Minor Field, Major Territories: Dilemmas in Modernizing

Hellenism
Artemis Leontis

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, May 1990, pp. 35-63
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2010.0163

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264479/summary

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 Minor Field, Major Territories:
Dilemmas in Modernizing
Hellenism
Artemis Leontis

Questions of Modernization and Legitimation

When the Greek critic and author Yiorgos Theotokas set out in 1929
to consider the cultural potential of modern Hellenism, he undertook
to chart from his "airborne" perspective the position and expanse of
Greek in relation to contemporary European traditions. He thought
that it would be especially fruitful to make comparative judgments
regarding a social and political body whose situation was becoming
all the more dependent on prevailing trends from the West. For he
did not see the dilemma of modern Greeks as a choice between local
color and western sophistication, faith and nihilism, tradition and
modernization. The decision to enter the auspicious wasteland of
modernity had been made of itself in the course of events following
the Great War which had remapped the western landscape. Its after-
math for Greece had been cataclysmic: "Suddenly, from one day to
the next, we found ourselves in the confusion of the modern world,
beaten by the great winds of post-war Europe" (1988: 61). The ques-
tion now was not whether, but how to open up the cultural boundaries
of a "small and narrow-minded, self-absorbed provincial community,"
which was of itself making unmanagable strides to keep up with mod-
ern developments (εξÎ-λιξη του τόπου, 61). At issue was the modern-
ization of Hellenism.
Theotokas' liberal manifesto of free thinking, Ελεϕθεϕο Πνεϕμα,
was addressed to producers of a minor national culture seeking to
gain international recognition. When his literary circle of "broken,
withered, and lost" fellow travelers (1988: 63), the so-called "Gener-
ation of the 1930s," succeeded in crossing the boundaries of paro-
chialism and bringing Greece culturally into an interesting if oblique
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990.
35
 36 Artemis Leontis

alignment with the modern western world, some won broad acclaim.
Critics took an analogous step when they asked, as Zesimos Lorentzatos
did, "what can be the significance of Solomos—or Calvos and Cavafy
for that matter—for foreign literature and thought" (1980a: 18). Fo-
cusing on valued individual authors or works, they highlighted uni-
versal themes—for example, "an indefinite tone of spiritual anguish,
a sense of catastrophe harking back to some lost paradise" (1980a:
19)—which were conceived at the same time as uniquely Greek in
their manner of expression. Thus, intellectual modernization in the
work of D. Kapetanakis, A. Karandonis, L. Politis, G. Seferis, I. Sy-
koutris, V. Sarandaris, and D. Nikolareizis took the form of a mod-
ernistically aestheticized Hellenism.
The strength and success of this trend in Greece was such that
it influenced directly Greek criticism on all levels, ranging from the
journalistic to the academic. As scholars began to develop a field of
modern Greek literary criticism, this particular model of intellectual
modernization presented itself quite naturally as a critical paradigm.
It was as if the academic field faced a dilemma similar to that of authors
and public intellectuals in Greece concerning its "significance" in re-
lation to "foreign" disciplines, and decided to solve it in the same way.
A few decades later, modern Greek literary studies made its way into
American universities by embracing this successful paradigm. Its prin-
ciple scholarly task was to illuminate the relationship between indi-
vidual modern Greek authors and their esteemed ancient precursors,
or prove the relevance and competence of Greek authors compared
with canonical modern English, French, German, or North American
figures. A professional structure was raised to bring about institutional
recognition of its academic activities. Yet the residence of modern
Greek studies within North American universities remained unre-
solved. First, the institutional partnership of language and literature
programs with esteemed disciplines such as classical studies served to
reinforce the dependent standing of modern Greek. Second, the schol-
arly effort to trace the influence of classical, European or North Amer-
ican authors on individual Greek writers confirmed the derivative
status of the Greek works.
The time has come, therefore, to change angles. As academics
housed in North American universities, we need to take into account
transformations in the shape and expanse of our powerful hosts, which
follow from recent institutional and epistemological developments.
One finds several crucial shifts. The search for universals has been
largely discredited and replaced by descriptions of local specifity; in-
terest in great male, Anglo-American authors overshadowed by dis-
cussions of excluded minority figures; interpretations of single authors
 Minor Field, Major Territories 37

displaced by analyses of cultural politics; established canons scruti-

nized for their political agenda; and the positivist assumptions of
philology or formalism challenged by the skepticism of new histori-
cism. In sum, the languages of autonomous and text-oriented criticism
have given way to cultural theory and interdisciplinary analysis, now
the dominant discourses running across disciplinary boundaries.
In this developing context, a very interesting problem has been
raised concerning the value and importance of minor discourses. It
is therefore incumbant upon us to ask how we can make advantageous
the very minority of the field of modern Greek. This should now
become our collective priority. To achieve this, we need to reflect on
the specific situation of the field and its object of study, and focus on
its distinguishing features and its relationship to dominant cultures.
In fact, given the presupposition of contemporary cultural theories
that "the hegemonic function of aesthetic culture has largely been
superseded"1 we may even consider how a minor culture such as
modern Greek can be used to challenge the institutional boundaries
which have kept it marginal, and perhaps even transform the major
areas and constitutive categories of Humanistic studies.

