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The Phenomenology of Hoods: Some Reflections on the 2008Violence in Greece

Marinos Pourgouris

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 28, Number 2, October2010, pp. 225-245 (Article)

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Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 225–245 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

225

The Phenomenology of Hoods: Some Re!ections on the 2008 Violence in Greece

Marinos Pourgouris

Abstract

The 2008 Greek riots were dramatized as a discourse of phainesthai: the violence that describes them manifested itself in the proliferation of a number of interrelated constructs, such as apháneia, diapháneia, apokálypsis, kálypsis, koukoulofóroi, and gnostoí-ágnostoi. Much of the discussion here focuses on the function of the hood ( koukoúla) and, more speci!cally, the implementation of a law in Greece to outlaw hoods during demonstrations. Such phenomenological exploration opens up a space where the relationship between (in)visibility and violence can be examined in the framework of what Slavoj "i#ek calls “objective violence.” Against the background of a wider theoretical discussion on the ethics of violence (Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Critchley, "i#ek), the 2008 events are also considered in relation to the French riots of 2005 in an attempt to map out their revelatory force: i.e. the violence and the tensions they revealed.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!

Pablo Neruda

226 Marinos Pourgouris

Violence: objective, subjective, academic

When a literary critic takes on the subject of popular riots, it follows that a number of apologies are in order.1 First, because they appear to be stepping in a territory that is assumed to be the exclusive preroga-tive of anthropology, sociology, political science, history, psychology, or even economics. In short, literary criticism, or continental philosophy for that matter, can neither speak scienti!cally nor offer objective truths. Though we could preface such explorations by investigating this tendency, as Foucault did, of the unchallenged perception of science-as-legitimization, there is hardly a need, I believe, to justify such analysis. The compartmentalization, or division, of knowledge into prescribed disciplines is a modern phenomenon that has followed a similar path to the one described by Karl Marx in his description of the division of labor. What such division perpetuates is, !rst, the lamentable split between “intellectual and material activity” or, better yet, between aesthetics and praxis and, second, the alienation of scholars who are now thought to belong to precise disciplines and, thus, can only speak a certain kind of discourse. To paraphrase Marx: as soon as knowledge is distributed, each scholar has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity forced upon him and from which he cannot escape (Marx 1983:177).2

A second more urgent problem in undertaking such endeavors is the apparent split between the event itself—an event which, in the case of the December 2008 riots in Greece, was initiated by the brutal execution of a 15-year-old-student by the police, and which resulted in many injuries as well as the destruction of dozens of stores in downtown Athens—and the attempt to make sense of what happened in an academic forum. As Costas Douzinas has argued, part of the “incomprehensibility” ascribed to these events is the fact that they were turned by anxious commentators “from a usual protest by students or workers into something new which sublates, both retains the characteristics of urban resistance and politics, and overtakes them radically changing the situation” (Douzinas 2010). Such overtaking—such capital ization we might add—naturally seems hubristic. One is hardly surprised, then, by the customary apologies that prefaced many scholarly discussions on the subject. We are also reminded here of Harold Pinter’s memorable Nobel Prize lecture, where he splits his exploration of “Truth” into two distinct discussions: one on Art and one on Politics. For Literature, he argued, truth is a relative and subjec-tive concept; in Politics, truth must be lucid and lead to accountability. Faced with the disparity between aesthetics, metaphysics, phenomenol-ogy, or poetry on the one hand, and murder on the other, we can only ask for a “permission to narrate.”3 What we are confronted with here is

227The Phenomenology of Hoods

the violence that describes the transposition of the Act to Logos. The academician, then, is confronted with the opposite of what Lacan calls passage a l’acte: instead of a “passage to the act,” we are dealing with a passage, or regression, from the praxis to logos. If the passage to act describes the violent dissolution of the symbolic network, the passage from the act to the logos is essentially the attempt to reintegrate the event—après-coup—into a network of signi!cation and meaning. And we recognize that by reversing the process we are unable to account for the very violence we set out to expose. We apologize for assuming that we can speak on behalf of the subject in question; for the audacity of believing that we can “deconstruct” such an explosive event; for writing about it from a safe distance and for even constructing its ideological parameters; for the implicit postulation that we know anything worth saying about the violent reactions of the youth.

In the spirit of Pinter, I should state from the outset what I consider to be obvious facts, and clarify the trajectory that my own commentary follows in discussing the 2008 riots. On 6 December 2008, Alexis Grig-oropoulos, a 15-year-old student, was shot and killed by Epaminondas Korkoneas, a police guard in the district of Exarcheia in Athens. In the immediate hours and for several days following the shooting, protests and demonstrations erupted, !rst in Athens and then in almost all major cities in Greece, that often turned into violent confrontations between the police and the protesters (most of whom were relatively young). These demonstrations continued well into January (2009) and they resulted in the burning of dozens of stores in downtown Athens and the injury or arrest of dozens of protesters by the police. The event also took an international dimension when demonstrations of solidarity to the youth of Greece were organized in Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

