Dimitris Plantzos A voice less material: classical antiquities and their uses at the time of the Greek crisis

Paper delivered at the one-day colloquium Greece / Precarious / Europe co-organised by the Hellenic Centre, the Subfaculty of Modern Greek, Oxford University and the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome, Royal Holloway University of London with the support of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway (London, Hellenic Centre, 16 February 2013).

My task today is to explore how the so-called Greek crisis has affected the ways in which Greeks view themselves and wish to be viewed by others with reference to Greeces classical past. That Greece as a modern nation-state has constructed itself upon the classical ruins dotting its colourful landscape hardly needs repeating here, especially since this eclectic relationship between the country and its past pretty much imagined by western European elites, then imported to the country by its own emerging upper classes in the 18th and the 19th c. is incessantly reminded to anyone who cares to listen, both at home and abroad. Since the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s, classical antiquity has been imposed on the collective imaginary of its people as an aesthetic as well as a political template, enforced through an autocratic schooling regime, a conservative set of ideas and practices, and a relentless disciplinary apparatus, ensuring on the one hand that Greeces classical past remains ever present and, on the other, that it is only put to the appropriate uses. These developments have been duly explored in the last twenty five years or so by a number of scholars including Eli Skopetea, Gregory Jusdanis, Dimitris Tziovas, Artemis Leontis, Stathis Gourgouris, Michael Herzfeld, Robert Peckham, and Yannis Hamilakis.

Six years ago, at a conference we organized with Dimitris Damaskos in Athens, we attempted to chart this notion of a Greek singular antiquity and its contribution to a number of discourses that have proved essential for the construction of cultural and social identities in contemporary Greece from the narrative of a continuous, uninterrupted Greek history, to the nationalist and exeptionalist rhetoric of the Greek mainstream and the essentialist readings of Greekness that continue to permeate the countrys intellectual, political, and social life to the present day.1 There are many instances of this uneasy relationship between contemporary Greece and classical Hellas to be cited; and most have been: from the scandal,

D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in 20th-c. Greece. Athens 2008 (Benaki). 1

back in 1959, of Karolos Kouns take on The Birds by Aristophanes, banned by the state because it both distorted the meaning of the classical text and (with one stone as it were...) insulted the religious sentiment of the people to the public furore in 2008, to a great extent orchestrated by the Press, when Jennifer Lopez was photographed for promotional purposes by state permission nonetheless at the Acropolis. Classical Hellas thus emerges as a site of conflict from these episodes of contemporary Greek cultural history, as the bone of contention between rightful owners and sly usurpers, and as Greeces national treasure as well as its passport to modernity.

Quite unsurprisingly, the stereotypical notion of Greece as the cradle of western civilization in view of its (supposed) classical genealogy is turned on its head by the countrys critics, especially since the onset of the more recent financial crisis. For as one can easily observe, in the case of the Greek crisis, the crisis itself is never discussed as a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but as a rather unfortunate, albeit inevitable symptom of the countrys inherent structural and cultural deficiencies from political clientelism to a chronic lack of enthusiasm towards modernity. Ever since its establishment as a modern nation-state, Greece has been invariably accused of belated, incomplete, and at any rate inadequate modernity, and a number of cultural stereotypes such as that of the lazy, backward-looking and unrefined Oriental have been employed in order to re-enforce precisely that notion. Inevitably, Greeces current under-achievement is projected against the backdrop of neoclassicism: a system of thought based exactly on the Orientalist, racist, and sexist notions of a white, male, superior culture in triumph over any cultural misfit. And it is precisely as misfits that the Greeks are being castigated by their friends and foes alike, with classical imagery been invariably used to underline their cultural shortcomings: ancient Greek columns and statues, marble temples and clay vases, Zeuses, Venuses, and Discoboloi, all symbols of a (supposedly) once glorious past, are now deployed in order to suggest the countrys modern predicament, as the Greeks themselves are branded cheats, thieves, and
2

sleaze-bums, rather unfit to be true members of the European family and, at any rate, thoroughly unmodern.2 And of course, the Acropolis, deployed as a geographical as well as cultural landmark, and in effect as a yardstick by means of which to establish the countrys compliance with its neoclassical promise a task contemporary Greece seems to be failing on all counts. So what else is new? Contemporary Greeks have been compared to their phantasmic forefathers ever since Greece was rediscovered as a land of classical ... sites and wonders. As a sad relic of departed worth, we all remember, was the archaeologically informed simile used by Lord Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II, Stanza 2) in 1812; in the words of Michael Herzfeld: the romantic love of ruins converts into visual images the sense of a Hellas irrevocably fallen beyond any hope of redemption.3

http://consumingantiquity.blogspot.gr/2012/03/greece-crisis-years-i.html http://culanth.org/?q=node/432 (20 Feb. 2013).

