratic process, which were in a state of chronic post-political fatigue for some time, were among the first victims of the ‘crisis’. The country entered a state of institutional malaise in the name of ‘emergency’. The signing of the first ‘Memorandum’ and the subsequent policies of austerity particularly affected the until-then stable articulation of the formal with the informal levels of political action and exposed the central political scene and the mainstream political parties to a fast-growing popular discontent. The system of ‘party clientelism’ broke down because of the inability of those in power to deliver the promised goods and the long standing ‘citizen-clients’ of the two main parties, which had alternated in government since 1974, deserted them in massive numbers. The rapid unaligning of voters from the major traditional parties led to the liquidation of PASOK and the multiple splits of ND. The negative political energy, which was stored in the unofficial margins, was now multiplied as the middle strata joined the ‘infuriated’ in massive protests. Mixed messages, combining anti-parliamentarism or the totalistic and anti-institutional ‘rejection of all sorts of “debt”, individual and collective’, with the utopia of direct democracy, occupied the front stage of public debate. All this culminated in the spectacular, not to say ritualistic, upgrading of squatting in the so-called ‘squares’ – the programmatically peaceful ‘occupation’ of the emblematic Syntagma Square opposite the Greek parliament, from May to July 2011, by many tens of thousands of ‘indignant’ protesters, pursuing a wide range of demands ranging from ‘direct democracy’ to the destruction of the parliament itself, as well as the ‘occupation’ of squares in

238 Papataxiarchis other Greek cities.17 As Athanasiou notes, new subjectivities and a ‘provisional, tenuous and groundless community’ of those without community were temporarily enacted. These new forms were mostly grounded on digital communication and were more prominent among the younger generations. The ‘indignant movement’ spread quickly, capitalized on the global ‘occupy’ protests and similar moves in Southern Europe, and, as it survived the suppression of the ‘squares’ by the government, went on exerting great pressure on formal political structures in the pursuit of ‘real democracy’.18 The deep crisis of legitimacy that threatened the political system with total collapse, and particularly the change in the balance of power between the grassroots and the formal institutions, created space for the strategic management of mass dysphoria by the Nazi Right (Papataxiarchis 2014a). The period 2010–2012 saw a spectacular rise in xenophobic violence. Violence was already a mark of that era, particularly because it was forcefully applied against the massive demonstrations and was eventually used to suppress the peaceful occupation of the squares. As Bampilis rightly notes, the Golden Dawn dressed its political messages in an almost ritualistic and thus highly publicized kind of murderous violence against its opponents. It primarily targeted Afro-Asian immigrants as a means of constituting a body politic fashioned in ethno-racial terms and obtained important gains from this strategy. In this period, political dysphoria was unleashed in immense quantities, from the bottom up, threatening the symbolic foundations of the democratic regime and stretching for a while the political system to its limits. The apotropaistic rituals (e.g., the massive performance of mountza, a traditional, insulting and contemptuous gesture made with an open hand), which had been innovatively applied in the ‘squares’ as a means of expression of indignant feelings against impersonal entities, such as the building of the parliament, and other more violent manifestations of anger, were eventually directed towards the personal entities of members of the government and the parties in power. In this climate of discontent, the military and student parades of 28 October 2011, the national anniversary of the ‘No’ to the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, turned into a terrain for the demonstration of anger that was now aimed at particular holders of public office. The reversal of the formal, public honouring of the resistant nation into the ritualistic dishonouring of its elected officials – particularly ministers and MPs – in person by the protesting citizens – even young parading students, who replaced the turn of the head, a formal gesture of honour to the officials who attend the parade, with a mountza, an informal gesture of dishonour – was the climax of a long period of aggressive protest. Trouble eventually reached the top (Papataxiarchis 2015)! Yet the crisis of political legitimacy – a delayed symptom of the historical exhaustion of the consensual, bipartite, democratic regime – also had its productive side. Anger found an institutional way (that is, the electoral process) to express itself, and in this way the ‘crisis’ eventually touched the top level of the political system, the ‘central political scene’. In a short period of three