What I hope that this essay will add to the many analyses of this event is a more phenomenological and systemic critique that will not concentrate on assigning culpability or even looking for the historical roots of rioting in Greece. In fact, as will become clear in the discussion that follows, I am approaching the event outside traditional historical discourse and more along the lines of its manifestation as an act—an “acting out” of sorts that can only become visible if we remove those distracting elements that persist to examine the subjective manifestation of violence. As Slavoj "i#ek argues (following Alain Badiou), subjective violence names the visible perpetrators of a violent act: a Hitler, a Saddam Hussein, a Stalin, etc. Objective violence, on the other hand, looks for that which is obfuscated by our historical convictions or even our senti-mental readings that naturally and unavoidably tend to empathize with


the victims. As such, objective violence aims to make visible, as much as possible, the systemic structures that might be imperceptible to the perpetrator and the victim alike. "i#ek writes:

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. (2008:2)

To clarify my own reading, then, I will not concentrate on the question of what caused the riots but rather on how they appear as an event and the way in which this visible subjective violence unfolded against the background of a less apparent objective violence. In doing so, my aim is to make more evident—that is, more phenomenological—another system of associations that link the subject to quite a different conceptual network or grouping. I use the term “phenomenology” here as a way to frame this discussion as an examination of that which appears (phainesthai) or, better, that which is essentially experienced as a revelatory phenomenon (an apokálypsis) beyond its historical signi!cance. The discussion will thus focus on the proliferation of the term koukoulofóroi (hooded) dur-ing the unrest and its correlation with a number of comparable terms that are persistently used in Greek politics and society, and that point to the tension between visibility and invisibility: diapháneia (transparency), apháneia (invisibility), kálypsis (concealment), apokálypsis (revelation) and gnostoí-ágnostoi (the known-unknowns).

A third clari!cation, or apology, concerns my focus on the mask or the hood. In examining the phenomenology of the hood, I am not sug-gesting that most of the protesters were in fact covered. Such assertion would be plainly wrong. But it would be equally wrong to assume that these “hooded” young men or women constitute an exception to the otherwise “normal” state of protest. To see them as the cause of extreme violence would give us a reading of this violence as subjective; such a position might justify, for some, the protests as an exception, or it might even allow us to empathize with the victim(s), but it is also distracting and forecloses any further discussion on the subject. The ambivalence of the Greek public during the unrest was perhaps best expressed in the following way: we understand the anger of the youth and we empathize with their protests; but we cannot condone the actions of a handful of “known-unknown” extremists who burn, loot, and cover their faces behind a hood. What I argue instead is that it is precisely this excep-


tion that constitutes the rule. As Walter Benjamin writes, and Agamben further elucidates, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Benjamin 1969:257 and Agamben 2005:57–59). In the act of covering up, these few “known-unknowns” unwittingly unveiled the violent force of a spectacle that was always already present in the systemic shortcom-ings of both the political and the social structure in Greece.

Revelation/revealability

In his 1994 lecture “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Jacques Derrida made a number of playful semantic associations to the word “phos” (light): “Light (phos), wherever this arché commands or begins discourse and takes the initiative in general (phos, phainesthai, phantasma, hence spectre, etc.), as much in the discourse of philosophy as in the discourses of a revelation (Offenba-rung) or of a revealability (Offenbarkeit), of a possibility more originary than manifestation” (1998:6). Though Derrida’s lecture focused on the signi!cance of these concepts in the context of religion borrowing the terms revelation/revealability from Heidegger, I am interested here in the way an event appears—the way it reveals itself to us—against a back-ground that is marked by certain phenomenological associations that can only be understood as a spectacle or as an appearance. The 2008 Greek riots appeared as a revelation in the sense that they were both apocalyptic (i.e. the violence of the execution of a young student, the burning down of stores, the reported looting, the clashes between the police and the protesters, the suspension of law, etc.) and revelatory (i.e. they brought to the surface, yet again, social and political tensions, they unveiled a state of corruption and police brutality, etc.). This appear-ance (phainesthai) became manifest in the most prevalent image that accompanied news bulletins or newspaper articles at the time: on the one side, we saw young people whose faces were covered with hoods, motorcycle helmets, scarves etc. On the other side, we were confronted with similarly masked policemen who were covered with, or protected by, the of!cial riot gear of the State: helmets, gas masks, shields, batons, etc. In some cases—and this is corroborated by several photographs taken during the demonstrations—“hooded” individuals (presumably policemen in civilian clothes) worked alongside the police. The thin line that separated these two masked sides was that of the Law: i.e., the Policemen were masked with the authorization of the State, whereas the protesters were masked using personal items of concealment. I will return to the concept of the Law later in my analysis, since much of the


political discussion that followed the riots centered on the illegalization of the “hood” (koukoúla). For now, let us stay with this image of the two masked sides, the police and the rioters. When the rioters were faced with the police, what they were confronted with was not the entire history of Greece since the restoration of democracy, but rather a spectacle: televi-sion cameras and reporters on the one hand, and masked policemen on the other. Likewise, those who were watching the protesters (policemen, journalists, the public) were always seeing them through a lens or a !lter: television screens, camera lenses, or helmets. The protesters were being watched from a distance, as it were, and they came “face to face,” not with people’s faces, but with the always already objecti!ed State Law or technological apparatuses. Such an oblique, obstructed and mediated gaze points to the fact that, contrary to popular perceptions, the covered rioters were not merely hiding behind the anonymity of a mask—they were in fact revealing themselves to the State and to the media as masked. The hood or the mask, in other words, signi!es a revelation with all the apocalyptic violence that such an appearance might suggest.

