The following paper was presented for the seminars Absurd Me / Paralogiasme: Towards Cypriot Cultural Studies, January 2007.
The truth is a great value. However much mud is spread over it, it will always
grow out of it. (Vlastisei is the word used in Greek)
Since when do great values, like truth, possess the quality to naturally sprout, to
germinate and grow regardless to any artificial obstructions like mud as it is understood in the above narration disclose, expose and declare their significance as though regulated by their own nature and its greatness? One is left to assume from the aforesaid statement, that such values lead a life of their own, impermissible to historical pretexts and isolated from rhizomatic narratives; such principles, it seems, exist a priori, in advance of and with advantages over any type of soil, any fertilizers, or any cultivation methods. Agriculture arrives too late; the truth has already sprouted.
This delay of cultural criticism and theory to establish a discourse when it comes
to mass culture, is what enabled the language of myth to engulf those signs from mass culture and represent them as offsprings of nature. And precisely this deliberate state of the absentee that the intellect chose to take, gave the space to mass culture to evolve and germinate, naturally. Here, at this point where cultural criticism lacks and is lagged, is where Roland Barthes introduced himself to what was still then, in the 1950s when he was writing his short essays that would later comprise Mythologies in an orphanage, unchallenged and deprived from theoretical perceptions: the everyday and the semiology of mass culture. Here and now, still in delay, lacking and lagging, I call upon Barthes to adopt his introduction for our own starter; to begin with.
Lets begin with a short introduction into how the myth, according to Barthes,
functions: for the mythical language to be effective it needs to appropriate the signs from language and by language I do not only imply the spoken or the written but any
communicative form that being imagery, audio, history, advertising etc. - empty out their subject matter, their pretext, their history and use them anew as the empty signifiers for a second semiological system, namely the myth. This passage from the full sign to an empty signifier entails some specific alterations, on which the utility of a myth and its establishment as such is based. Lets take them one by one.
As long as the mythical language is dealing with an empty signifier, deprived of
its history, its previous connotations and pretexts, it has already amputated its subject of discourse. It is left with an inanimate mass, irrepresentable and ill represented. It is
therefore no coincidence that Barthes uses the term hemorrhage (aimorragia) to describe this process of modification. The new signifier is left without blood and consequently without circulation, It is in a frozen state, vulnerable to any injections, infections and inflations, and that is precisely the mythical languages task; in Barthes words myth is neither a lie nor a confession, its an inflexion. Myth, in order to relocate this disempowered signifier to its desired role, appropriates certain aspects of what has previously constituted its identity and elevates them, while it simultaneously subordinates others accordingly. The example that Barthes gives with Roman films is clearly indicative. Commenting on the use of fringes on every single actor playing in films that take place in Ancient Rome he ponders: what then is associated with these insistent fringes? And comes back straight away with a reply: Quite simply the label of Roman- ness. The general representativeness of the actors or the set design, can expand incomplete safety, cross the ocean and the centuries, merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans, thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.
Such an example proves, how the emphasis given by myth on elements like the
fringe, on fragments that embody totalities, can represent the aggregate beyond any
ambiguity, in a state of factual plausibility. These elements remain hoisted up the
flagpole of representativeness and bear the significations of the myth. But if, however, we assume that all myths need to be persuasive is factual plausibility, we then presuppose, that they lack actual factuality and are in need of factual simulations. At this new state that the myth has relocated the sign, it requires firm foundations to valorize its new narrative. This is precisely the point where myth calls upon nature to provide it with the safety net, the unambiguous framework in which myth can sprout and germinate beyond any ambivalence. When something is natural, it simply is full stop. This is perhaps the most significant alteration that myth forces its signifier to undergo, and transforms what has previously been the pretext and the history of the attacked sign to the nature of the new signification. When Barthes deconstructs the methodologies employed by advertising language commenting for example on the Citroen Déesse, or the washing powders what those products portray is not simply their quality to be fast, smooth in assemblage, or effective in cleaning but they are the very definition, by nature almost determined by god - of what speed is, what smoothness in design assemblage is, and what disinfestation is. As Barthes points out commenting on the smoothness of the juxtaposed elements of Citroen Déesse is as if it is a bequest from a more benign Nature. And to go back to the quote I began with, when Zacharias Koullias refers to truth as a great value that possesses the quality to grow what he is actually implying is not that truth can sprout naturally, but that naturallity is being signified by truth. Legend has it that there is nothing more natural than truth. Well, go and find it and to quote Tsioronis the Cyprus Samurai, on whom I will refer more extensively towards the end of my talk: Ies tin, Ien tin kanenas? (Have you seen it, has anyone else seen it deliberately with the Cypriot
accent of a Samurai). It seems as though Anoi3en I gi tziai ekatapien tin (translate)
and that connotes not only a naturalness, but a natural disaster schema.
