Pristupačnost
Dear colleagues,
it is our great pleasure to invite you all to prof. Sean Homer's lecture that will be held next Thursday (26.10.) at 15:30 in Room B. The title of the lecture is "The Greek Crisis: A Cultural Trauma in Becoming". Sean Homer is Professor of Film and Literature at the American University in Bulgaria, where he teaches courses in Film Criticism, Balkan Cinema, Modernism, Postmodern Literature and Psychoanalysis.
Cultural trauma, as Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues have formulated it, ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander et al 2004: 1). It is perhaps too early to say that the current economic crisis in Greece represents a cultural trauma in this but it certainly has the potential to become just such an event. As Ron Eyerman (2004) has argued, cultural trauma involves a struggle over the meaning of an event, how it is to be narrated. In the case of the Greek crisis, there is no consensus in the popular imaginary as to the origins of the crisis and, consequently, an emerging body of ‘crisis narratives’: the official narrative, both nationally and internationally, lays the blame for the crisis at the feet of a profligate Greek state and bloated public sector; amongst the wider public conspiracy theories abound; and the Left sees the crisis as externally determined. What is elided in these narratives is the traumatic kernel of the event itself, the public debt, namely the issue of the Greek state running up such a debt, officially 113% of GDP in 2009, and, more importantly, where the money went. High levels of sovereign debt is not a problem in and of-itself, as we can see in most advanced capitalist countries today, it is the servicing of the debt that is the issue. The debt, in the sense that I discuss it below, is not simply an economic issue but a manifestation of the failure of the Greek state, during metapolitefsi, the period of the restoration of democracy after the fall of the military junta in 1974. Indeed, the issue of the debt and whether or not the Greek state was bankrupt in 2009 brings into question the political settlement that has been in place since 1981, that is to say, the social pact that contemporary Greeks have taken as given. The debt, I suggest, is the traumatic core, the absent centre, around which the crisis narratives circle but cannot touch; this traumatic core is nothing less than the failure of metapolitefsi and as such manifests a cultural trauma in becoming.