3

(20 Feb. 2013). Greece and its critics:

M. Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass. Critical ethnography in the margins of Europe. Cambridge 1987 (CUP), 21. 3

And it is precisely this deployment of visual images that, quite mercilessly, drives the sour point home: for contemporary Greece has invested a lot of its effort, its own as well as other peoples money, a lot of its cultural energy, as it were, during the last 200 years in order to appear worthy of its classical heritage. Restoration, enhancement, and promotion of its ruins glorious rather than sad have been thought to guarantee, besides the increase of tourism, the re*habilitation of the country as a great modern nation. Can we really afford to lose the copyright to our antiquities? The Greek state, for one, is systematically trying to remind both its people at home and its critics abroad that it alone is the rightful owner of the classical copyright. I must say I do feel for those unfortunate troika members who have to deal with the Greek governments attempts to rationalize its own administration, if only because they have to deal with all those funny classical names and mythologically correct innuendoes: Callicrates, for example, is the code name for the states plan to reform local government at municipal level, attempting the radical reduction in the number of municipalities in the country (from about 6,000 in the 1990s to 325 in 2012 mostly based on a compulsory merger strategy); Athena, on the other hand, is the code name for the Ministry of Educations plan to merge, again on a dont-take-no-for-an-answer basis, the countrys Higher Education Institutions by the end of this academic year (a plan that was only announced two weeks ago and still has not been outlined in any detail). Now, why would anyone choose the lesser half of the duo that gave us the Parthenon Callicrates rather than his much more prominent partner, Ictinus is anybodys guess, though I feel the choice may be due to the formers name sounding a lot sexier (in Greek and in English). Such odd choices may hide a certain irony or a slight frustration at a past that does not exactly perform the way we want it to: as any man who served in the Greek army in the 1980s and the 1990s would remember, the grand, annual military-training exercise was called Parmenion, bizarrely named after one of Alexander the Greats generals, murdered by him on rather unfounded suspicions of treason.

However, with Athena, I do find the problem is serious indeed: why give the name of the Greek goddess of wisdom to a reform plan put together in a rather wishy-washy way, simply in order to close down those university departments that do not seem to fit the bill of a market-oriented higher education (a practice we seem to have imported from elsewhere, notably the United Kingdom) and at the same time discipline the academic community at large, brought to its knees as it is owing to three consecutive years of budget and salary cuts? For the same reasons, I guess, that the Greek Ministry for Public Order would choose to call
4

its thousands of random arrests of Asian- or African looking men and women thought to loiter the streets of Athens (including a few unsuspecting tourists),4 and subsequent incarceration of those without proper immigration papers, the Xenios Zeus operation, named that is after the Hospitable Zeus of the ancients, protecting the traveller and the visitor to any Greek city: as a blatant affirmation of the inherently Eurocentric, discriminatory, and oppressive nature of the classical antiquity narrative. As Yannis Hamilakis observed in the London Review of Books last August, calling the operation Xenios Zeus is an appeal to classical authority, part of an attempt to assert a perceived difference between western civilisation and oriental barbarity going all the way back to Ancient Greece.5 According to the authorities, almost 77,000 people have been arrested so far (mostly on the grounds of their appearance), but only 6% of these were found not in possession of the appropriate papers which would sound like a waste of time and money, if the aim of this whole exercise was truly to rid Athens of crime. As far as illegal immigration is concerned, Greece seems to cast itself in the role of the easternmost European bastion,

4
5

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20958353 (20 February 2013). http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/08/08/yannis-hamilakis/hospitable-zeus/ (20

February 2013).