Territory
One way of empowering the study of modern Greek culture
within the emerging constellation of power and knowledge involves,
first, considering the field in terms of theoretical concepts that are
under discussion across the disciplines of the humanities and social
sciences, and of special import for the case of modern Hellenism;
then, participating in these theoretical discussions through the specific
contributions, debates, and conflicts found in Greek political, social,
and aesthetic culture. In this paper, I want to suggest that the concept
of "territory" may be especially compelling, illuminating, and relevant
to modern Greek, both as a field and as an object of study. The issue
is itself raised immediately by the uncertain institutional placement
of the field. Whereas with many minor cultures there is little disagree-
ment about where their study can be accommodated in relation to
existing disciplinary boundaries (or to boundaries that may be gen-
erated according to existing formulae, such as geographical, linguistic,
or disciplinary relations), with modern Greek there is a continuous
discussion about disciplinary position in the academy, which has no
parallel in culture or area studies. Because of this perpetual difficulty,
the question of territory is felt in a direct and material sense.2
The term, "territory," appears both in contemporary theoretical
discussions about the social and political operations of identity, and
 38 Artemis Leontis

in Greek debates about national identity dating from the mid-19th

century. Within the broad movements of poststructuralism today,
there is a current which explores the possibilities of territory, alongside
the more pervasive term of desire, as the foundation for a project
which studies the construction of social bodies. In A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, for example, a major philosophical treatise
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, territory3 emerges as a force that
marks, organizes, and modifies a slice of the world and links it to a
particular group. Deleuze and Guattari develop the notion of territory
in their discussion of identity. They use "territory" and the derivative
terms of "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization" to explore
identity as of position rather than essence.4 In the process, they provide
a tool for "map-tracing" (1987: 15) or "cartography,"5 the critical task
of analyzing the symbolic delineations and ideological functions of
space, while seeking to find ways of renegotiating the boundaries of
that space and thus "movfing] between things" (1987: 25).
Territory is delineated by conceptual boundaries which confer
a spatial and temporal dimension, or "roots," to an aggregate of in-
dividuals. These ensure and regulate the coexistence of this "imagined
community"6 by way of a hierarchical "assemblage,"7 which may be
anything from a "standard" vernacular language to a juridical corpus,
a canon of venerated authors, or the bureaucratic dimension of a
State. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territory takes shape when
notions of identity cease to be functional and transitory, and acquire
temporal constancy and spatial range for a social body (1987: 315).
In relation to this body, it organizes and unifies, finding ways of
"hold[ing] heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be het-
erogeneous" (1987: 329), while representing these as homogeneous.
It does this by coordinating the interaction of various centers. The
result is that "heterogeneities that were formerly content to coexist
or succeed one another become bound up with one another through
the 'consolidation' of their coexistence and succession" (1987: 330).
One way of reorganizing heterogeneous functions and regroup-
ing heterogeneous forces so as to provide the semblance of homo-
geneity is to link the forces of a territory to an intense center. This
center may be physical (for example, a capital, cathedral, tomb of the
unknown soldier, museum), institutional (the nation, religion, medi-
cine, art), discursive (truth, origin, sexuality, knowledge, aesthetics),
or expressive (the classical, the romantic, the traditional, the popular).
In any one of these forms, the center's power "not only ensures and
regulates the coexistence of members of the same species by keeping
them apart, but makes possible the coexistence of a maximum number
of different species in the same milieu by specializing them" (1987:
 Minor Field, Major Territories 39

320). The example of the museum, in close relation to the institution

of art, the discourse of aesthetics, and the classical style, may provide
a useful example.8 The British Museum, for example, serves to isolate
and protect the Elgin Marbles from the milieu of the Athenian Acrop-
olis, while offering a new context for viewing them in a way that relates
them to the decoded fragments of other cultures which also may be
labeled classical. At the same time it serves to territorialize diverse
aspects of ancient Hellenism around the discourse of aesthetics and
the notion of autonomous art.
In the State apparatus of the nation-state,9 an example which is
also of relevance to my project, a people's "home" is staked out around
its capital and through the motif of the homogeneous national com-
munity. "Home' is made up of decoded fragments borrowed from a
variety of milieus, such as cities or towns,10 villages, monasteries, coun-
tryside, to which the state gives the value of property, and makes them
subject to taxation, verification by title, conscription, etc. It then
"makes the town resonate with the countryside" (1987: 433); that is
to say, it retains elements from other milieus, but decodes them, re-
moving them from their prior context and making their features
common to all. It thus "necessarily cuts off their relations with other
elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls
those relations" (1987: 433). Given a continuing intersection between
the milieu of the State, with its institutional or ideological motifs (for
example, national identity), its counterpoints (liberalism, popular sov-
ereignty), and its decoded milieus (premodern religious institutions,
unaccounted for ethnic communities), the state continually subordi-
nates a multiplicity of elements and diversity of expression, so as to
"form a vertical hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines
in a dimension of depth" (1987: 433).
I have mentioned that territory may develop consistency by way
of expressive qualities or "style," which organize qualified marks, such
as the "Hellenic," into motifs and counterpoints. It is important to
understand the power and operation of matters of expression for the
purposes of a discussion of Greek literary delineations of territory.
Although physical signposts, as well as the more abstract forces of
institutions and discourses, do much to mark a territory, Deleuze and
Guattari emphasize the importance of matters of expression in or-
ganizing space and giving it a "temporal constancy and spatial range,"
and claim that territory may be quite simply a "byproduct of art"
(1987: 316). One of the most fundamental preconditions for the de-
lineation of a territory is that "milieu components . . . cease to be
functional and become expressive" (1987: 315). Conceived on the level
of music, language, or image, a territory is formed when disparate
 40 Artemis Leontis