The most common response of the riot police to the violence was the use of tear gas to disperse the protesters. Once again, the tension here is one between visibility and invisibility. Protesters that are not recogniz-able, that is to say they are not identi!able, also become unable, when exposed to tear gas, to see. They become both unseeing and unseen. What I mean, then, in arguing that the protesters revealed themselves to the State as masked, is that the issue which was acted out in these con-frontations was intrinsically linked to the discourse of phainesthai; that on a phenomenological level, the question was who gazes at what and how they are seeing the spectacle. Here again, the view is obstructed and distorted. Furthermore, what obstructs the view, in this case, is the forceful evocation of tears through the use of another technological apparatus. Another way of putting it is this: the protesters were emotionally upset and angry with the representatives of the state, the police, for the brutal murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos. Through the use of tear gas, the police essentially forced the protesters, who were, after all, on the brink of tears, to cry in order to obstruct their threatening gaze. Hyperbolic as it may sound, this argumentation simply aims, once again, to emphasize the appearance of the event as a spectacle where visibility and invisibility, seeing and not-seeing, being seen and being unseen, were reenacted in a number of interconnected ways.

Two more images conjure up and effectively capture both the appearance of the event as a spectacle and the tension between visibility and invisibility that was acted out during the riots. On the third day of the demonstrations, the Christmas tree which is traditionally decorated


and placed at Syntagma Square was torched. As the local and interna-tional media reported, after this event, the city authorities decided to re-decorate a new tree and they sent riot police to guard it. They sur-rounded it—dressed in full riot gear—and kept vigil as protesters gath-ered around them. In the context of what the youth largely perceived as a cover-up of murder, here was a much-too-visible—not to mention well-lighted—symbolic object of festive celebration; its burning signi!ed, perhaps, a spectacular smoldering of a symbol that was already meant to be a spectacle: to be seen, admired for its proportions, to evoke a certain emotion. But the State’s decision to re-decorate and re-place the tree on Syntagma Square is equally astounding in this context. In essence, it was an emblematic gesture, not so much indicating the State’s resistance to the uncontrolled violence, but one that signaled the desire for a return to normalcy and order. The paradox here, of course, is that normalcy appears as a provocation of symbolic violence and as a state-of-being that must be protected even if one must use violent means. Hence, this strange image of the protesters and the riot police gathering around the Christmas tree points to a staging of systemic violence as an event that is always measured against (to return to "i#ek’s description) “a zero level standard.”

One of the most controversial images of the riots was the photo-graph of two policemen, dressed in full riot gear, including gas masks. One of them aims at the protesters with a gun, and the other extends his index !nger imitating the standard symbolic hand/gun gesture. In other words, one of the policemen aims at the crowd with a real gun and the other aims representationaly or symbolically. The scene effectively captures the full force of the representational act itself. The real gun pointed at the crowd might reveal a number of con$icting states, from fear to anger, and the display of power. The virtual hand/gun, however, can only be understood as an act of symbolic violence par excellence. And it is all the more powerful as an act when we realize that the policeman who is making this gesture is carrying a real weapon. In effect, what his act is gesturing is, I desire to shoot you, even though I know I am not allowed to do so. Is this not precisely a blatant example of what Bourdieu means when he describes symbolic violence as “the hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible” (1977:196)? Real guns may kill, but symbolic guns terrorize.

So far, I have concentrated on three images that best capture, in my opinion, the phenomenology of violence as it was represented and staged during the Greek riots of 2008. I am situating these in a phenomenological discourse in order to outline what "i#ek calls systemic violence. All three images are examples of how the Greek riots were an externalization of


an ongoing violent interplay between visibility and invisibility. They are also commentaries on the relationship between representational and subjective violence. As I have already argued, such an approach allows us to explore more effectively the kind of violence that is structural, or systemic, by analyzing how the riots unfolded against the background of the tension inherent in such violent revelations.

(In)visibility and its vicissitudes

Apart from the term koukoulofóroi, a second term that was persistently used to describe the hooded youth was gnostoí-ágnostoi (known-unknowns), which we can also translate as the “usual unidenti!ed suspects.” Here too, we have a tension between visibility and invisibility, i.e., between our knowledge of the much-too-visible violent act and the invisibility of the perpetrators’ identity. These hooded men are “known” since their violent “kind” has appeared often enough for it to be recognized; they are “unknown” because their identity cannot be determined. What they represent is a type.