Moving now to the local domain, adopting all the theory I have been mumbling
about until now and placing it against elements it can be utilized within the Cypriot
culture, allow me to expand on two simple examples that state propaganda has
manipulated to introduce its own myths. I will begin with the imagery used for the Den
3exnw series. For those who are not familiar Den 3exnw I do not forget, implying I
refuse to forget has been the motto signifying all that has been left behind, both
physical and symbolic, in the occupied areas of Cyprus in 1974, after the Turkish
invasion. The prototype of Den 3exnw was constructed the very morning of the second invasion, on August 14th, 1974 when Nikos Dimou juxtaposed the slogan with the, by now, very familiar image of the shape of Cyprus bleeding from North to South. From then on, this slogan will be present everywhere: from school classes to governmental buildings, and from car windscreens to the state channel (always beside the picture of Ethnarch Makarios III with the inscription ZEI he is still alive -, a dominant myth, to which I will get back later). I will stick to how the state television channel has manipulated the slogan, juxtaposing it with specific imagery from the occupied areas,with the intention of establishing a dominant myth on the general understanding of what is left (not what there is but what is left and that is the crucial point of the myth) beyond the line. During highly popular airtime often before or after the news still images from the occupied side of Cyprus were broadcasted, bearing the slogan Den 3exnw and the name of the location at the bottom. Nowhere, in these images, do we get a human presence. The places, that we / the viewers were meant to be familiar with in a certain way, are now desolated and in a state of ruination. There is nothing not to forget in what we have in our monitors since there is nothing we ever knew. On the contrary, what the myth makes the viewer not to forget is what he does not see, not necessarily what he has known, but what he is left to assume he has known via the process of binary elimination and by representing what he refuses to believe has happened. These are not only alienated, unfamiliar, and desolated places in the eyes of the viewer, that have no association with ones recollection, but these images are the very definition of desolation and alienation, this is the only way that ruins are being signified. Let us just note, without underestimating it, the popular phrase, Be aware not the end up in the Tourtsika that is always enunciated with a mixture of doubt, fear and irony. Those images do not present how the other is, but they are the only significations of how the other only is. A myth that of course collapsed when the borders opened in 2003, and accessibility to those places
was made possible beyond the representation of the state channel. A revelation took
place. People do actually live there. What has been inanimated for all these years, what has been frozen actually does circulates. Too bad for the myth-makers, that the so called real (I suppose in contrast to the virtual) is not accompanied by dramatic music or inscriptions.
My second example will be borrowed from education. It has to do with a
correlation that exists between heroism, brutality of death and the accomplishment of
freedom. I am referring to two specific cases; Athanasios Diakos being impaled and then put on the spit in 1821 or to make it more raw, allow me to borrow the terminology of history books, the skewing / to souvlisma bearing all the connotations of souvla or ovelias in a wider Hellenic context in the struggle against Ottoman repression, and Grigoris Afxentiou, the deputy leader of the military wing of E.O.K.A. who was burned alive in 1957 at he mountains of Machairas. The mythic context that these two heroes amongst others, but to make a long story short I have chosen the most vivid examples have been placed, in regards to their approach to death at the moment of its arrival and the brutal way they inevitably faced it elevates them to the state of martyrs. Of course, there is, with this perception of achieving liberation and freedom nothing unnatural or specifically local, since we are all aware that such methods are being employed by various nationalities or religious sectors even today. But it is precisely this promotion of nothing being unnatural about them by history books approved by the state that establishes the myth. The heroic deaths are being naturalized in an attempt to centralize and convey a singular narrative for the accomplishment of liberation and freedom. Those heroes died with the fiercest way possible so that, naturally and consequently we (the students) can enjoy the liberty we now have. Having said that though, one implies, that to be free and independent by nature, that being by birth, is an unnatural quality. Freedom is a value, a luxury that one can only be receive as the reward of brutal deaths, and even then the accomplishment of liberty is still under question if we take under consideration
the retrospective and prospective autoethnographic Hellenic view that since ever and forever we are being the subjects of suppression. Therefore, death is the natural and the only way to emancipation, and the more brutal the death is the more effective it is.
Indeed, a contradiction in terms; the natural way for the hero and the symbol of the hero to triumph and achieve his aim is to go against his nature. Unless you get burned or skewed, you will be in eternal slavery.