Afterword 239 four years (2012–2015), Greek citizens went to the polls six times – four parliamentary elections, one municipal election that coincided with the elections for the European Parliament and one referendum. Political time accelerated: the lifecycle of governments and parties dramatically changed. First, as ‘consensual democracy’ was ritually deconstructed – primarily in the streets and the ‘squares’ – the Papandreou government fell and was replaced by a technocratic government. Then, after the landmark double elections of 2012 that formally confirmed the collapse of historical bipolarism, ND was forced into a coalition government with PASOK. And eventually the political parties that had been either produced or renewed and expanded in influence during the ‘crisis’ occupied prominent positions in the central political scene. The political system was largely restructured from below – small parties from the left and right margins occupied prominent positions in the renewed political scene and new parties were formed. The only reminder of the old political order is ND, the foundational stone of the post-dictatorial democratic regime. ND remained as one of the protagonists of the political game, yet was now wounded by numerous splits primarily from the right. Golden Dawn capitalized on the xenophobic climate and in successive elections confirmed its third place in the parliament. Of course, the single most important outcome of the reshuffling of the party political system from below was SYRIZA. The party of the Radical Left expressed a broad coalition of the lower and middle strata that had suffered from the crisis. It capitalized on the social movements against the ‘Memorandum’, and, to the extent that it captured the resistant spirit of that era, it dominated the 2015 elections as an innovative force, promising a combination of social justice and political renewal with soteriological economics and vernacular aesthetics. With the coming into power of SYRIZA, a new phase of political re-legitimization began: the democratic institutions gradually regained some of their historical potency, indignation declined, the hold of the official over the un-official level was slowly restored and the re-alignment of voters with the main parties commenced. The restructuring of the political system from below was realized in a climate of moralization of politics – from all sides, right and left, above and below. The political repositioning of pro-EU elites in a moral direction (Gkintidis) and their constructive, hegemonic moralism were directed against the allegedly ‘populist’ mentality of the left and the performative moralism of the Golden Dawn (Bampilis). The political debate became framed in the moralistic pair of ‘populism’ and ‘anti-populism’. This pervasive moralization of politics is one of the important legacies of the ‘crisis’.19 This is not a novel phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the Greek context.20 As the classic works of John Campbell (1964) and Peter Loizos (1975) have shown, the contractual foundations of clientelistic politics are sanctioned by the values that govern interpersonal sociality. The growth of politicized humanitarianism on a global scale is suggestive of the moralization of inter-state relations.

240 Papataxiarchis The new ‘patriotism of solidarity’ (Papataxiarchis 2016d) that emerged during the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece draws upon the same cultural reservoir.

4 Creative trouble: pragmatism against austerity (i) Platanos: squatting in ‘solidarity’ with the refugees The adventurous ‘negotiation’ of the debt arrangement between the new coalition SYRIZA-ANEL government and the ‘partners-lenders’ in the first half of 2015, and the massive entry of around 1 million displaced people from the ‘East’ into a crisis-ridden country in the course of the summer and autumn of the same year, could be regarded as the climax of the current Greek predicament. The coming of the refugees coincided with the defeat of the resistant ‘anti-memorandum’ illusions, after the historic compromise of SYRIZA with its lenders, and the change of course by the Radical Left government. The defeated government had to deal with hundreds of thousands of displaced people coming from Asia and the Middle East. This ‘crisis within the crisis’ eventually generated a lot of collective energy at the social grassroots level but also produced extreme forms of disruption, particularly at the Aegean frontline. In this regard, it is quite suggestive of the creative and the destructive sides of the ‘crisis’. During the last two years, I witnessed the unfolding of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Skala Sykamnias, a small village community at the northern shores of Lesbos, from the viewpoint of Platanos (plane tree), a collective ‘initiative’ of support for the refugees.21 In summer 2015, a small group of anarchist activists traveled from their urban base in Exarcheia to the frontline of the crisis in Lesbos, where they felt they were most needed. They were previously involved in various squats and had a lot of experience in the provision of assistance – food, clothes, medical aid – to the refugees in Pedion tou Areos, one of the big squares in the center of Athens. In Lesbos, they eventually settled in Skala, with the support of local activists and particularly the ‘Lesbian initiative’ (in which a number of my students were active), a local NGO and some of the inhabitants of the village, who offered them hospitality in their houses. Their mode of settlement in the village resembled their mode of existence in Exarcheia. They initiated, in other words, a culturally unique experiment of rural squatting. Their squat in a small ‘park’ near the sea expanded quickly into a small camp – with a number of tents, an ISO box with cooking facilities and a dispensary run by an international Christian NGO. Their infrastructure was complemented by a small ‘rescue boat’ and a few warehouses where donations from all over the world were kept. The successful use of social media and some press coverage offered them high visibility. They soon became one of the emblems of the grassroots mobilization in support of the refugees at the national level, attracting hundreds of volunteers who came from all around Greece and the world to ‘help’. Within a period of 10 months, the ‘camp of the misfits’, as they