Like the term koukoulofóroi, the term gnostoí-ágnostoi succinctly cap-tures the externalization, or the manifestation, of a knowledge that was both known and unknown to Greek society. The 2005 riots in France make a good point of comparison. To begin with, like the Greek riots, they were sparked by the death of two young immigrants that the protest-ers attributed to police actions. They also brought to the surface social conditions that were largely known/unknown to the French public, namely, the deplorable state of immigrants living in France, and their ghettoization. Still, as "i#ek writes in the context of the looting in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the sobering effect of these riots was that people “had to acknowledge that such a thing can happen here as well” (2007b:304). What is shocking in this framework is not that a new and hitherto unknown truth is unveiled to us, but rather that we recognize, to a certain extent, what is present as a knowledge in a par-ticular systemic structure. In other words, the problems of clientalism, nepotism, of a slow moving bureaucracy or embezzlement, are standard “knowledge” in developed, developing, or underdeveloped societies alike. But, as Stathis Gourgouris notes, “if there is a mark distinguishing advanced (“developed”) capitalist societies, it is that such scandals have ceased to be experienced as scandals. They merely become the way of things” (1996:69). "i#ek’s “zero level standard” is increasingly rede!ned, in this framework, to compensate for the system’s excess. Until, that is, violent outbursts, such as the Greek riots of 2008, force us to actually face, or to recognize, that which we suspected all along. The shock value


in such recognitions is based on the foreknowledge of systemic violence which has something of the characteristics of ancient tragedy: what shocks us in the plight of Oedipus, the quintessential schizophrenic subject of imperialism/capitalism (as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it), is that his fate has been foretold; that even though he knew it all along, he still re-enacted it in the most violent and tragic way.

But what exactly did we know all along in the case of the 2008 Greek riots? In the immediate aftermath of the civil unrest, commenta-tors, journalists and intellectuals alike concentrated precisely on those uncomfortable social issues that the riots brought to the surface. The most pertinent subjects they focused on were: (a) the repeated and well-documented police brutality that had reached a climax with the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos; and (b) the economic conditions that marginalized the youth. Along these lines, yet another term was coined to describe the Greek youth: the generation of 600 Euro.4 Undoubtedly, these were, and still are, important social issues that urgently need to be addressed in Greece, particularly in light of the current economic crisis, but the question of whether these riots had a program, whether they were ideologically motivated, is a different question altogether. Apropos of the 2005 French riots and the New Orleans riots following Hurricane Katrina, "i#ek argues that these lacked the “positive utopian prospect” that characterized the May 1968 riots in Paris. He further claims that the aim of the 2005 French riots, which largely involved young Muslims, was more simple:

The Paris outbursts were thus not rooted in any kind of socio-economic protest, still less in an assertion of Islamic fundamentalism. One of the !rst sites to be burned was a mosque—which is why the Muslim religious bod-ies immediately condemned the violence. The riots were simply a direct effort to gain visibility. A social group which, although part of France and composed of French citizens, saw itself as excluded from the political and social space proper wanted to render its presence palpable to the general public. Their actions spoke for them: like it or not, we’re here, no matter how much you pretend not to see us. (2008:76–77)

As I have been arguing, in Greece too, the 2008 riots manifested them-selves as a discourse of visibility. The irony here, of course, is that the demand to be seen was paradoxically expressed in the context of conceal-ment. That is, the discourse around visibility became discernible behind hoods and unidenti!ed suspects. But is this not yet another example that points to the fact that these protesters revealed themselves to the State as masked? This is the same conundrum that describes the relationship between violence and visibility: the only way that this event could become


an event, that the media and the State could take notice, was in fact a violent one. And the only way that this violence could express itself was in the context of concealment. But what is markedly different in com-parison with the French riots of 2005 is that we cannot assign an easily identi!able social problem (i.e. immigration) as the de!nitive motive for this outburst of violence. Even though there were some reports of immigrants participating in the demonstrations against police brutality, such participation did not become part of the wider popular discourse on the riots. As in the case of the Muslim youth in France, here too the violence seemed to be indiscriminate. And as was widely reported in Greek media, many of the young demonstrators were, in fact, children of middle-class families; what they destroyed was not simply banks and of!cial state buildings, but also small businesses whose owners belonged to the same social class as their parents.

In 2010, a demonstration against the austerity measures announced by the government in order to cope with the economic crisis led to the death of three people, one of whom was pregnant, after a Molotov bomb was thrown in the bank where they worked. Politicians and the media alike reverted to the same language, describing hooded anarchists and the known-unknown terrorists as the instigators of this horrible crime. Here too, violence presented itself as indiscriminate: the symbolism of targeting of a major bank was rendered obsolete, or it was muted, by the actual death of three innocent civilians. This event led to a public outcry against the perpetrators of this act. Once again, we are faced with the same question: what is the aim of such violent acts? Can we relegate the blame to the actions of a small group of anarchists?

In her book On Violence, which is perhaps the most thorough study on violence and its relationship to power, Hannah Arendt reached a similar conundrum. What is the aim of violence, she asks, if it ends up replicating the same conditions that it sets out to confront? Her conclu-sion is even more pertinent today, when the post-1989 Left seems to have lost its ideological program, and when violence appears to be increasingly irrational and indiscriminate:

Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction, but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention. (1970:79)


Like "i#ek, Arendt too, then, emphasizes the fact that violence, !rst and foremost, serves as a dramatization of grievances; that is, violence or, more precisely, the passage to the act of violence, has a chie$y spec-tacular aim. The difference between their positions is that for "i#ek, the aimlessness of violence is the consequence of capitalism’s de-totalization of meaning: “its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of a truth-without-meaning, as the [Lacanian] ‘Real’ of the global market economy” (2007b:307). Capitalism, in other words, has foreclosed access to any “meaningful” reaction to the status quo since it is not “global” at the level of meaning: “it can accommodate itself to all civilizations from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist” (2006:181). For Arendt, the aimlessness of violence has always been inherent in its very essence; violence does not lead to revolution because, historically, it has only proven to lead either to a further empowering of Power (and "i#ek would certainly concede that, in the aftermath of the French Riots, the Right gained more power) or to a total negation of the supposed aims violence set out to achieve, as in the case of Stalinist Russia or Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.

