Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

As a grammatical mode in which the subject remains inside the action, the middle voice has been said to unsettle binary distinctions between active/passive, or perpetrator/victim. This article revisits theorizations of the middle voice by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and others, and explores its potential in fostering alternative accounts of the contemporary Greek subject against the backdrop of popular discourses on the Greek ‘crisis’. The middle voice takes centre-stage in a currently popular Greek wall-writing featuring the word vasanizomai (‘I am in torment’) – a wall-writing that also plays an instrumental role in the recent novella by Sotiris Dimitriou Konta stin koilia/Close to the belly (2014). In the face of hegemonic discourses that narrativize the Greek crisis as krisis (judgement and distinction) between perpetrators and victims, vasanizomai signals a different kind of crisis: it unsettles dominant accounts of the Greek subject that either hold Greek people responsible for the crisis (e.g., the stereotype of the ‘lazy Greek’) or cast them as disempowered victims of a political system or of uncontrollable global forces. By enabling an agency grounded in the subject’s publicly shared vulnerability, vasanizomai de-centres the notion of the liberal ‘willing’ subject but also of the subject as fully determined by ideology. While a middle voice discourse harbours political pitfalls, the article lays out the conditions under which it could constitute a critical tool, able to accommodate voices of dispossessed individuals.

This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, I explore the ways that people’s interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveal that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community’s material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘family’ in the immigrant context.

This article undertakes a close examination of Nikos Kazantzakis’s first screenplay, Kokino Mandili/‘Red Handkerchief’ (1928), more than three-quarters of which is preserved in a typed manuscript at the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation in Iraklion, Crete. Kazantzakis wrote Kokino Mandili in French in Russia for the national film organization VUFKU, with the collaboration of Panait Istrati. The screenplay, which was never shot, is a Marxist narrative of the Greek Revolution of 1821. The examination of the story, plot and imagery of Kokino Mandili shows that Kazantzakis borrowed freely from major Soviet avant-garde films, primarily Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and October and Pudovkin’s Mother and The End of St. Petersburg. He altered facts and traditional beliefs about the 1821 revolution for ideological purposes, constructed scenes through a few characteristic details, and employed montage techniques to suggest rhythm and juxtapositions and to translate ideas into images. At the same time, Kazantzakis combined the borrowings from Soviet cinema with some idealistic conceptions, thus producing a mixed artwork that alluded to both Marxist and anti-rationalist theories. In addition to contributing to our appreciation of Kazantzakis’s debts to Soviet cinema and fusion of different traditions in expressing his world-view, Kokino Mandili helps us to identify some key sources of the imagery and rhythm of his subsequent, non-filmic works and reflect on the broader issue of cinema’s impact on his literary creations.

While most responses to contemporary Greek cultural production have referenced the ongoing economic and social crises, not as much attention has been paid directly to the art that has arisen directly out of such pressures. This article focuses on one small mode of cultural production, QR Code Poetry, an amalgam of graffiti, poetry and technology. Code Poetry comments on contemporary Greek social and political landscapes and is clearly indebted to larger global political and aesthetic movements as well. The brainchild of artists and poets Theodoros Papatheodorou and Ioannis Dimitriadis, Code Poetry is an art form that critiques neo-liberal ideology and its role in dismantling both the contemporary welfare state and any notion of a public commons. Code Poetry achieves these goals by making city space itself an integral component of the art object itself, suggesting that the relationship between the observer and the artwork must be a politicized one in order to produce any potential critique.

This article examines the integration of participatory journalism policies in the websites of Greek daily political and financial newspapers. A survey conducted in these websites revealed a very reluctant attitude towards tools and applications that involve users in the production of news. The study identified the adoption of few and limited user-generated content (UGC) initiatives, which mainly allow readers to interact with the journalists’ work after it has been published, rather than produce their own content or take part in the initial stages of news production process. When users can create their content, this process is regulated by rules set by the editors. Furthermore, it was found that Greek newspapers use a number of methods, such as moderation, registration and CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), in order to avoid problems caused by the coexistence of professional and amateur content and to ensure the quality of their websites.

Europe faces a refugee crisis of historic proportions. Greece has yet again become the principal site of an ever-unfolding humanitarian calamity. The refugee crisis has brought to the Aegean shores a motley crew of humanitarian activists, journalists, artists and photographers offering relief and documenting the plight of suffering populations fleeing war and destruction. Appeals, reports and photographs circulate across the globe on a daily basis. Borrowing Susan Sontag’s well known dictum, the essay offers a commentary on some key aspects of the visual economy of the refugee crisis and registers some preliminary thoughts on the relation between the current moment and past visual vocabularies of suffering and displacement.

To Prosopo Tou Penthous: I Ilektra Tou Sofokli Sto Keimeno Kai Tin Parastasi/The Face of Mourning: Sophocles’s Electra Between the text and the stage, Eleni Papazoglou (2014) Athina: Polis, 456 pp., ISBN: 9789604354344, p/bk, €22

Darwin’s Footprint: Cultural Perspectives on Evolution in Greece (1880–1930S), Ceu Press Studies on the History of Medicine, Volume vi (SERIES ED. MARIUS TURDA), Maria Zarimis (2015) Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 340 pp., ISBN: 9789633860779, h/bk, €45.00; ISBN: 9789633861004, p/bk, €27.00; ISSN: 20791119