Of course I could carry on with various other examples of how and where mythic
language appears in Cypriot culture as lets say with the Green Line and the motto for
Nicosia The last divided capital in the world and how such a motto has been nurtured
as a tourist attraction, echoing the same ones used for the beaches of Ayia Napa or the mouflons of Akamas. Thanks to Nicosia there is still a divided capital in the world that one can visit imagine if there wasnt -, the sign and definition of dichotomy having
replaced Berlin in the post Cold War world. Nicosia monopolizes this concept and
promotes it as a natural heritage, almost as a natural beauty, and by dichotomy Nicosia is being defined. Or even one can expand on the mythical dimensions attributed to Makarios III heart, via his own language, [my heart beats for Cyprus], his death [a heart attack that has never been admitted but is being presented as his heart stop beating due to the intolerable burden of pain reflecting Cyprus privation] and the preservation of this heart as a symbol to guide our beat and political pace from then onwards, until very recently when it was buried with the rest of his body, acquiring new significations. I will however, leave these proposals behind as possible issues we get back to during the discussion, and leap to the last part of the talk; the subject of resisting mythical language. How is myth to be stripped naked, exposing its simulacrum of naturality and be appropriated within a critical discourse, received by ambiguity and released from the freezer? Barthes clearly declares that nothing can resist mythical language. It is, quoting Barthes extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside: for the very effort one makes in order to escape its stranglehold becomes in its turn the prey of myth: myth can always, as a last resort signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it. It appears, therefore, that no sign can escape the corruption brought by myth. Mythical language is in position to invade any aspect of mass culture, appropriate and redirect it towards its desired place utilizing it for its own sake. Where then does the place of the resistance lie? Where does the enterprise has to begin from, and via which scope to approach the mythical language in order to disempower it? That is the point where we actually need to call to arms myth itself. The best weapon against myth, Barthes asserts, is myth itself, is to mythify it in its turn and reconstitute it into new orbits. Displace it from myth and replace it into the domain of mythology. In fact, the only weapon against the myth is to mythify it perpetually, decentralize its subject matter thus depriving it of its singularity and its monopoly over nature-ness. Dispense further narratives that emit from the myth, thus constructing a third, a fourth or a fifth semiological system, or even to use a Deleuzian term, semiological systems to the nth power.
Such a task can be undertaken by the implications of fictiveness. By a genre of
literature that including, not only books, but films, drama, radio, television etc. - that
acts irresponsibly to either history or myth. A form of fiction that can absorb
significations, distort them, inflate them, deflate them, without any aim in particular other than the creation of multiple narratives and the dispersion of storylines, the animation of infertile, sterilized and singular myths, therefore providing cultural material for discourses disassociated from immobile signs. Such a genre, unfortunately is lacked andlagged within Cypriot mass culture. In order to spot out an effective example I had to step back into the 1980s. Perhaps the most fertile era in Cypriot cinema, which however materialized in video, and was made publicly available due to the wide accessibility to video players, and the high productivity of fictional movies which could be provided from the then popular video clubs alongside martial arts films with Bruce Lee, Greek slapstick, American war movies with Chuch Norris, Rambo and Steven Seagal, or Japanese anime dubbed to Greek. This context of a cultural pastiche encouraged local directors like Petros Hrakleous or Kostas Demetriou to incorporate such elements towards Cultural Cypriot Studies via the use of moving image. Allow me now to move to some samples from one of those videos, O tsioronis o Samurai (Tsioronis the Samurai), and I will afterwards argue on how this movie has achieved a mythification of already established local myths.
Clearly, Tsioronis the Samurai, is a simulation of Makarios, both in image and in
character. The Samurai, dressed in black as if the reincarnation of Makarios, or
Makarios in a sequel is simultaneously the voice of god, and the political leader twin
baroline as he admits the one that has come to redeem the people from their burdens and solve all the faults in the village. Legend has it that such has been the influence and the impact that Makarios had over the majority of the Cypriot population, being both the voice of the church and the head of the state, in short the redeeming ethnarch. However, such a personification is achieved via a completely foreign itinerary, disassociated from all the political, religious or localized connotations and by introducing a totally extrinsic signifier; that of the samurai. Precisely this is to follow myths pathways: appropriate the myths full sign and convert it to an empty signifier, deprived from any pretext. Once the release from the previous sign is achieved, the new figure of Tsioronis is in a position to receive the same historic facts i.e. the non-alignment agreement, Spyros Kyprianou, the metaphor of the Greek as a falling bomb referring to the 1974 coup etc. that Makarios went through and employ them in a mockery, without any obligation to reflect neither the real nor on the myth, in the same way that the myth is neither a confession nor a lie, as I have pointed out earlier. The inflation of the narrative with elements from Japanese martial arts, the pseudo-western soundtrack and the fragmented reference to local history mainly as a figure of speech, allows it to expand towards multiple trajectories and scatter any unified substantiality that the myth previously had under its capacity. Tsioronis o
Samurai, both the movie and the character, therefore. function as a hypertextual
trampoline, on which every jump of the video player head and clearly from its quality
there have been many supplies the material for critical discourse and marks the
departure of several myths I have only mentioned one from the freezer.
It seems, after all, that mass culture and cultural issues in general should not be
left in the hands of nature, neither in the preservative ice of the freezer. Culture and its myths should be boosted with fertilizers, agricultural methods, cooking techniques and washing powders. Truth or any other values, greater or lower, do not grow, naturally, and in fact the need not to grow. They need to be expanded, in order to keep things circulating and the discourse going on, or at least kick off.