Afterword 241 jokingly called their squat, offered ‘solidarity’ to many among the more than 250,000 refugees who passed through this village. The story of Platanos illustrates the immense transformations that are taking place on the ground in Greece during the recent period – the radical changes in ordinary lives, but also in wider ideological and political projects, and the conflicts that come with them. It is also a testimony to the politicoideological mix that is characteristic of this era. Platanos was programmatically an anarchist project, resting on clear ideological principles: self-organization, ‘horizontality’ (that is, radical equality), ‘dignity’, distance from the state, opposition to interested forms of engagement. Despite its clear ideological origins – that were manifested both in its symbols, such as the anarchist flag at the entrance of the compound, and in its organizational practices, such as the regular assembly of its members in which by consensus decisions were made – the squat eventually came to rest on the broad alliance and actual cooperation between ideologically and politically heterogeneous actors – Greeks and foreigners, anarchists, Radical Left activists, communists, union members, even volunteer tourists. That was an absolutely unexpected and unprecedented exposure to the social milieu that was produced by the ‘refugee crisis’ at the frontline. As an anarchist utopia, Platanos came into being in a multi-valent context that was foreign to its natal urban environment. Besides the masses of refugees who were passing through, the new environment involved the local rural community and the regional system of humanitarian governance that had started operating in Lesbos in October 2015 under the supervision of the UNHCR in close cooperation with the municipal authorities. The bilateral effects of the interaction between Platanos and this complex environment were unforeseen. The squat actually turned into an advanced school in humanitarian work. Once in Lesbos, the activists and volunteers of Platanos found themselves working side by side with professional humanitarian workers as well as with volunteers from other collectivities, Facebook personalities or NGO officials. They mingled with the humanitarian crowd, became part of the ‘humanitarian village’ that was formed within the local community and shared the agonies and the joys with their fellow ‘humanitarians’. They ‘taught’ the foreign participants the Greek manners of sociality, and they were immersed in the cosmopolitan ethos of this international mobilization. Some of the core members of the squat, particularly those who had stayed in the village for most of the period, together with representatives of the many NGOs that operated on the island, participated in the division of humanitarian labour that was coordinated by the UNHCR and the other big international organizations, took part in joint meetings and shared responsibilities, thus becoming integrated into the official terrain of humanitarian governance. In the course of the crisis, the activists of Platanos developed new techniques and improved their skills in rescue at sea, first reception, medical aid, camp maintenance or management of resources.

242 Papataxiarchis The interaction of the members of Platanos with local inhabitants was more complicated. In this predominantly left community, some of the locals offered houses to the activists, others showed their sympathy, yet very few were actually involved in the project. The logic of squatting directly contradicted the rules of hospitality that required the consent of the host community as being sovereign over public space. The failure of the squatters to agree on a common line of action with the local authorities and their insistence on occupying public space despite the opposition of the local council, touched a sensitive nerve in connection with sovereignty. On the one hand, it produced a series of mini crises for the local authorities who eventually threatened the squatters with eviction. On the other hand, it had domestic repercussions as it alienated some sympathizers and brought friction and division in the ranks of the sizable group of friends and members of SYRIZA. The exposure of the programmatically anarchist project to these complex circumstances also had important internal repercussions. ‘Plataniotes’ faced hard dilemmas. Accept external assistance by a Christian NGO or even a public institution in order to offer necessary services, such as medical aid, or restrict their functions and eventually perish? Receive monetary donations that opened the room for corruption, or restrict their field of appeal to items of priority? Keep ‘solidarity’ exclusively for refugees, or extend it to the village ‘poor’? Cooperate with the local authorities, or go on occupying the moral high ground as authentic agents of ‘solidarity’, thus risking their complete alienation from the local society? As the project was progressing, made its own roots and started creating its own reality, and as it departed from its initial conception, the relation with the parent collectivities, which were attempting to supervise the project from a distance and make sure that it conformed to the original premises, became complicated. The project was riven by internal tensions between the ‘idealists’, who remained faithful to the ideological foundational principles even if this put the project at risk, and the ‘pragmatists’, who were open to compromises that would safeguard their project and ensure the successful realization of the ultimate task – the efficient rescue and reception of the displaced people. The harsh realities gave birth to challenging dilemmas. In some instances, ‘horizontality’ turned against anthropia (humanism), autonomy against cooperation. The mixing of the utopian project with the objectives of the emergent humanitarian agenda became a source of anxiety. For a number of the activists, the ‘saving of lives’ – all lives, irrespective of the social status of the displaced people – and the proper reception of the refugees had a priority; it overrode the consistent application of the foundational principles of this otherwise anarchist project. This new hierarchy of values justified in their eyes the sacrifice of ideological principles in the name of operational effectiveness. After all, this was a noble cause. These dilemmas were never fully resolved, particularly as Platanos led a multiple existence – in the squat and in the assemblies of parent collectivities