rhythms and functional movement are given the measurable quality

of expressiveness, or a style. In this case, "what defines the territory
is the emergence of matters of expression" (1987: 315), which develop
internal impulses and external circumstances through certain "sign-
posts" (1987: 319) that establish the interior and exterior points of a
territory. "Expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting
relations with one another; these 'express' the relation of the territory
they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and the exterior milieu
of circumstances" (1987: 317). The signature, like the flag, is the
constituting mark of a distinct domain. "One puts one's signature on
somethingjust as one plants one's flag on a piece of land" (1987: 316).
Territory may thus be marked by the symbolic gesture of planting a
flag, of course, but also by the signature of an author, the style of a
movement, or the canonization of a tradition which was previously in
flux—all of which signify critical distance and distinctiveness.
Territory, or topos, forms a crucial part of modern Greek debates
about national identity. In the rest of this paper, I will map out repre-
sentations of an ideal Hellenic topos as they appear in Greek texts from
the 19th and 20th centuries, raising a number of questions: how is a
cultural idea such as Hellenism marked as a territory; how does Hel-
lenism confer on an imagined group a sense of place; in what ways
is this space distinguished from the geographical territory of (modern)
Greece; what sort of history, hierarchy, teleology, language, and (most
important for Greek modernist authors) tradition is ascribed to it;
how does it regulate the coexistence of the assemblage of Greeks (for
example, through notions of a sovereign state, an independent nation,
or a superior culture); how does it consolidate a milieu, coexistence,
and succession for the heterogeneous populations of the Balkan pen-
insula and Hellenic diasporas; and finally, how do matters of ex-
pression and style acquire, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, a
"temporal constancy and spatial range"? My purpose is to show some
of the forces that came into play in constructing a modern territory
of Hellenism, where the mainland of Greece becomes elevated from
the location of a revenant nation to a site of origin transcending time
and place.
Before entering my discussion of the Greek material, however,
I should insert a note of explanation. By juxtaposing modern Greek
references (with their rhetorical perspicuity) to a theoretical discussion
of territory (with its metacritical opacity), I do not mean to imply that
Greek renderings of a topos are simple or naive. Although I uphold
the need for comparative analysis which scrutinizes minor local ex-
amples alongside major, comprehensive, and commanding theories
of the day, I wish to avoid any suggestion that the nonstandard Greek
 Minor Field, Major Territories 41

material is epistemologically unsophisticated as compared with an in-

volute poststructuralist analysis. On the contrary, I believe that the
case of Greece can offer a special dimension to the theoretical con-
ception of territory. For example, by studying the negotiation of ter-
ritory in Greece, one may discover how imaginative geography takes
specific forms and becomes subject to concrete political battles in the
context of nationalism. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari's dis-
cussion of territory provides a perspective which takes into account
local phenomena as leading elements in important social and political
processes. From this angle, it is possible to locate on the concrete,
microscopic level of the literary or critical text lines of power that
delimit a territory of Hellenism. At the same time one can plot the
flow of intensities between various conceptions of Hellenism, and
discover lines of flight where there are ruptures or changes in what
seems to be a predictable, determined, and fixed notion of national
identity, tradition, and history.

Territories of Hellenism
There is an exceptional degree to which territory and its ne-
gotiation has been basic to modern Greek history, politics, and culture.
A cornerstone of nationality, together with a people and its history,
territory is perceived as a precondition for the birth and development
of Greek civilization, as is evident in this passage from Ελληνικός
Πολιτισμός (Greek Culture), written in 1913 by the politician and
author, Ion Dragoumis: "Territory (topos), history, and people are
necessary for the birth of Culture. Each culture is born in a particular
fatherland (patrida), epoch, and nation (ethnos)" (1927b: 233-234). It
is assumed that the Greek nation can develop naturally and find self-
fulfillment only within its own territory, although the precise bound-
aries of this territory are then subject to endless debate. Hence the
tracing of national territory on an imaginary map of the Hellenic (as
distinguished from the Helladic) world becomes a central project and
point of contention in Greek politics and culture.
The Greek word topos11 may designate a space physically inhab-
ited or legitimately claimed by Greeks. Greek authors of the 20th
century use it to refer to an intimate and narrow space (τοϕτος o
μικϕοϕτσικος τόπος, "this little tiny territory," Psycharis 1978: 86; o
τόπος μας ο κλειστός, "our closed off territory," Seferis Mythistorema
I, line 1) in a familiar and possessive way (ο τόπος μας, "our territory,"
Theotokas 1988: 19 and 63). They treat this space as an organism
with a "spirit" (το πνεϕμα του τόπου μας, "the spirit of our territory,"
Pikionis 1985: 8), "feelings" (ο τόπος μας Î-ζησε χωϕίς γενναία και
 42 Artemis Leontis

ευγενικά συναισθήματα "our territory lived without brave and noble

feelings," Theotokas 1988: 63), and "life" of its own, which deserve
close study (είναι καλό και χϕήσιμο να μελετοϕμε τη ζωή του τόπου
μας, "it is good and useful thing to study the life of our territory,"
Theotokas 1988: 19). An earlier, more neutral appearance of the word
identifies a particular geographical space with its inhabitants, for ex-
ample, ο τόπος όπου το παλαιόν εκατοικοϕσαν οι Έλληνες, ("the
territory where Greeks dwelled in ancient times," Konstantas 1948:
71). In its recent, more frequently figurative use, topos is bestowed
with attributes that situate it above the din of everyday life: τόπος
υπεϕουϕάνιος ("transcendental territory," the title of a book by Stelios
Ramphos 1983), or τόπος στοιχειωμÎ-νος και μαγικός, τόπος χλοεϕός,
τόπος άτοπος ("haunted and magic territory, verdant territory, atopic
territory," Panousis 198912). For the past century, topos has been em-
ployed with a deceptively transparent, unmediated, self-evident re-
ferentiality. Indeed, under certain conditions, it becomes the pre-
ferred term, (alongside words for nation, people, race, fatherland,
kingdom, country: Î-θνος, λαός, γÎ-νος, φυλή, πατϕίδα, βασίλειο, χώϕα)
for invoking the self-presence of Hellenism.
During the formation and expansion of the modern Greek state,
foreign policy was devised to make the Kingdom of Greece fit the
imagined space of Hellenism, then revised to accommodate gains or
losses that proved the impossibility of the project; culture was created
to mark the boundaries between the Hellenic and non-Hellenic; cul-
tural battles were fought again and again over conflicting conceptions
of and claims over privileged territories; and ideas of race, tradition,
modernity, literature, and minority were debated regularly in terms
of a physically limited but intellectually and culturally expansive ter-
ritory of Hellenism. From Greece's political or cultural history, many
documents make evident the effort to stake out an ideal national
territory, affirm the attachment to a particular geographical expanse,
and develop a sense of place as a symbol of being and identity. In
some cases an ideal territory is rendered with real geographic markers,
although the frontiers of the actual space may remain vague; in others,
material space recedes like a Platonic shadow, while ideational territory
is illuminated. Here I will limit myself to a few major statements about
Greek national identity and tradition.
As an example of the first kind of geographic mapping, I will
discuss a well-known passage from the famous speech on the Megali
Idea given by Ioannis Kolettis before the Constituent Assembly. As
examples of imaginative geography which places culture and tradition
at the center of Hellenism, I will analyze passages from Psycharis,
Lorentzatos, Seferis, and Ramphos. Somewhere in between lies the
 Minor Field, Major Territories 43