protecting the holly grounds of western civilization against the uncivilized hoards of unwashed infidels. A buffer zone, as Michael Herzfeld has called it, begging for a bit-part in the neoclassical project, first deployed in order to colonize Greeces past, then in order to re-configure its present. It seems, therefore, that with projects such as Xenios Zeus, classical antiquity is put to its appropriate uses. As has been acutely pointed out, with actions such as Xenios Zeus and its surrounding rhetoric, the government wants to occupy the same rhetorical ground as the most extreme and openly xenophobic groups in Greek society. Classical antiquity is very popular with such groups, as I was able to discuss in a recent paper, dedicated to the re-enactment of ancient Greek ways of life, mostly warfare and (invented) religious rituals whose technologies of bio-power are employed in counter-hegemonic fashion: their repeated performances, canonized and controlled, constitute a new kind of Greek temporality: this make-believe antiquity [...] involves both the participants and their audience in the construction of Greece as a site of memory where Hellas is alive and well, at the same time enforcing onto the bodies of its subjects this new version of an ever-present past.6

Such exercises in bio-power, however, are sometimes to be found even where they are least expected: on February 17, 2012, two armed men wearing Halloween masks raided the Museum for the History of the Olympic Games at Olympia, tied up and gagged the only guard on duty, smashed display cases with hammers, and run off with 77 bronze, clay, and gold artefacts. Although a spokesperson for the Greek Ministry of Culture claimed that these were pieces of no particular archaeological value, the likes of which one can find by the thousands in our museums and that in any case only one of the stolen artefacts, a ring, was made of gold,7 the Mayor of Olympia was both devastated and critical towards the central authorities: The level of security is indeed lacking he said. These are treasures. A piece of world heritage has been lost [...]. I think (Greek authorities) should have been more mindful and the security should have been more serious.8 In the space of less than a month, on March 14, the union of archaeologists working for the Greek State, somewhat misleadingly called Greek Archaeologists Union, launched an international campaign ostensibly for the protection of Greek cultural heritage, though in fact designed as a political denouncement of
6 7

http://www.academia.edu/2393588/The_glory_that_was_not_embodying_the_classical_in_contemporary_Greece (20 Feb. http://amantomatimou.wordpress.com/tag/%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B1-%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD% CE%B4%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%B7/ (20 Feb. 2013). 8 http://www.tovima.gr/vimagazino/views/article/?aid=481751 (20 Feb. 2013).

2013).

the government and the successive though hitherto phenomenally unsuccessful austerity packages it has imposed on its people since 2010 in an effort to restore Greeces fiscal balance.9 As a second bailout deal between Greece and the so called Troika [consisting of the EU, the ECB, and the IMF] was about to be ratified right about when the robbery took place, the Greeks found themselves facing the grim prospects of poverty, with the countrys potential exit of the Euro-zone and in effect the European Union itself (the by then notorious Grexit) really being the least of their worries.

The archaeologists union seemed aware of all this and managed to introduce Greeces cultural heritage into the debate. One of the campaigns most powerful moments was a short video filmed inside the National Museum in Athens.10 The film, only 57 seconds long, shows a little girl visiting the museum with her mother. As she wanders off, and strolls round the museum alone, the girl finds herself in front of Phrasikleia, a 6th c. BC marble statue of a maiden erected on her grave in Attica. Suddenly, we see the girl being kidnapped, only to
9

10

http://www.sea.org.gr/press/pages/viewpress.aspx?PressID=105 (20 Feb. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtQeYzuMa3s (20 Feb. 2013).

2013).

realise that in fact the victim of the abduction was our other daughter, the silent statue. The film concludes: there is no future without a past. Monuments have got no voice; you do. The idea was to broadcast this film in national television; however the Central Archaeological Council refused to allow this, fearing that the general public might think that Greek museums are unsafe places where kidnappings of children may occur. The fact that the archaeologists unions president is also a spokesperson for ANTARSYA, a leftist political party with an active presence in Greek politics, certainly did not help the films chances with the states traditionally conservative watchdogs. As a result, the archaeologists union campaign had to be confined to more traditional methods, such as the international launch of a series of multi-lingual posters carrying the same catchphrase, regarding the monuments ability to speak. At a press-conference, the unions president claimed that if the monuments had voice, they would describe what has happened in Greece [since 2010]; how a severe austerity package has been enforced using the global sovereign-debt crisis as a pretext and the IMF as its Trojan Horse; how austerity dismantles social cohesion and undermines the state of law; strangles the countrys dignity and Democracy itself; threatens the natural and cultural environment which are the Greek peoples inestimable property, while at the same time [...] illicit digs and theft of antiquities are rising alarmingly, research is underfunded, [...] and state archaeologists are facing massive layoffs.