Afterword 243 in Exarcheia, not to mention its separate digital life! They continued to puzzle its members, producing further tensions and internal splits that ultimately did not stop the ongoing transformation of the squat in unforeseen directions. In the squat, the duration of stay and the degree of commitment were making the difference and leading this project in a direction that facilitated the mutual accommodation of Platanos to the local environment. From this brief account, it becomes clear that Platanos is a testimony to the generative event that the refugee crisis was. The ‘solidarian initiative’ worked as an agent of local change but also changed itself, yet change followed directions that radically differed from the ones initially envisioned by its architects. Once the project achieved its own, programmatically heterotopic spatiality, it was almost forced into a series of mutations in response to its heterogeneous environment. The anarchist project eventually brought together radically different, if not opposite, ideological forces; it transformed some activists into professional humanitarian workers; it turned into the birth place of new NGOs; and it was eventually added to the wide conglomeration of sites of ‘gift worship’ as it attracted a large number of donations. (ii) Pragmatism against austerity This short detour to the frontline of the refugee crisis has taken us to the heart of the matter. If the ‘crisis’ is a generator of resistant yet constructive praxis, then it is an important factor of change. Under such conditions, a society in crisis is inevitably a changing society. The logic, the form and the direction of change, particularly in the social field, are the key issues. Do we have the invention of new forms, or the reconfiguration of old ones? To what extent do the innovative activities born of the ‘crisis’ remain faithful to their ideological premises? In which direction are the historically available contexts and forms reconfigured as they accommodate the disturbance brought by the crisis? This volume offers interesting evidence of the confusion and the ideological tensions that underlie the energetic responses to the ‘crisis’, of the ideological battles on the direction of change. This is more than apparent in the ongoing confrontation over the migration issue. It has been equally strong and painful within the many grassroots ‘initiatives’ that flourished particularly in the last two years during the ‘refugee crisis’: they are haunted by the internal strife between ‘ideologists’ and ‘realists’, between those who faithfully stick to the ideological principles of self-organization and disinterestedness and their comrades, who opt for the necessary ‘compromises’ that will make their project feasible. This internal conflict echoes the tension in the Exarcheia squats between those who aim at an ‘opening . . . to the wider society’ and those who stick to ‘a very specific radical ideological and political stance’ (Poulimenakos and Dalakoglou) and becomes sharper when the energetic involvement in the ‘refugee crisis’ reshuffles the value hierarchies

244 Papataxiarchis in the humanitarian direction. Such tensions echo the conflictual and often divisive dilemmas that are haunting the central political scene, particularly after the historical compromise of the SYRIZA government; they are endemic in the blurring of ‘clear’ categories and the confusion that comes with the ‘crisis’. Some of the chapters in this volume are particularly suggestive of the ways in which similar tensions are resolved on the ground. Rakopoulos describes how the members of the ‘anti-middlemen initiative’ are busily trying to make ‘remunerative cooperatives’ out of their informal networks. They strive for ‘immediate’, not ‘fair’, trade, and ‘lower’, not ‘transparent’, prices, and they look for formal recognition and protection from the state.22 Chatzidakis shows how the anti-consumerist network eventually turned into a site of over-consumption. A rather conservative imperative seems to override the anti-capitalist ethos of the activists of Skoros. His remarks remind us of the imaginative reconstruction of philanthropic giving – in ‘social wardrobes’ or other places – into a conventional form of consumption through the application of the market language that turns gifts into ‘commodities’, or the equally powerful, imaginative reconstruction of ‘soup kitchens’ as continuations of the home through the application of hegemonic notions of the household. These workings of the imagination, which are so vividly described by Douzina-Bakalaki (2016), are governed by the longing for normality. It is evident that as utopias and other ideological projects of engagement with the ‘crisis’ were applied in specific contexts, they were pushed in directions other than the ones initially envisaged by their initiators, they became ‘domesticated’ in their particular fields of application and they were re-signified and eventually normalized (that is, accommodated in conventional forms that prevailed in each particular field). These otherwise new, innovative practices reverted to historical forms in the course of adjustment to difficult circumstances and employed the old, established language of ‘labour’, ‘commodity’, ‘profession’, ‘NGO’, or ‘recognition’ and symbolic capital. This book, therefore, reports a struggle that is particularly salient when our interlocutors are active in movements and schemes that promise alternatives. It is the struggle between two programmatically opposed temporal dispositions: between recapturing a glorious past of economic security, employment and consumption and pursuing an alternative utopian future. In this contest between nostalgia and utopia, the drive for survival in an age of generalized trouble apparently prevails. It encourages adjustment to the new circumstances through the employment of old, available means. In this sense, the past gains leverage over the future. Even in ‘initiatives’ in which the future, in a utopian form, is given priority, the past has the last word.Yet, the recapturing of the past equals its remaking. The application of historical forms, or even of their illusion, in these new circumstances has effects – it leads to reconfigurations, to changes in the content of the old forms. The systematic understanding of these reconfigurations is the most challenging