Where does this leave us in connection with the Greek riots of 2008? As I have argued from the outset, a phenomenological reading of the riots does not provide us with solutions but it leads us to an understanding, a revelation of sorts, of what was revealed as such during this violent eruption. Conservative commentators in Greece and abroad stressed the fact that the riots were largely a result of the Greek State’s inability to deal with anarchists since the fall of the Junta in 1974. The taboo, in other words, of being associated with the state terror of the Generals’ Junta provided a fertile ground for the unchecked evolution of anarchist violent outbursts in Greek society. Liberal commentators, on the other hand, read the riots as a desperate cry for a much needed reform in Greek society: better training for policemen, dealing with the exclusion of young men and women from the social structure, etc. Many Leftist or liberal commentators went as far as naming the riots (Néa) Dekemvrianá—referring to the violent confrontations that took place in Greece in December 1944–1945 between Leftist and Right-wing organi-zations, the government, and British soldiers. In short, the reading of the riots was either a cultural reading in the spirit of here is what’s wrong with Greek society or attempts to import the historical meaning that the riots seemed to lack.

Apropos of the imposition of meaning on violence, one might be tempted to read the New Orleans and the French riots as proof of what Jameson calls “the tendential leveling of social identity generated by consumer society” (1993:37). In other words, one is tempted to say that these two violent outbursts are principally consequences of class divisions;


the only reason we read them as ethnic, cultural, or racial phenomena is because consumer society has broken all links that might suggest a more universal relationship, such as class struggle, between violent out-bursts. To put it simply, the French riots and the New Orleans unrest are more likely to be described in the context of immigration and race respectively rather than as manifestations of the more encompassing category of class struggle that would give them universal signi!cance. Although I would certainly agree that Marx’s re-reading of history along the lines of class struggle has been relegated to the background today, the problem with ascribing such meaning to the Greek riots is that the demonstrators themselves, as was widely reported, were children of middle-class families. If a phenomenological reading of the riots can teach us anything, it should be precisely this: ideology, in the current global economy, has been rendered totally incapacitated, and meaning can only be understood in the context of a revelation of the system’s limitations. It is not so much that the riots revealed the gap between two vastly different ideological positions, but that the in$icted violence revealed the fallacies of a system that operates as an automaton, i.e., itself participating in a network that keeps maneuvering and readapting to cope with the demands of global economy.

Paradoxically, one of the words that have dominated Greek political discourse since the restoration of democracy is diapháneia (transparency). The very repetition of the word, particularly during election campaigns, indicates something of a discomfort—a kind of unconscious realization on behalf of the State that a truth which amounts to a complete transparency is always foreclosed (that the system in which the State itself participates is beyond its control). The term diáphaneia is yet another manifestation of the discourse of phainesthai and it should be understood, in the case of the riots, in relation to its tension with its antonym, apháneia (conceal-ment, invisibility, oblivion or obscurity). The rioters indeed perceived themselves as aphaneís, lost to obscurity, metaphorically and literally. This was clearly not a revolution of the masses as some journalists tried to speculate. On the contrary, it was motivated mostly by high-school and college students whose !rst act was, naturally, to barricade themselves in schools (the known phenomenon of katálipsi in Greece).

What I am arguing here is that we must see the actions of the State, and its ever pursuing diapháneia, as intricately entangled with the position of the youth, not in terms of class, but in relation to the failure of achieving the much-desired transparency, or visibility, and of being confronted, once again, with the frustrating results of systemic obscurity. Was the almost total collapse of the Greek economy in 2010 not an equally


emphatic manifestation of the intricate connection between the continu-ous pursuit of transparency and the ever-present conditions of systemic concealment? One should hardly be surprised that the crisis caught the Greek State itself by surprise. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market becomes eerily relevant here: the indiscernible multi directional workings of the global economy are indeed “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [our] intention” (Smith 1902:160). This invisible hand is perceived as both sublime and natural. Thus, when we are faced with the images of masked protesters and policemen confront-ing one another, we are also faced with a con$ict between apháneia and diapháneia or, more precisely, between the apháneia of a system that renders everything under its auspices invisible, and the utopian desire for an absolute diapháneia.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man provides us with a poignant commen-tary on the symbiotic relationship between violence and revelation. When the nameless black protagonist of the novel decides to go underground in order to escape a discriminatory and repressive system, he designates himself as an “invisible man” (in fact, we could also call him aphanis). One day, the invisible man “accidentally” bumps into a tall blond white man who “perhaps because of the near darkness” actually saw him and called him an insulting name. The invisible man becomes so enraged that he beats him violently, almost killing him. Then, suddenly, he stops and becomes very amused:

Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man! (Ellison 1995:5)

This passage succeeds in both capturing succinctly the schizophrenic nature of irrational violence (with laughter and anger as alternating states) instigated against the background of the de-totalization of mean-ing (as "i#ek would have it), and revealing the interplay between (in)visibility and violence. In the aftermath of the riot’s devastation, we could say that the Greek State too was tested to the point of destruction by invisible men—the hooded and the known-unknowns—who, knowingly or unknowingly, were forced to go underground.