work of Dragoumis, who, as both politician and author, brought to-

gether discussions of real and conceptual space, as well as proposals
for social-political and cultural reconstruction. These Greek examples
offer a wealth of material for analyzing the strategic functions and
political uses of identity, as manifest in discussions about national
space, as well as the circumstances that make these discussions op-
erable. A chronological view also reveals interesting changes in the
ways the imaginary boundaries of Hellenism are drawn, as the policy
of irredentism is replaced by one of containment and consolidation.
In his speech of 1844, the influential member of Parliament
Ioannis KoIettis made this notable declaration:

The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece. [Greece] constitutes only one

part, the smallest and poorest. A Greek is not only a man who lives
within this kingdom, but also one who lives in Jannina, in Salónica, in
Serres, in Adrianople, in Constantinople, in Smyrna, in Trebizond, in
Crete, in Samos, and in any land associated with Greek history or the
Greek race. . . . There are two main centres of Hellenism: Athens, the
capital of the Greek kingdom, [and] "The City," the dream and hope
of all Greeks, (quoted by Clogg 1979: 76)13

Kolettis is arguing here for the expansion of the physical boundaries

of the Greek state so as to fit a territory ideally associated with Hel-
lenism. The key to his irredentist vision and territorial aspirations is
found in the formula that Greece spans not only the places where
contemporary Greeks may now reside or the land legally under their
control, but "any land associated with Greek history or the Greek
race." Positing the non-identity of the Kingdom (basileio, kratos) and
the Nation (ethnos), the "Helladic" (the institutional borders of Hellas)
and the "Hellenic" (the land associated with a Nation's history), the
real and the ideal, Athens and Constantinople, Kolettis organizes and
unifies an ideal Hellenism as a unique social organism (a race) ex-
tending through space ("land") and time ("history"). He gives this
social body a territorial dimension by plotting an ideal center, which
resonates alongside the hierarchical center of the State. Constanti-
nople, the capital of Byzantine Hellenism, the ideal "City" signifies
the homogeneity and distinctiveness and standard of an unfinished
Hellenism which rests alongside the legal entity of the Greek State,
symbolized by the capital, Athens.
Because the project of a revenant Hellenic nation is unfinished
but in the process of becoming, there is something teleological in the
promise of territory. An imagined community of modern Hellenes
radiates from the center of Constantinople, consolidating notions of
succession as well as coexistence. Greeks of the Byzantine era are
 44 Artemis Leontis

placed prior to but on a plane with those of the Tourkokratia or of the

new state, while Greeks living in Jannina, Salónica, Serres, Adrianople,
Constantinople, Smyrna, Trebizond, Crete, and Samos are conceived
as existing together with those who inhabit the small and poor "King-
dom of Greece." The idea of an enlarged and unified territory of
Hellenism also functions as a means of consolidating unity and tran-
scending alternative local, regional, or supranational allegiences to
territory. Finally, it regroups the heterogeneous forces and functions
of Greeks living in the diaspora under the concept of a unified race,
and links these to the ideologically charged center of Constantinople.
The general context is the ideology of nationalism,14 which gen-
erated successive ideas and visions of a restored territory of Hellenism
both before and after the establishment of the Kingdom or State of
Greece in 1832, and always extending beyond its legitimate bound-
aries. In the form of ethnic nationalism, with its narrow ethnic but
expansive territorial representation of Greekness, this ideology sup-
ported claims for the annexation of eastern Thrace and western Asia
Minor." "Constantinople" always marks one of the centers of this
desired territory. In my next example, Psycharis' My Journey, Con-
stantinople, and more specifically the Patriarchate appear as a haven
for Greekness and the soul of a besieged nation (ethnos). While the
vessel for his modern national ideal, the indigenous, vernacular lan-
guage and art, offers resistance to the prevailing purist infinitives of
the Phanariotes, yet Psycharis concedes a weakness for the place of
residence for the highest hierarch of the Orthodox church and the
governing elite. "Who can look at the Patriarchate and the Patriarch
without feeling shaken?" he asks rhetorically. "For 400 years this tiny
territory (topos) stood alone, a wooden house, a little old house, our
only refuge, our only fatherland (patrida). It was here that the nation
(ethnos) clung" (1978: 86). The Patriarchate, a tiny place of refuge
during the Tourkokratia, becomes for the author the coveted space over
which claims are made in the name of national identity. Psycharis
certainly does not show interest in the Patriarchate merely for its
deliverance of local populations during 400 years of occupation. Its
contribution consists in its present and future significance.15 It has
the synecdochic power to evoke the whole of an imagined Byzantine
Hellenism. It becomes tinder for rekindling an homogeneous ethnicity
even among Greek expatriates or non-ethnic residents. Once ethnic
identity is attached to this group and space (something that occurs
simultaneously), the tiny refuge becomes the ideologically charged
center from which the larger territory of Hellenism radiates.
Another center of Hellenism which rests in counterpoint with
Constantinople is "the place . . . called Athens," the intellectual and
 Minor Field, Major Territories 45

