Ανησυχία. Μια καταγραφή του αυθόρμητου τον Δεκέμβριο του 2008, and: We Are An Image of the Future. The Greek Revolt of December 2008 (review)

The importance of historical events is often reflected in the extensive and long standing commentary that serves as their recognition, establishment, critical evaluation, analysis, or interrogation by contemporaries, but also reconceptualization, reiteration, and re-imagination by generations following. Most precious, however, especially as events become distant in time and entrenched all the more as a result of such commentary, is any documentation of primary evidence—not merely testimonial accounts by the historical actors, but even more, the presentation of actual materials embroiled in the action: pamphlets, posters, stencils, graffiti, photography, artwork, and media practices in the broadest sense. Even the most avid devotees of theoretical reflection cannot help but be awed by the presence of such raw historical traces. I am especially partial to the extraordinary posters from the Paris Commune, the pamphlets distributed by the rebelling soviets during the Kronstadt Uprising or the unprecedented and startling documents from Barcelona under anarchist governance, and I would give anything to have seen even one of the posters that Vladimir Mayakovsky designed and produced daily (numbered in the tens of thousands and posted anew everyday in the post offices of 34 towns), informing the Russian people how to cope with everyday concerns in revolutionary conditions (from food supply to typhus prevention) or offering advice against the kissing of icons—all poetic texts in perfect quatrains bearing both the mark of the Russian poetic tradition and Mayakovsky's own inimitable style, which had led Leon Trotsky to reprimand him for everywhere producing Mayakomorphism.

Especially precious, it seems to me, is raw historical evidence of spontaneous social action, where no guiding political mechanism holds the reins of a budding archive of decision making. The profoundly heterogeneous, plural, and multi-sited spontaneity of what we have come to identify as the December 2008 insurrection in Greece is arguably the most remarkable—and most difficult to theorize—dimension of what happened. It is what defies subsequent attempts by supporters and detractors alike to codify the historical evidence whether according to standard modes of allegedly "objective" social science or the pronouncements of ideological certainty—to my mind, the same thing.

My intellectual response to the events, in all honesty, remains one of puzzlement. I refused, at the time, to rush into the realm of public assessment, as I felt that all the analytical tools I have inherited were indeed ineffective. In retrospect, puzzlement honors the seriousness of the event, which isn't to say that, as intellectuals, we should not try genuinely to evaluate the significance of what happened. (For the best such efforts in English, see the texts of Neni Panourgia, Marinos Pourgouris, and Kostis Kornetis in this issue and of Andreas Kalyvas in the recent issue of Constellations.) This is not the venue for such an attempt on my part. However, I am convinced of one thing: what happened deserves to be called an insurrection and, as all insurrections in history, it was spontaneous and uncontrolled, an eruption of extraordinary rage against all and in demand of nothing—or, just as well (to borrow a bit from the poetic language of the actors), in demand of all and against all established order which amounts to nothing. It was an insurrection conducted initially by students of the lycée, who were eventually joined by a significant number of university students, immigrant undocumented workers, as well as by weathered anarchist groups and youth belonging to autonomist and freethinking circles of all kinds, politically, socially, and sexually. It is utterly misguided, however, to consider that autonomists and anarchists controlled the contours of the action in any way, and it goes without saying that the official parties on the Left were completely uninvolved—decidedly suspicious from the outset and, with few individual exceptions in the ranks, ultimately opposed to the movement in ways...