Afterword 245 task of future research, a task that requires the adequate historicization of the ‘crisis’. What is the driving force behind this often imaginative and unpredictable recapturing of the past? The subjects of all these ‘initiatives’ seem to have a thorough understanding of personal vulnerabilities, of limited resources, of the very predicament that haunts their lives, of the ‘need’ that governs their engagement with the ‘crisis’.23 They are also sensitive to the effects of their actions and particularly aware that these ‘initiatives’ make them agents, in the full sense of the word, in a conjuncture that forces them to futile inaction or ineffective reaction. On that ground, they are open to the un-envisioned effects of praxis, even if they contradict certain ideals, as long as these are morally justifiable. Under these conditions, the determination to act prevails. Initiating solidarian initiatives through putting elementary means – primarily one’s own agency – to ends that are justifiable, and, eventually, finding a way out of the current predicament, rests upon a determination that puts pragmatic considerations over ideological concerns.24 In one word, in the Greek age of generalized trouble, pragmatism triumphs! What is particularly interesting in many of these ‘initiatives’ is the disinterested form that pragmatism adopts as it is being put in the service of empowerment. The pragmatic engagement of the ‘solidarians’ with the crisis remains in touch with allegedly disinterested motives, it dresses altruistically in keeping with the ‘other in need’ and not the private self as a point of reference: it is interested action in disinterested form. Disinterestedness is thus employed as a symbolic source of moral justification of the otherwise egoistic pursuit of survival. In the paradoxical shape of disinterestedness, ‘solidarian’ pragmatism is carrying with it an endemic tension between interest and its opposite; it is torn by an anxiety over motives. Next to the contradictory symbiosis of nostalgia with utopia, another source of ambiguity is added to the ‘solidarian’ project. The agonistic pragmatism, which originates in the struggle for survival, against austerity, and remains committed to the recovery of the social bond as its foundational condition, is the actual horizon of the future. This emerges as the most important legacy of the Greek ‘crisis’. Will it be sufficient for getting us out of trouble?

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors of the volume, Georgios Agelopoulos and Dimitris Dalakoglou, for the invitation to participate in this project and for their comments. Many thanks to Efi Avdela, Jane Cowan, Olga Demetriou, Charles G. Gore, Murat Erdal Ilhcan, Lois Labrianidis, Panos Papadimitropoulos, Effie Plexousaki, Marica Rombou-Levidi and Katerina Rozakou for comments on an earlier draft. 2 The same applies to other concepts – for example ‘austerity’ or ‘populism’ – that came into prominence during the recent ‘crisis’. On the ‘global life of austerity’, see Rakopoulos (2017).