spiritual ancestor of Europe, home of poetry and philosophy. Through

Athens, Psycharis attaches the map of the neo-Hellenic world to the
main line of an ancestral European tradition, rather than to modern
Europe, and assembles a homogeneous "Hellenic tradition." This
"small territory" becomes the fount and origin of cultural life, although
it is not actually "present" in the workings of civilized modernity.16
Even if I die tomorrow, I will have had my fill of life, now that I have
seen Athens. This is where the world was born. It is here and in Rome
that Europe received its education. This small territory (topos) filled the
earth. From here we derived mind and thought and ideas. It made us
into human beings. The place is called Athens, and never did another
name with so few syllables mean so much in the world. For the name
says it all. Whoever comes to such a place treads reverently over its earth;
the sky which you look at is the one that great men looked at in their
time; the horizon which you observe today with such joy is the one that
their eyes observed every day. In this atmosphere lucid ideas were born,
poetry and philosophy were created. And when the bold ones climbed
up to the Acropolis, they made out the same sea which you now make
out. (1978: 158)

Psycharis' narrator expresses the joy of having reached an unques-

tionable terminus in life, Athens, by liturgically invoking the syllables
of its proper name. The complex history of the modern capital is
reduced to the nondescript moments of a civilization's birth and the
narrator's rebirth. Athens, city and later village, the site of sometimes
radically participatory, sometimes exclusive or reactionary govern-
ments, host to friendly or hostile occupying powers, becomes a place
where past and present are first perceived as separate, then linked
causally through the immediacy of experience; if, he feels, the ancients
observed the horizon where I now observe the horizon, then we have
observed the same horizon. The temporal continuity of these two
moments, classical and modern, is guaranteed through the individual's
invocation of those physical signposts which signify the eternity of
place—earth, sky, horizon, atmosphere, and sea. These tags stake out
the territory and bring about its conceptual, dehistoricized unification
across thousands of years of history. The fetishized name of Athens,
then, "says it all," formulaically marking the distinctive and distin-
guished history, the unique cultural contribution, and the spiritual
continuity of what Psycharis refers to as the Greek "national soul"
(1978: 39).
The spatial dimension of this national soul appears everywhere
in Psycharis' book. Throughout the journey, his persona marks dis-
covery points where yet another aspect of the unique Greek character,
fate, and destiny are revealed. Not only Constantinople and Athens,
 46 Artemis Leontis

the Patriarchate and Acropolis, but also the island of Chios, for ex-
ample, induces this kind of self-discovery, an epiphany concerning
"the fortune of every Greek not only on Chios but also throughout
Europe" (1978: 115). The experience of this Mr-Greek can be reduced
to the formula, "never yet to have found firm ground, always to be
moved and moving. He doesn't know today what will happen tomor-
row, and asks himself: 'will everything suddenly collapse on me, or
will I enjoy the light of day again tomorrow morning?' " (1978: 158).
Chios paradoxically marks a fixed reference for this transitory aspect
of Greek identity, as defined by Psycharis. The figure representing
fully the temporal and spatial constancy of this identity in flux is the
greatest son of Chios, Homer. "Homer" is the sign of the social or-
ganism at work weaving the disparate tales from various villages into
a unified if sometimes contradictory expression. For, according to
Psycharis, Homer was neither a literate nor a single individual poet:
"Homer was many people. Greece thus proved to be a rich territory
(topos): one poet was not enough; it produced many poets at once, all
of whom wandered here and there throughout Greece, each telling
his own tale. . . . Poetry and imagination were not the possession of
a single person, but of all the people (laos) together" (1978: 116—117).
Place names such as Constantinople, Athens, Chios, and Peraias
resonate in Psycharis' populist17 text as territorial markers indicating
the vitality and persistance, expanse and uniformity of a living, solid
community.18 These key geographical points represent the immanent
power of the nation and its people, without direct reference to state
borders. They subordinate the multiplicity of elements and diversity
of manners that may exist within that space. While Psycharis stakes
out the physical space between concrete markers, and suggests that
the nation has legitimate claims of sovereignty over a space greater
than that which is currently controlled by the kingdom of Greece, the
map which he draws has more of a symbolic than a real value. Rather
than serving as a geographic guidepost for the expansion of the king-
dom, it illuminates and assembles the territory of Hellenism, con-
trolling its shape by reference to culture, language, education, and
thought. As he professes in his opening chapter, "For a nation to
become a nation, it must expand and it must produce its own literature.
... It must expand not only its physical but also its intellectual borders.
It is for these borders that I am now fighting" (1978: 37).
Psycharis' intellectual battle to expand the cultural boundaries
of Hellenism by way of a populist and deeply ethnic nationalist ide-
ology was only one of many efforts to define and control territory
through the elaboration of ideology and regulation of culture. Along-
side the political declarations of the Megali Idea, culture systematically
 Minor Field, Major Territories 47