Visibility before the law

Article 167 of the Greek Penal Code, which has been in effect since 1976, stipulates that resistance (antístasis) to of!cers of the law is punishable by a one-year imprisonment. In cases where such resistance involves individuals who “cover or alter their characteristics,” the punishment is a two-year sentence (or more). But the law was hardly ever put into effect, and the presence of hoods in demonstrations in Greece has been a standard phenomenon, particularly since the 1980s. Given the rise of the trend among protesters to cover their faces, the then ruling New Democracy party attempted to pass a new and more speci!c law, in 2007, that would outlaw the “hood.” In the aftermath of the 2008 riots, the debate on the subject intensi!ed and in 2009, the law was eventually put into effect, becoming known as “Dendias Law” after the Minister of Justice Nikos Dendias who implemented it. When the socialist PASOK government took over in October 2009, it nulli!ed the law. After the death of three bank workers during the May 2010 demonstrations caused by a Molotov bomb thrown in a bank by hooded protesters, the debate on hoods and violence resurfaced once again.

The 2007 justi!cation was published under the heading “Measures to Protect Public Peace” (!"#$% &'% #( )'%*+,-'*( #(. /0'121'/3. 4'$31(.) and was signed by Aliki Giotopoulou-Marangopoulou, a professor of Law at Panteion University. Among other provisions, it stipulates the following:

Taking advantage of public gatherings and the peaceful demonstrations of citizens, persons who cover or alter their physical appearance (#% +5*'/, #05. 6%$%/#($'*#'/,), hiding behind the anonymity provided by such covering, are engaged in legally punishable and disciplinable acts, such as the unwar-ranted destruction of foreign property, including the destruction of public buildings . . . aggravated assault, robberies, etc. The frequent manifestation of this phenomenon and the intense social misconduct that describes the act of covering or altering facial characteristics dictates the implementation of measures by the State. Besides, it is the duty of the State to protect the constitutional right of people to gather freely which is undermined and hampered by the violence of those who are hooded (#21 /05/05-0+7$21) . . . In addition, it must be stressed that the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the State is obliged to protect the smooth conduct of demonstrations by citizens, free from agitators who attempt to obstruct them, and that every citizen must be able to demonstrate without the fear of becoming a victim of physical or other abuse in the hands of other demonstrators.5


What we are presented with in this justi!cation is the full force of the Bentham’s Panopticon that Foucault so memorably elucidates in his Discipline and Punish. The major effect of the Panopticon, Foucault tells us, is “to induce in the inmate [or the suspected perpetrator we might add] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the auto-matic functioning of power” (1995:201). What is permanent about this visibility is not only the fact that demonstrations should take place in open view of the State; it is also that they are accompanied by a plethora of technological apparatuses—from state installed cameras to news crews, photographers, journalists and even bystanders—that ensure, knowingly or unknowingly, this “automatic functioning of power.” Not surprisingly, during the height of the violent confrontations in the center of Athens, a camera was broadcasting 24/7 live footage from Syntagma Square; and, of course, during the 2008 attack on Gaza, we were presented with a similar permanent visibility of anticipatory destruction with live webcams positioned in various parts of the city under siege. And here lies the crux of Panopticism in the era of global capital: the “Benthamite physics of power” (Foucault 1995:209) have been internalized and present them-selves in the context of our desire to become voyeurs and participate in the surveillance apparatus. This is the same jouissance, as "i#ek has argued, that produced a plethora of destructive !lms that can be seen as forerunners of the 9/11 attacks.6 In the context of the discourse of phainesthai, the Law against hoods essentially stipulates what the State purportedly desires: absolute and complete transparency (diapháneia). The obvious problem here is the same as in Bentham’s Panopticon: the Law desires that “one is totally seen, without ever seeing.” And from the vantage point of the State, “one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault 1995:202). Such unidirectional gaze therefore ensures the discipline of people even as, or precisely because, they protest. Finally, the hood, or the invisibility it suggests, is linked to the crime a priori—covering one’s face becomes the criminal offense itself.

The most astounding argument in the justi!cation of the illegaliza-tion of “hoods” is the claim that it is a necessary step for the protection of protesters. In other words, what is striking here is the State’s paradoxical position of describing itself as the protector of demonstrators at the same time as it possesses the role of quenching or controlling the protest. These are, as Foucault tells us, the ethics of biopower, where even the right to dissent falls under the control of the State, which justi!es its actions as an attempt to protect life. What these lawmakers were upset with was that the “physical characteristics” of hooded rioters were not accessible to them: one can protest, in other words, as long as the State can see his or her face, as long as his or her identity is visible. What


emerges, then, in the attempt to implement this law is not simply the protection of the State’s panoptical technology of controlling the body by insisting on its visibility. Instead, what becomes plainly evident, besides the deep discomfort of the State with its failure to render its own work-ings transparent, is the attempt to control demonstrations by removing all their violent byproducts. Is this not the ultimate “democratic” and liberal fantasy that always envisions a non-violent reaction against the State? In this sense, the Law to protect demonstrators from demonstrators and to ensure the “smooth conduct of demonstrations by citizens” may be compared to the signs held by demonstrators in many American cities that read: honk if you are against the war!