246 Papataxiarchis 3 Theodossopoulos (2014a: 416) argues in favour of the analytical rescuing of ‘resistance’ through its ‘de-exoticization’ and ‘de-pathologization’. On the mixing of ‘resistance’ against austerity and romantic sources such as ‘defensive nationalism’ and ‘indigenism’, also see Kalantzis (2015). 4 Also see Bakalaki (2008). 5 Rakopoulos (2016) suggests using ‘solidarity’ as a ‘bridge concept’, whereas Douzina-Bakalaki (2016) takes a greater distance and speaks about ‘modalities of engagement’. 6 On a recent appraisal of ‘activist anthropology’, see Ortner (2016a). 7 I should clarify that here I employ the term ‘temporality’ not from the perspective of temporal reasoning but from the angle of duration and rhythm of change – not as subjective understanding of past, present and future (that is, as historicity) but as a property of structures. On the ‘historical consciousness’ of the ‘crisis’, see the very interesting work of David Knight (2015a). Also see Knight and Stewart (2016). On the political manipulation of time, see Streinzer (2016). 8 This brief review of the anthropological literature of the Greek ‘crisis’ cannot be comprehensive. The big anthropological interest in the ‘Greek crisis’ is reflected in a number of special issues. See History and Anthropology (vol. 27, no. 1, 2016), Social Anthropology (vol. 24, no. 2, 2016), Visual Anthropology Review (vol. 32, no. 1, 2016) and The Unfamiliar (vol. 2, no. 2, 2012). Also see the special section ‘Beyond the ‘Greek crisis’: histories, rhetorics, politics’ in the ‘Hot spots’ of Cultural Anthropology (2011). For a brief yet insightful review of ‘crisis anthropology’ in Greece, see Kalantzis (2016a). 9 This approach has been particularly productive in the study of the workings of the (discursive and visual) imagination. For example, see Alexandrakis (2016), Kalantzis (2016b), Knight (2015b), Papailias (2012), Theodossopoulos (2014b) and Yalouri (2016). 10 For example, see the work of Heath Cabot (2016) on the reconfigurations of care and citizenship in ‘social pharmacies’ in Athens; Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki (2016) on transformations in gender, kinship and affect in soup kitchens in Xanthi; Katerina Rozakou (2016b) on the reformation of sociality among volunteers in Athens; and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (2013) on the application of the, historically available, blame-evading tactic by Greek ‘indignants’ in the context of the ‘defensive nationalism’ that pervaded the protest against austerity. Also see the study of the reconfigurations of the ‘migrant’ by Sarah Green in this volume. 11 The most theoretically elaborate version of the thesis that the Greek crisis is exceptional rests on the ‘state of exemption’ argument. For a systematic discussion of this argument, see Athanasiou (2012). For a critical assessment of the Eurocentric bias and the exoticizing thrust of the ‘exceptionality paradigm’, see Rakopoulos (2014a). 12 Michael Herzfeld (2016) makes a similar call to consider the ‘ethnographic genealogy’ of the response to the crisis and to ‘pay close attention to the earliest ethnographic descriptions’ (201). 13 ‘Irregular mind /Atakti Skepsi’, Synchrona Themata (vol. 30, no. 103, 2008). See, for example, the critical agency that was generated among graffiti writers in the aftermath of the December revolt (Alexandrakis 2016). Also see Astrinaki (2009), Dalakoglou and Vradis (2011) and Kallianos (2013). 14 See Kritidis (2014) and Papadogiannis (2015). 15 This does not mean that ‘initiatives’, particularly those that identified as ‘social’, did not intersect in many ways with the social movements of the last two decades – the anti-globalization, the ecological or the feminist movements. 16 On solidarity initiatives as a creative grassroots response to austerity, see Arampatzi (2016).

Afterword 247 17 For an ethnographic approach of the ‘squares’, see Papavlou (2015). Also see Stavrides (2012). 18 On the ambivalent feelings concerning indignation, see Theodossopoulos (2013). 19 Also see Herzfeld (2016). 20 On ‘humanitarian reason’ as ‘a mode of governing’ precarious lives resting on the ‘fantasy of a global moral community’ and the general moralization of politics on a global scale, see Fassin (2012). Also see Muehlebach (2012). 21 For a first account of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Northern Lesbos, see Papataxiarchis (2016a,b). 22 On the ‘pragmatic dimension’ of cooperativism in Greece, also see Rakopoulos (2014a). Rakopoulos understands cooperativism as a perspective on the future that unleashes ‘new forms of consciousness’. 23 ‘Solidarity came out of the need’: this is how volunteers in social pharmacies studied by Cabot (2016b: 152) understand their involvement in these informal formations of welfare. Also see Agelopoulos (2015). 24 See Knight (2014) on the innovative strategies with which people cope with chronic uncertainty.

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Index

abandonment 25, 198 abuse 21, 120, 130 activism 22, 24, 28, 61, 64, 69, 71, 80, 150, 152, 194, 200, 208–214, 222, 229, 235, 243. See also LGBTQ activisms Agamben, G. 52, 83 Agelopoulos, G. 225, 235 agriculture 140–142 Albania 76, 96, 105–106 anarchism 150, 152, 154, 173–174, 178, 189–190, 198, 234–235, 241. See also squat Anderson, B. 114, 115 Anderson, T. 50 Andreas, C. 79 anomie 174–179 anthropology 2, 86, 109, 121–123, 132, 145, 203, 204, 229, 236 anti-austerity initiatives 222 anti-immigrant 24–25, 61, 63, 74, 81, 112–113. See also Golden Dawn anti-memorandum 127, 240 anti-neoliberal politics 16, 17, 24 anti-racist 26, 27 anti-structural/moral turn 41–42 anti-xenophobic movements 222 antiquities 87, 88, 100, 149 apotropaistic rituals 238 Athanasiou, A. 54, 128, 129 Athenian heterotopia 149–154 Athens: consumer city 148–149; in-group solidarity 156–157 Athens, foreigners in: 1920s 107–108; 1960s 102–103; 1990s 105–107;