Although the stolen antiquities have since been recovered, and the robbers arrested, these statements were well justified. The situation in Greece was already pretty grim when they were made, almost a year ago now, and has become even grimmer after yet another bailout agreement was effected last November. While state funding of archaeological research and heritage management is now next to negligible, unemployment in Greece has risen to unprecedented heights: calculated at 26% last October, it was expected to reach 30% by the end of last year; unemployment for the 18-24 age group has now reached a staggering 56,4%. As almost 1,5 million Greeks find themselves out of a job, the European Commission estimates that the probability for unemployed people in Greece to return to work has decreased from 25% on the outbreak of the crisis to 15% in 2013, owing to severe fiscal consolidation measures.11 So the archaeologists unions reaction was fair enough; but what does it say about the uses of classical heritage at a time of crisis? How can it help us put together a classics in a state of precarity, a precarious classics so to speak? The no voice campaign presents Greeces classical monuments as silent and helpless, relying on the initiative of others of us, real people in order to be preserved. Quite intriguingly, the unions press release replaces us, the public at large, with them, the 950 state archaeologists who appear to be resisting the Troika and the bailout agreements imposed on Greece and its people. In that, the union merely regurgitates the old rhetoric regarding the discovery and preservation of antiquities in Greece since the 19th c., and the objectives it was motivated by. As stated by Vassilios Petrakos, secretary general to the Archaeological Society in Athens, the aim was to link the young Greek state and the neo-Hellenes with the Classical Greek antiquity of which they, since they spoke the same tongue and inhabited the same land, were the direct heirs and agents; to defend the young nation and state against those who wished its demise; and to put an end to, or at least to reduce, the destruction of antiquities in liberated Greece by its own inhabitants, be they peasants or smugglers, as well as the foreign archaeophiles and antiques traders.12 Business as usual, therefore, for those underpaid civil servants defending the young nation; as well as for the deeply essentialist, highly romanticised rhetoric regarding the monuments voice or lack thereof. In the no voice clip, the little girl appears as the alter ego of the statue: losing one is like losing the other. It is all a clich of course; archaeologists and archaeophiles tend to view antiquities especially statues as living organisms: the same gimmick was used in Italy last December,
11 12

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-01022013-BP/EN/3-01022013-BP-EN.PDF (20

Feb. 2013).

Damaskos and Plantzos, A Singular Antiquity, 14. 9

when budget cuts threatened with closure the Italian Archaeological School in Athens.13 In the framework of Greek nationalism, however, such gestures cannot pass unnoticed. The idea that Greece is what it is because it possesses classical antiquities a heterotopia of ruins as it has been described by Artemis Leontis remains a fundamental component of Greek constituent ideology to the present day. And archaeology remains the provider of these ruins: ever since the days of Spyridon Zambelios in the 19th c., words signify objects, and objects have history. [...] the discovery of a stone bearing some phrase engraved upon it, a name or a date [...] sometimes suffices [...] to bear witness to the identity of an entire nation (thus in the words of one of Zambelios anonymous admirers).14 And it is to 19th c. ideas of environmental determinism and Romantic nationalism at large, that we owe the suggestion that classical statues are in fact our sons and daughters relying on us for their protection. Essentialist, exceptionalist, and downright racist, this kind of rhetoric helps create a new temporality for the nation, a kind of time-warp, whereby the past is collapsed into the present and the (anticipated) future in order to launch a new, national time continuum. This is precisely what generation after generation of modern Greeks have been taught at school since their childhood, by an educational system that tends to project a forged imagery for the national self onto the unified, continuous narrative of an all but eclipsed historical time. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of time (whereby a promised land of plenty is used as a means to turn the present into a neoliberal dystopia while everybody is looking elsewhere) is systematically deployed during the Greek crisis, resulting in the establishment of a new kind of aesthetics of precarity.15 In their no voice clip, the Greek archaeologists union cast their members and the rest of the countrys population in the role of the statues protectors, their fathers and mothers in fact. Though improvised, this is a sophisticated play with body- and identity politics. As Greeks, we have been brought up to behave as embodiments of a deeper, ancient self, aware of its history as well as its superiority. Besides serving as dutiful custodians to the heterotopic Neverland we claim contemporary Greece to be, we also act as living embodiments of our own classical past. Greekness is therefore perceived as a performance of national significance, a duty to ones origins, ones history, ones identity.
13 14