marked the spiritual dimension of Hellenism, from Homer to Rom-

iosyne. In fact, it may be argued that from the beginning of Greece's
existence as a modern constitutional entity, intellectuals and politicians
assumed the task of negotiating the difference between the ideal ter-
ritory of Hellenism and the real boundaries of modern Hellas.19 The
relation of their projects was one of interdependence. On the one
hand, the politics of expansion derived legitimacy from an assumed
disjunction between the state of Greece and an ideal of Hellenism,
which Greek intellectuals nourished. They believed that it was their
calling to ressurrect an ideal form of Greek language, art, and learning,
as a foundation for national identity. On the other hand, intellectuals
enjoyed the authority to stake out the territory of Hellenism, because
the political entity of Greece had invested in the ideal of a single Greek
identity as a way of developing loyalty to and asserting control over
a particular space.20 One may argue, therefore, using the Greek ex-
ample, that the negotiation of national identity is coterminous with
the delineation of a territory, and that territory is the symbolic space
where national identity is produced and reproduced.
The dialectic between politics and culture appears most visibly
in the work of the demoticist critic and politician, Ion Dragoumis.
Dragoumis was always careful to maintain a distinction between the
"natural borders" of the Hellenic nation (or Hellenism, or Romiosyne),
and the artificial boundaries of the Helladic state, or Greek kingdom.
He considered the latter a temporary and imperfect solution—a "mor-
ibund organism" with an "artificial center," the "artificial ruse of for-
eign diplomats"—which Greeks erroneously identified with the nation.
The Greeks (Hellenes) of Greece, let us call them the Helladics, identified
in their minds the Greek state, the Greek kingdom, this tiny Greece,
with the Hellenic nation. They forgot about the Hellenic nation, Rom-
iosyne, Hellenism. They forgot that the state, the kingdom, is temporary,
and they imagined what it would be like if it were perfect. And their
conception of perfection consists in any other state in Europe that has
succeeded. . . . But these gentlemen, these Greeks (Hellenes), the Hel-
ladics don't understand that England [for example] lives naturally, be-
cause it has its natural boundaries.... Whereas Greece (liberated Greece,
that is, the state) does not live naturally, because it is the artificial ruse
of foreign diplomats; it doesn't have its natural borders, it is a temporary,
moribund organism, an artificial center, and not a finished nation.
(1927a: 108)

The Hellenic nation, on the other hand, presents the natural solution
to the geographic distribution and self-government of the Hellenic
population. Dragoumis describes it as an integrated patchwork of
simple, organic communities: social groupings, in other words, of the
48 Artemis Leontis

kind that Max Weber and Otto Bauer labeled "Gemeinshaft" or asso-
ciations based on a feeling of members that they belong together as
a distinct group with a subjectively and collectively held common
identity and sentiment of solidarity, rather than impersonal associa-
tions formed for a specific political purposes, or "Geselhchaft."21 Loyalty
to these local groups derives from loyalty to place (τοπικισμός) and
common racial origins (φυλή). Behavior is controlled by regionally
and racially shared codes (the code, for example, of honor or shame),
values, and ancestral traditions (τα πάτϕια), rather than by an abstract,
foreign constitution, that is, "Frankish systems." Thus, no constitu-
tional system can under any conditions abolish the loyalty that time
and place have produced in community members: "ο τόπος και o
χϕόνος δεν καταλϕονται στον ανθϕώπινο κόσμο" (1927b: 184).
By upholding the value of the community (with its traditions,
manners, codes, and local base) over the state (with its institutions,
systems, centralized government, and the uniform overcoding of an
abstract sovereignty22) Dragoumis appears at first glance to be fending
off the onrush of modernity and defending a kind of pre-modern
archaism. It is certainly true that he sought to strengthen local influ-
ence and boost local political participation as a way of staying the tide
of both migration to Athens and emigration from Greece. His goal
was to redraw the political map of Hellas as a spatially expansive, but
loose and decentralized union of autonomous, individually coded com-
munities.
But if Dragoumis was so uneasy with the physical boundedness
of the Greek State, this was because he placed the state at the service
of an abstract ideal of the nation, whose culture he believed tran-
scended physical boundaries and political institutions.23 According to
him, the purpose of the state was to assure the "flowering of the
nation"; there was no better reason for its existence. The state, there-
fore "does not have the right to confine itself to its own narrow political
borders" (1927b: 183). It must
not forget about any part of the nation, no matter how far it is from
the political center; it is obliged to protect places outside its borders from
destruction, because every part of the nation, no matter to what political
organism it is wedged, is the creator of national culture and participates
in its flowering. . . . The entire nation is the creator of the state, and
the nation fashions the state for the purposes of the nation, so that it
may produce its culture in one body, undisturbed and securely—so that
it may blossom. (1927b: 183)

Dragoumis thus sketches the territory of Hellenism as a national

space over which the state may legitimately claim some kind of juris-
 Minor Field, Major Territories 49

diction, if only over cultural matters. Like that of Kolettis and Psy-
charis, his image of Hellenism is not confined to existing state bound-
aries, but extends beyond the physical borders of the kingdom of
Greece. Although a fluid, negotiable space specified only by ethnic,
historical, and cultural rather than constitutional markers, it none-
theless takes the shape of a "very substantial, material, measurable,
and concrete entity"24 when the obligations and interests of the state
are attached to it. It in turn organizes, unifies, and controls what it
has constituted as a single, homogeneous social body, shaping its in-
terests and desires. Hellenism thus becomes a "reterritorialized" site
for a state policy of nation-building.25
The salutary purpose of the reterritorialized social body is to
produce a unique culture which can overcome, paradoxically through
the particularity and distinctiveness of indigenous contributions, the
limits of local contingencies, surpass the borders of states, and become
universally accessible and admirable:
What is the final purpose, destiny, mission, call it necessity of nations?
It is Culture! This is a task worthy of nations—a humanistic, a truly
human project.... This is how nations can surpass their borders, overflow
and become broader, higher, fuller, and conquer the earth. ... At the
same time, it does not suffice for a nation merely to be civilized; it must
be civilized with its own indigenous culture. (1927b: 181—182)

Although culture is represented here as the "native/territorial fruit"