2000s 108–113; Asia minor refugees 107–108; concept of crisis 103; conflict 102–103; disproportion, sense of 108–113; foreigners before migrants 104–105; migrants, invention of 105–107 Bakalaki, A. 106 Bauman, Z. 222 Beetham, D. 45 Berger, P. 48 Billiri, N. 90 Boholm, Å. 50 border guards (sinoriofilakes) 74, 79, 112, 113. See also police borderlands 73–74, 77, 78–82. See also immigrant Bourdieu, P. 185, 186 Brown, W. 17 Bulgaria 25, 65, 220 bureaucracy 77, 80, 83, 105, 115, 123, 189, 198, 199, Butler, J. 16, 128 Campbell, J. 239 capitalist crisis 15, 20, 32–34, 40, 42 capitalist relations, moral formulation of 35–41 civil society 80, 125, 141, 204, 211, 213 Claessen, H. J. M. 45 Comaroff, J. 86 commodity value 148, 155 commons 134, 145 communication 82, 152, 160, 167, 198, 200, 235, 238

Index 277 communism 61, 65, 69, 102, 211, 212, 241 consumption 148–149, 219, 223, 227 Crabapple, M. 154 Corsín Jiménez, A. 111, 114 crisis: biopolitics and governmentality of 18–21, 49, 52–53; concept of 15, 38, 103, 110–111, 126; critique of 15–16, 215; immigration as 107–109, 192–194; and legitimacy 46–47; multiple temporalities of 230–232; politics 15, 28, 49, 76, 79; symbolic universe of 50–52, 54 critical intimacies 15 CV industry 160; deceptive temporality 163–166; illusion of 161–163 Dalakoglou, D. 47, 55, 122, 132, 222 De te fabula narratur 11 Dean, M. 52 debt crisis 3, 21, 32, 47, 122, 146, 199, 204 Derrida, J. 30, 163, 164, 194 Doron 184 Douzina-Bakalaki, P. 244 EC. See European Commission (EC) ECB. See European Central Bank (ECB) economic depression 101, 119 emergency politics 27–30 emergent politics 27–30 emerging middle-classes 155 emerging subectivities 120–121 emotive language 123–126 EMU. See European Monetary Union (EMU) Epirus 106 ethnography 1–2, 10, 87, 107, 112, 121, 123, 132, 182, 193, 210, 228, 232 European Central Bank (ECB) 46, 146, 214 European Commission (EC) 32, 39, 46, 166, 230 European Monetary Union (EMU) 32, 33 European money 33, 34, 39, 40 Exarchia. See squat

far-right politics 24–25. See also Golden Dawn feminism 23, 24, 26, 27, 73, 247 Ferry, E. 100 fertility, metaphors for 97–100 Foucault, M. 183 free money 35–41 gendered and racialized enactments 25–26 global capitalist crisis 32 Golden Dawn 4, 5, 8, 25, 59–63, 65, 68–71, 74, 82, 112, 156, 176; immigrants 65–68; neo-Nazi strategies 71–72; orthodox allies 63–65; recent history 61–63; violence and mooring 68–71 Gourgouris, S. 104 Graeber, D. 109, 211–212 Greece: and the EU 33, 34–41, 51, 93, 106, 138, 140, 159–156, 230; golden era of 8; place, landscape and environment 97–100, 104; potato movement 11, 218; streets and squares of 21–24 Greek crisis 1–3, 7, 10, 11, 26, 45, 50, 74, 81, 121–123, 164, 192 Greek state 46, 48–50, 53 Greek technocrats 3, 41 Greek–Albanian border 106 Habermas, J. 46 Harvey, D. 210 Herzfeld, M. 104, 107, 115, 122, 127, 128, 145, 231 hetero-utopias 182–187 heterotopias 5, 182–185, 234 Horstmann, A. 78 immigrant 21, 29, 73–78, 79, 105–7, 181, 238: ‘immigration as crisis’ 107–108, 111; as opposed to ‘foreigners’ 104–105, 106. See also anti-immigrant; borderlands; Golden Dawn; Lampedusa; solidarian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 160 infrastructure 10, 107, 122, 125, 149, 152, 177, 192, 222, 240

