Based on eighteen months of fieldwork amongst anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups in Athens this thesis focuses on the December 2008 Greek revolt. It is an ethnographic exploration of collective self-organised practices in the public spaces of Athens and the occupied buildings of that period. It posits that these sets of processes were developed in the revolt as politics of subversion of the everyday life which in the thesis is considered both the site of alienation and emancipation. Based on Bourdieu, this study suggests that the everyday practices of subversion in radical politics are habitual dispositions of action that have been developed, based on past events which go as far back as the Greek civil war (1946-49), to establish a political living in the present, a process that is explored based on what Friedman calls ‘mythologisation' . Drawing on De Certeau, Lefebvre and Vaneigem it is argued that these collective dispositions are the productive factors of tactics of the subversion which emerge in the context of everyday situations defined by the particularities of public space, imagination and public memory.This suggests that the revolt was not an organised process to create a counter-hegemony but rather, a multitude of micro-processes which used everyday situations as sites of subversion. This argument is explored based on the notion of the social imaginary as defined by Taylor and Castoriadis. In this thesis imagination is considered to be constitutive of the politics of subversion. Fuelled by past events and habitual dispositions of actions radical political practices in the revolt were formative of an ontological process which imagines and explains the political as personal and the private as public. According to that interpretation the event of the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos generated sites where official power could be challenged, escaped and confronted by tactics of subversion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:572710 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Kallianos, Ioannis |
| Contributors | Dilley, Roy; Harris, Mark |
| Publisher | University of St Andrews |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3545 |
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