(εντόπιος καϕπός, 183) produced from "deep within the entrails" of
the nation, neither it nor the nation can be contained by or reduced
to a single locality. Indigenous culture is part of a generally conceived,
"humanistic" project.26 Territorial ethos and local roots become buried
in a modern eschatology, with the symbol of the nation, and beyond
that, the human race, becoming the privileged transcendental signifier
and carrier of a developing Culture. The project of highlighting the
immanent validity and inner pattern of growth within the particular
national culture serves finally to promote the interests of civilized,
hellenized, enlightened modern Man.
If Dragoumis found license to reterritorialize local community
interests on the level of a broadly and abstractly conceived, homo-
geneous social body, this is because the idea of expanding the physical
boundaries of the state was in his time a major item on the national
agenda. After 1922, however, the dreams of expansion became ef-
fectively moribund. Poets and critics now felt the pressing need to
reconcile themselves with a limited State of Hellas. Zesimos Lorentz-
atos, for example, urges his readers to lay aside issues of physical
geography: "Today more than ever before, we must not expect any-
 50 Artemis Leontis

thing from the geographical size of our country" (1980a: 8). "Poetic
topography" (1980a: 16) becomes the touchstone of critical thought.
The hope was to restore the native shape and expanse of a cultural
Hellenism by scraping away at the mass of Greek intellectual history.
No longer the emblem for physical expansion, Hellenism comes to
signify the spiritual and intellectual potential of a historical entity
which cannot be contained under any conditions by a delimited space,
even when it has come to possess a state.
In us are merged the fierce local roots of the Greek and the Jew's
knowledge of the diaspora. We continue to be named after a country
that is full of contrasts, that exists in time much more than it exists in
space. This is why our fate is incompatible with the fate of countries
that are firmly rooted in space; this is why our fate keeps weaving around
the insoluble problem of the two dimensions. We are the suitors of time,
and the outcasts of space. . . . Today more than ever before, we must
not expect anything from the geographical size of our country. Today
more than ever before, we must ask ourselves whether we can offer the
coming ages anything else but our spiritual and intellectual potential;
that is, if we are to survive at all, if we are to keep alive the name of this
small country, this land of marble ruins and constant conflicts. (1980a:
8-9)

Here the geographical dimension of the state, the "land of marble

ruins and constant conflicts," is subsequent to the temporal experience
of Hellenism and non-essential to the existence of an eternally up-
rooted population. Rather than geographical boundaries, constitu-
tional limits, or physical markers of a national body's breadth, it is
now artistic expression, language, and tradition that define Hellenism.
Lorentzatos concerns himself with what he calls the "national
horizon" (1980a: 59) of modern Greek poetry: how modern literary
works signal the passage of a Hellenic tradition through time and its
fluctuation in space. He surveys Seferis' poetic output in order to find
a properly Hellenic, "metaphysical" alternative to two equally "mo-
notonous" foreign paths, "the modernization of Hellenism, or the
hellenization of Modernism" (1980b: 127). His project of sketching
modern national horizons from the perspective of contemporary
Greek artistic expression and literary production is not an aberration
for his time.
Theotokas, too, as we have seen, examines the problem of
Greece's development in light of the "cultural/intellectual heritage
(πνευματική κληϕονομιά)" of Hellenism, on the one hand, and the
modernization of European cultural forms, or modernism (μοντεϕ-
νισμός, 1988: 54), on the other. What he discovers is a lack of "intel-
 Minor Field, Major Territories 51

lectual horizons" (πνευματική οϕίζοντες, 1988: 19) in Greece. As a

liberal corrective, he tries to bring his audience to imagine
a garden of modern Greek letters . . . without limits. We can wander all
paths, but we will not find the outer boundaries of the garden anywhere.
The hopes which it offers at every step are infinite. Its ground . . .
contains rich and inexhaustible resources. For it is possible to express
the limits of nations which have come to an end, but the genius of a
living people knows no bounds in its breadth or depth. (1988: 72)
For Seferis, another contemporary of Lorentzatos, the ideal "gar-
den" of Greek letters is also Hellenism, the conceptual space where
civilization grows, scatters, and spreads. This is to be distinguished
from Greece, a modern nation with an unformed identity, a cloistered
space which suffocates its population. Especially after the Catastrophe
of Asia Minor, Greece becomes altogether sequestered:
Our place (topos) is closed,
all mountains whose roof is a low sky, day and night. . . .
It is shut off by the two Symplegades.
At the harbor where we got to breathe more freely,
we see under the sun's light
broken planks from unfinished voyages,
bodies that have forgotten how to love.
(Mythistorema, Γ 1-2; 12-17 my translation)
In the well-known "Dialogue on Poetry," Seferis offers an interesting
interpretation of Greek history. The foundation of the Greek state in
1831 enabled Greeks to assemble into a measured and marked geo-
graphical space. Since that time, the national goal has been to station
Hellenism in modern Greece and make Greece Hellenic. This estab-
lishment of residence did not involve relocating an actual group of
people, but transporting a cultural milieu so as to transform the geo-
graphical space of the state into a national territory, "our own land."
But the timing was immature, the ground not ripe; what was brought
back was not Hellenism, but a set of foreign values:
We, however, with most legitimate and commendable motives, burning,
as we were, with the desire to bring back to Greece everything that was
Hellenic and seeing signs of Hellenism everywhere, brought back, with-
out looking more deeply into the matter, countless foreign values which
in fact had nothing to do with our land at all." (1966: 94)
Everything that appeared Hellenic to the burgeoning Greek state was
in fact foreign to the territory of Hellenism. The passage indicates
the conditions for a juncture of Greece and Hellenism. Greece will
not be able to make its territory Hellenic and thus become synonymous
 52 Artemis Leontis