At this point we are faced with an impasse: the deconstruction of Power’s inner workings seems to presuppose a certain justi!cation of violence in siding with the perpetrators or in endorsing their acts of vandalism, looting, burning, and even murder. To put it bluntly: one can either “honk against the war” or throw Molotov bombs. The recent death of the three bank workers in Athens brought the question of the ethics of violence to the foreground. The type of unidenti!ed “hooded” anarchists that protested the brutal execution of Alexis Grigoropoulos were now deemed responsible for the death of three innocent workers, including a pregnant woman. This choice, I believe, between the endorsement of violence and organized non-violent acts of protest, is the fundamental dilemma that also describes the ambivalence of the New Left today. If one considers the ideological confusion that characterizes the relation-ship between (Leftist) systemic critique and praxis in the post-1989 era, addressing this impasse has become particularly urgent.

Conclusion: ethical violence and violent ethics

Hannah Arendt was undoubtedly one of the !rst philosophers to note the shift in Leftist ideology from an emphasis on non-violence as a response to the proliferation of atomic weapons to the endorsement of violence as the only possible means of resistance. In her re$ections on violence, she criticizes such scholars as Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon, as “preachers of violence” and suggests that much of its “present glori!cation” is due to the “severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world” (Arendt 1970:83). But in her polemic against the valorization of violence, she also seems to reach an impasse as to the kind of non-violent position that systemic critique can take. Her analysis is more a phenomenological deconstruction that presents us with the reasons behind the rise of resistance by violent means: from bureaucracy to technology, science, and nationalism.


More recently, the debate on the ethics of violence reached its epitome in the caustic exchange between Slavoj "i#ek and the British philosopher Simon Critchley. In essence, their disagreement centered on the form that the opposition to the capitalist system should take. Arguing that the liberal democratic system is here to stay, Critchley suggested that resistance can only be effectively carried at a distance from it; resistance, in this context, means bombarding the state with in!nite demands, know-ing fully that it would be impossible to keep up with them. The desired effect of this in!nitely demanding politics of resistance is to hold the State accountable and to expose its fallacies. "i#ek’s most fundamental problem with Critchley’s argument is that it promotes a kind of anemic liberal resistance to the State that ends up endorsing and perpetuating its power. For him, the symbiotic relationship between power and resis-tance came to the fore in the demonstrations against the Iraq War; in the end, both sides—the protesters and the State—were satis!ed: “The protesters saved their beautiful souls”7 ("i#ek 2007a:7) in disagreeing with government policy and the government veri!ed its own liberalism and “democratic” function by arguing that such protests are the greatest proof of their tolerance towards dissenting opinion.

How can we understand this ideological impasse inherent in the relationship between violence, power, and resistance in the context of the December 2008 events in Greece and the more recent 2010 demonstra-tions? Several conclusions may be drawn in the aftermath of a violence that was both valorized and criticized for its indiscriminate destruction. First, that the event of the demonstrations in Athens, particularly in the framework of the intense emotions that it elicited, cannot be separated from the violence that accompanied it. In fact, it became an event pre-cisely because it was dramatized by violent means. In this sense, hooded rioters, the known/unknowns in this drama, cannot be considered either the exception or the violent minority: if we are to consider them as such, then we must necessarily add that they are the exception that con!rms the rule; that visibility, in other words, became manifested only in its excess. Second, the reasons behind this excess cannot be neglected. What "i#ek labels “systemic” violence, as well as the critique that exposes it, opens up a space where violence can be analyzed as a multi-directional cycle that is to be located in both sides of the spectrum: the arche and the anarchy. Third, if violence in the era of global capital is largely irrational, at a time when political structures function in ways often unbeknownst to govern-ments themselves, then it is hardly possible to rationalize this violence at the time of its inception. If rational violence is described as a systematic attack based on prescribed principles and aims, the problem with "i#ek’s critique is that it can only speak after the fact. It doesn’t guide events;


it merely deconstructs them (and why should it guide them?). Here I !nd Critchley’s position instructive. In his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “Critique of Violence,” he offers a number of conclusions that try to navigate between the obscure gap that separates the law from the praxis of opposition to it. The most signi!cant point that pertains to this discussion on the December 2008 Greek riots is this:

The question is, can a struggle against violence avoid the institution of vio-lence out of this very struggle? The only honest answer is to acknowledge that we do not know, we cannot be certain. Violence is in the very air we breath and its unforgiving and bloody political and legal logic is irrefut-able. . . . All that we have is the folly of a plumb-line of non-violence, a set of exceptional circumstances and a moral and political struggle, wrestling with the in!nite ethical demand. (Critchley 2008c:5)