278 Index injustice 23, 27, 29, 123, 127. See also justice International Monetary Fund (IMF) 46, 146, 214 justice 17, 29, 87, 127, 131, 138, 157, 203, 236, 239. See also injustice K*VOX. See squat Kalymnos 89–93 Kaplani, G. 75, 76 Karpozilos, K. 140 Kasmir, S. 210 KKE (Communist Party of Greece). See communism Knight, D. 99 labour 138, 160, 182, 185 202–204, 205, 210–211: privatizations 9; responses in 212–214 Lampedusa 84 legitimacy 45–46; militant particularism 210; problematic of 46–48 Lesvos (Lesbos) 111, 223 Lewis, O. 136 LGBTQ activisms 24, 29 liberal socio-politics 25 Limbert, M. 99 local echoes 96–97 Loizos, P. 239 Luckmann, T. 48, 51, 52 Lynteris, C. 126 McLaren, P. 79 Makrygianni, V. 150 Marx, K. 7, 211–212, 222 Marxism 36, 39 Massey, D. 75 materiality 34–38, 42, 44, 86, 87, 89, 97–100, 127, 150–152, 175–176, 182, 185, 209–211 Mauss, M. 41, 211–212, 214 Mediteranean 83, 84, 109, 204, 219 Memorandum 51, 133, 164, 230, 231, 235, 237, 239 mental health 120–121, 128–129 metapolitefsi 47, 55

Nazi Right 238 neo-Nazism 24–25. See also Golden Dawn neoliberal biopolitics 26–271 neoliberal context 82–84 neoliberal subject 52–53 neoliberalism 2, 3, 9–11, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 48, 60, 185, 186, 210, 215, 228, 229 New Democracy (ND) 26, 28, 46, 48, 55, 222, 231, 237, 239 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 161, 188, 227 O’Maley, P. 53 oil and hydrocarbons 93–96 Ortner, S. 228 Papandreou 219, 239 Papastefanaki, L. 95 Papataxiarchis, E. 194, 237 Passerin d’Entrèves A. 51 PASOK 37, 69, 177, 220, 222, 231, 237, 239 pathology 123–126 pathology discourse 126–129 Penny, L. 154 Polanyi, K. 202–204 police 21–22, 27, 48–49, 64–65, 67, 74, 82, 112–113, 177, 186, 194–196 political legitimacy 231, 238. See also legitimacy Portwood-Stacer, L. 152 Povinelli, E. 25 pragmatism against austerity 240–246 pre-crisis situation 218 Purple Bench – Gender Group 23 Rakopoulos, T. 145, 225, 235, 246, 247 Reid, J. 53 Roitman, J. 1, 110 Rozakou, K. 236, 246 Samaras, A. 55n7, 66, 82 Simmons, J.A. 50 social antagonism 38, 42, 180, 183, 185 social contestation 46–48

Index 279 social contract 47, 54–55, 60 social economy 203–214 social transformations 1, 10 socio-spatial 8, 11, 28, 148, 150, 153, 159, 182, 218 solidarian 188–191, 213 solidarity 35, 41, 47, 133, 152, 156–158, 216, 218, 228, 236–237: economy 204–214, 219–222; future of 209–211; lessons from 199–200; radicalised 194–198. See also solidarian squat 9, 48, 149–150, 154, 173–174, 175–179, 182, 185–187, 234 states of crisis 15–18 Stewart, C. 87, 89, 98 Sutton, D. 123, 124, 145 Swartz, J. M. 45 Syntagma Square movement of 2011 173 SYRIZA 1, 26, 28–30, 127, 208 T.I.N.A (‘there is no alternative’) syndrome 218 Taussig, M. 86, 98 Theodossopoulos, D. 123

Thessaloniki 65, 127, 174, 203, 206–207, 213, 216, 219–224 Thompson, E. P. 203 Tirikos-Ergas, Y. 93 traditional clientelistic structures 235 Tsavdaroglou, C. 150 Tsipras, A. 114, Tuden, A. 45 Turkey 67, 70, 82–83, 93–96, 108, 192, 220 Turner, V. 45 uncertainty 4, 47–48, 50–55, 124, 227 Voglis, P. 140 Wacquant, L. 48 Weskalnys, G. 100 Whyte, K. K. 212 Whyte, W. F. 212 Williams, R. 210 Wolff, R. P. 46 Xenios Zeus 191–194 Yalouri, E. 102, 103