Feb. 2013). M. Herzfeld, Ours Once More. Folklore, ideology, and the making of Modern Greece. New York 1986 (Pella). 15 Cf. Dimitris Papanikolaous perceptive discussion of a Nea Demokratia tv ad during the 2012 election campaign: Unfollow 10 (October 2012), 34-39. 10

http://firmiamo.it/troppi-tagli--rischio-chiusura-della-saia/ (20

In fact, the no voice campaign justifies Greeces critics, employing classical heritage in order to belittle both the modern state and its citizens. Ostensibly focusing on the voice of the classical past and its remains, such schemes manage to render invisible the very materiality of the past they wish to praise. Greeces classical past then becomes voiceless matter, while the Greeks themselves are yet again conscripted to a state of perpetual archaeolatry. With the no voice campaign, the archaeologists union repeats a by now stereotypical trope whereby dissident groups within the Greek society claim ownership of certain aspects of the countrys past a statue, a site, a popular or popularized narrative in order to attack the central state. Artefacts such the so-called Keratea kouros,16 employed in posters advertising the violent reaction of the people of a certain region in Attika against decisions made by the central government, or the neo-classical copy of a classical bronze statue disguised as a rioter during the violent demonstrations that took place in down town Athens in the summer of 2011, are thus meant to inspire a justified reaction against the barbarous policies of an undemocratic, deeply corrupt state apparatus; be that as it may, these uses also confirm some of the most worn-off stereotypes in contemporary Greek thought. They attempt the inauguration of new hegemonic discourses, recycling the same old 19th c. materials: representation as a means of constructing and controlling the other; classics as an exclusionary ideology; the Eurocentric archive as a neo-imperialist, neo-colonialist tool.

16

http://www.academia.edu/1600831/The_kouros_of_Keratea_Constructing_subaltern_pasts_in_contemporary_Greece

(20 Feb.

2013). Cf. Dimitris Papanikolaous archive trouble: http://culanth.org/?q=node/446 (20 Feb. 2013). 11

12

So where does this leave us, modern Greeks? In this composite Hellenic heterotopia, this colourful scenery of sun, sea, and ruins constructed by generations upon generations of aesthetes and public intellectuals, novelists and movie-directors, poets and song-writers, modern Greeks are time and again asked to perform their own archaeolatric self: in fanciful processions, ostentatious parades or Bollywood-style movies, dressed (or rather undressed) in the bodies of the ancients, on their own or by the hundreds and the thousands, the Greeks of today perform their Greekness under the inspired (or so it would seem) direction of an elite of sorts, an upper class desperate to cash in on its invented classical pedigree. And this in order to suggest that the country that gave us democracy, the theatre, ostracism, cholesterol, catastrophe and pederasty is still inhabited and, despite its contracting economy, Greece is (still) alive. And, indeed: Greece is alive is the title of a video project launched only last December, featuring a bunch of half-naked boys singing and dancing in the scenery provided by classical and neoclassical Hellas.17 Although the video is subtitled boys version, its female counterpart has yet to appear. The sort-of-classically displayed male bodies in the video, occupy the space generated by the neoclassical project, as well as the spectacular vistas created by Dimitri Pikionis Hellenocentric modernism (a landscape so freely used since its creation in the 1950s that it has by now become naturalised as indigenous Athenian soil). Greece is alive, the ruins are still here, and the classical bodies are still available. And still pretty silent: as voiceless matter, subject to the international gaze, the boys in the video lip-synch call me maybe to Canadian pop-singer Carly Rae Jepsen trying to solicit the attention of any audience out there. In many respects, the call me maybe and the no voice videos are telling us exactly the same thing, and more or less in the same way too. I must admit, Im rather puzzled by this turn of events; and quite horrified, to say the least.

17

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW_d9NuBHBs (20

Feb. 2013). 13