For Critchley, and certainly for Arendt too, the valorization of violence is not only self-negating; it is also “endemic to fascism” (2008c:5). In this framework, the four deaths that tragically marked the violent demonstra-tions in Athens in 2008 and 2010 may equally point to a systemic reading of violence and expose the shortcomings of a crippled system. At the same time, however, we must also underline the fact that a phenomenologi-cal reading of these two events is by no means ethically comparable. As Douzinas has argued, and as I have attempted to emphasize in exploring the phenomenological appearance (phainesthai) of the event, the visibility that the 2008 young protesters sought amounted to a proclamation: “We, the nobodies, they seem to be saying, the schoolkids, the suffering Uni-versity students, the unemployed and unemployable, the generation that must survive on a salary of 600 euros, are everything. We, the apolitical, voiceless, indifferent nothings, are the only universal against those who have always interpreted their particular interests as universal” (Douzinas 2010). Excessive violence in this case was the aporia of an execution, a declaration that forced the state to confront the violence of its own Law. Lamentably, in trying to illegalize the wearing of hoods, the state clearly misread the message by responding to the question Can you see us? with We command that you take off the masks so that we can see you. The problem is, of course, that such a demand misses the point, since what the Greek State had already told the youth was: Put on the masks so that we can see you/us. In the case of the 2010 demonstrations, which led to the deaths of three people, the problem was not merely that violence was excessive. Violence, in fact, always is. The problem, rather, is that this violence was not simply “phatic,” to use Jacobson’s term, but “conative.” The phatic question “Can you see us?” became, in this case, an emphatic and pro-vocatively narcissistic statement: “You can’t see us!” What I hope we can


responsibly recognize, at this ethical juncture, is that we are no longer speaking of “known/unknowns,” at least in the phenomenological reading that I have outlined here. What we are speaking of are mere “unknowns” that triumphantly endorse state violence by presenting it with an alibi. And in doing so, they also corroborate Hannah Arendt’s worst suspicion that “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world” (Arendt 1970:80).

%&'() *)+,-&.+/0

NOTES

1 I should add a note on my use of the term “riots” in connection with the 2008 events in Greece. The reader will note that I use the terms “demonstration,” “event,” “civil unrest,” “protest,” and “riots” to describe them. At the 2009 Modern Greek Studies Association conference, organized by the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Neni Panourgia correctly noted that the term “riot” is already laden with connotations of power and that its discursive usage has been historically shaped by those who opposed or quelled them. Though I share her cautionary position, one should further add that there is a performative connotation in the colloquial use of the term “riot” which is intriguing in a phenomenological consideration of the December events. As the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, since the early twentieth century, the term is also theatrical, and may refer to “an uproariously successful performance or show, a ‘smash hit.’” Could we not say, in this sense, that what transpired in Greece was literally a smash hit of the most violent kind? (cf. “riot, n.4d” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 16 May 2010 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50207125>).

2 The much-celebrated interdisciplinarity of our times has supposedly emerged as a response to this intellectual division of labor. But one would simply have to read Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Hegel, or Kant, to see that this illustrious “inter” of disciplines is not a modern invention. It also seems unnecessary to stress that the entire Foucauldian project consists in exposing the genealogy of this dis-semination of knowledge into increasingly specialized disciplines.

3 The phrase is from Edward Said’s article “Permission to Narrate.” C.f. Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13.3 (Spring 1984):27–48.

4 The description refers to average monthly salary of young people in Greece, which is far below the European average.

5 The excerpt was translated by Marinos Pourgouris from the report (Aitiologikí Ékthesi) published in full on the website of the Greek Ministry of Justice. Greek Ministry of Justice, “8'#'0-0&'/3 9/:4*(” www.ministryofjustice.gr/!les/23-04-09-aitiologiki.pdf.

6 In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, "i#ek argues that the obsessive repetition by the media of the World Trade Center’s collapse is the !nest example of jouissance. In essence, “we were all forced to experience what ‘the compulsion to repeat’ and jouissance beyond the


pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again; the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest” (12). At the same time, the scenarios of total destruction were already the “object of fantasy” in Hollywood !lms; therefore, "i#ek writes, “America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (16).

7 The sardonic reference to these non-violent “beautiful souls” is not entirely without context: the trajectory of the term passes from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, to Hegel, and to Lacan, who writes that the “me [moi] of modern man . . . has taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize his very reason for being in the disorder he denounces in the world” (Lacan 2006:233). The implication, of course, is that these “beautiful souls” are not cognisant of their own reciprocal relationship to power, which they end up endorsing by detaching violence from protest.

REFERENCES CITED

Agamben, Giorgio2005 State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago

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Arendt, Hannah 1970 On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company.

Benjamin, Walter 1969 Illuminations: Essays and Re$ections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Knopf.

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2008b “Letters: Response to ‘Resistance is Surrender.’” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008:4–6.2008c “Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Zizek.” Naked Punch 11:3–6.

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Said, Edward 1984 “Permission to Narrate.” Journal of Palestine Studies 13.3:27–48.

Smith, Adam1902 The Wealth of Nations (Part II). New York: P.F. Collier and Son.

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"i#ek, Slavoj 2002 Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. 2006 The Paralax View. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2007a “Resistance is Surrender.” London Review of Books 29 (22):7. 2007b The Universal Exception. Edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London:

Continuum Books.2008 Violence: Six Sideways Re$ections. New York: Picador.

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