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Almost 60 years aft April 21, 1967, when a right-wing subject coup took spot successful Greece, establishing a seven-year dictatorship known arsenic the “Regime of the Colonels,” the treatment astir it returns with an strength that says much astir the contiguous than astir the past itself. Not due to the fact that we are rediscovering its violence – which ne'er ceased to beryllium the undisputed halfway of the seven-year acquisition – but due to the fact that the question arises arsenic to however we narrate its complexity today.
Was it a “dark” play oregon was it ultimately 1 where civilization “prospered?” The question seems logical, astatine archetypal glance, but successful world it is misleading, due to the fact that these are not two competing interpretations, but two arsenic inadequate simplifications.
Culture wasn’t suspended
The thought that there was taste beingness under the junta is neither caller nor subversive. The historiography of the past 30 years has shown successful each way that civilization is not mechanically suspended within an authoritarian regime. It transforms, folds, hints, and clashes with reality. From euphony and cinema to literature, publishing, youth civilization and the aesthetics of mundane life, the play 1970-73 has already been studied arsenic a tract of transformations and contradictions, and not arsenic a taste void. The supposed find of a forgotten “thriving” taste scenery says little astir however we really retrieve that epoch and much astir the modern request to conception supposedly corrective counter-narratives.
The indispensable question is not whether there was life, song, emotion oregon amusement during the dictatorship. It is however each of this was regulated within a authorities that was not contented with prohibiting things, but attempted to modulate the very skyline of mundane life. Dictatorships are not imposed lone by torture and censorship; they besides govern by organizing time, desire, “normality.” The junta invested arsenic successful symbolisms and celebrations successful stadiums arsenic it did successful television, electrical appliances, cars, user credit, vacations – successful each that singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos condensed with precision successful the lyrics of the 1969 τραγούδι “Theia Maro” (Aunt Maro): “Cheap television, refrigerators, installments, cars and construction.”
The past of mundane beingness is crucial, precisely due to the fact that it allows us to spot however authoritarianism is experienced successful its astir banal forms. Not to whitewash it, but to understand the way successful which societies unrecorded within constraints without ceasing to nutrient meaning. Even within the astir authoritarian regime, beingness remains messy, contradictory and unfastened to aggregate readings.
In Vassilis Maros’ documentary “The Bouzouki” (1973), for example, this is captured successful an astir perfect way: We watch aged rebetes (musicians progressive successful rebetiko music) playing successful student clubs, fashionable singers appearing successful clubs successful coastal Athens, and renown composer and bouzouki subordinate Vassilis Tsitsanis performing astatine the Hilton. Zembekiko music, the smashing of plates, the looks and gestures, constitute a dense archive of sociability, without ever transforming it into an representation of untroubled normality, due to the fact that each of this was fundamentally unfolding successful a state of surveillance; and due to the fact that the authoritarian structure not lone did not destruct the governmental magnitude of things, but really imposed it connected everything similar a chokehold.
The ‘hidden transcripts’
This is precisely where the governmental ambiguity of civilization lies. The aforesaid τραγούδι could mean antithetic things to antithetic audiences: for some an implied governmental allusion, for others simply entertainment. The aforesaid is true of theater oregon cinema, where a captious wide reads the governmental connection betwixt the lines, communicating successful an astir “magical way” with the creators, according to manager Theodoros Angelopoulos.
Social idiosyncratic James C. Scott’s theory of “hidden transcripts” is peculiarly utile here. Political connotations were not ever inherent successful the works themselves; they were activated lone for those who possessed the corresponding interpretive codes. Not due to the fact that each allusion constitutes resistance, but due to the fact that the governmental is produced done contexts, assumptions, communities of interpretation.
This is mislaid when the taste density of the play is detached from its governmental context, successful interpretations where the second functions simply arsenic a backdrop. The aggravated creativity of the epoch did not spring distant successful a humanities vacuum. It developed within an situation of censorship, surveillance, fearfulness and suffocating limits, which it tried to flooded by inventing caller ways of expression. But adjacent later, the comparative relaxation of restrictions and the adrenaline of changeless dialog with the limits of the authorities fueled an existential hunt for a way retired and survival strategies, alternatively than a substantial consciousness of idiosyncratic oregon creator liberation.
The contented is not to regenerate the acheronian representation of subject regularisation with a brighter one. It is to debar some conveniences: heroic simplification and ostentatious revision. The junta was a authorities of violence, which astatine the aforesaid clip attempted to signifier regular life, to subject aesthetics, to nutrient the illusion of prosperity and normality. On the different hand, the intentional enactment of radical who felt, suffered, fell successful love, dreamed and created unfolded within this structure, without needfully identifying with it.
If we want to understand this play historically, we indispensable analyse some simultaneously, arsenic indivisible aspects of the aforesaid condition. Because the seven-year junta, beyond its ex station facto taint, was a play of authoritarian powerfulness that sought to formal its imposition with variations of normality.
Kostis Kornetis is adjunct prof of modern past astatine the Autonomous University of Madrid and advisor to the Spanish authorities connected matters of humanities memory.
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