with "our own land," until it has appropriated the true values of
Hellenism. This involves finding a "right attitude toward tradition"
and becoming "conscious even of her own history" (1966: 96). For as
long as this attitude and history are left buried, Greece will remain a
"barren and largely unknown country" (1966: 97).
Hellenism, on the other hand, though an exiled force, has con-
tinued to exist and spread from ancient times to the present: "Since
the time of Alexander the Great, we have scattered our Hellenism far
and wide. We have sown it throughout the world" (Seferis 1966: 92).
The scattered culture has then produced new civilizations, such as the
modern Western European, "which is basically an offspring of the
values of Hellenism" (1966: 92). Seferis expresses the hope that con-
temporary Greece will recollect its true origins and yield its native
fruit. He explains that this is in large part a matter of finding appro-
priate the artistic form, expression, and style. "Greek Hellenism [the
indigenous, as distinguished from the European Hellenic product,]
will show its face when Greece of today has acquired its own real
intellectual character and features. And its characteristics will be the
synthesis of all the characteristics of all true works of art which have
ever been produced by Greeks" (1966: 95). These will include "the
deepest features of Calvos, the verses of Solomos, the agony of Pa-
lamas, the nostalgia of Cavafy," and the "brush strokes" of Theoto-
copoulos (1966: 95). It is significant that three of the four poets whom
Seferis names (Calvos, Solomos, and Cavafy), together with the single
artist (El Greco), are Greeks of the diaspora, Greeks, that is, who spent
at least their years of schooling, if not entire life, outside the physical
territory of Greece, Greeks who learned Greek, if at all, only as a
second language. Their situation and tentative relationship to the
geographical space of Greece is symptomatic of Seferis' spatial atopia.
In the "intellectual landscape" of his neo-traditionalist cultural ideal,
it is not the physical occupation of space, but proper lodging within
tradition that places one's work among the "discernable landmarks"
of Hellenism.
An anti-modern, anti-western, ethnocentric revision of this con-
cept of Hellenism is found in recent works by Stelios Ramphos (1983
and 1984). In his Τόπος Υπεϕουϕάνιος (Transcendental Territory), Ram-
phos describes the "spiritual crisis" experienced by Greece from the
late Byzantine to modern times, as it "staggers between East and West"
seeking its proper identity (1983: 34). Caught in the Stillwater of a
mired present, Greeks have become absorbed in aberrant projects:
the "archeology of identity," the "Megali Idea of resurrection," and
"the Enlightenment, with its ideologies of power and rapture" (1983:
34). These undertakings are signs of a spiritual impasse, Ramphos
 Minor Field, Major Territories 53

argues, following from Greece's unique situation in an inauthentically

"Hellenic" world:

The issue is not that we are captives to our past, but shipwrecks in a
self-centered (αυτοσκοπό) present. What kind of nationality can the
modern Greek claim in a world that is already Hellenic? How and where
can this nationality be sought when Greece lives and rules in a spirit of
life that does not offer the privileges of Greekness (ελληνικότητος) to
anyone. Is there the possibility for hellenization which does not at the
same time de-hellenize? (1983: 34-35)

As Ramphos explains in a later work, the west has appropriated Hel-

lenism in the spirit of "technical prowess and positivism" (1984: 30).
Hence the "bewitched" dialogue between Greeks and western HeI-
lenizers produces two spurious approaches to neo-Hellenization: a
"progressive" imitation of western prototypes, which responds to no
living Greek reality, and the reactionary "traditionalist" inhalations of
the "dusty greatness of the past." "As long as this territory (topos) is
ruptured from tradition," Ramphos asserts, "its forces will remain
divided and its future uncertain." (1984: 30).
The real Greece is "not the Greece of borders and monuments,"
but a "conceptual territory" (τόπος νοητός), the "transcendental ter-
ritory" (τόπος υπεϕουϕάνιος) where the "other of the world" resides—
absolute, eternal, unbounded, inconceivable, and non-existent:
How can the map define its atopia, how can it contain it—the one a
space, the other that which cannot be contained within a space? The
absolute is the Other, the Other of the world, eternal and unbounded
and inconceivable and non-existent. The other of the world is Greece.
(1983: 4)

In the spirit of differentiation from the west, Ramphos' Hellenism,

the "Other of the world," reproduces, from the point of view of the
west, the theological topos of the absent Hebraic God who has always
already turned His face, refusing to take any form or settle in any
space. Thus the atopia of Hellenism is its absence from western
thought, especially where it claims "Hellenism" as its own. It is an
inauthentic "Hellenism" that has been reduced to a system of ideas
and bounded within a western state. Yet this does not mean that
authentic Hellenism does not exist, according to Ramphos. If God
has turned His face from the west, His sight nonetheless "illuminates
the face of the Other." This Other of the western world is the oriental
Byzantine Orthodox Christ, who, according to Ramphos, "was born
in Greece," his way prepared by "Heracleitos' logos, Parmenides'
noein, Plato's theory of ideas, Aristotle's metaphysics, and Stoic
thought" (1983: 20). "Christianity did not arrive from the outside to
 54 Artemis Leontis

fulfill or revoke Hellenism: it was the authentic fruit and recapitulation

of Hellenism, the incarnation of the Divine Logos;" as heirs to Byz-
antine orthodox tradition, Greeks are always already "living a Hellenic
civilization and sharing its glory and judgment" (1983: 33).
Tradition offers another angle on the delineation of this para-
dox, the atopic topos of Hellenism as distinct from enlightenment
thought and political, religious, or cultural forms. Again, the problem
is how to recover an authentically hellenized Greek space in a world
that dehellinizes in the name of "Hellenism." For Ramphos, tradition
is the space where the Greek communicates with Hellenism already
in the making. "Tradition is not a concept, but the space of history,
communion with an idea which preexists" (1983: 43). With no origi-
nary or final form, tradition is "the insertion of the present into a
hardly perceptible preexisting framework, the persistence of the past
in the becoming of the present" (1983: 53). Its transubstantiation takes
place wherever it is venerated and observed, whether by the monks
of Mount Athos or by "the Orthodox believer anywhere, in his pure
or crooked form" (1984: 110). Thus "it is the orthodox soul, as the
authentic oriental, with huge reserves of feeling and spirit at its dis-
posal, which resists the provocation of the West; it holds the thread
of life that will lead us to Greece if we follow it" (1984: 110). According
to Ramphos' neo-orthodox nationalism, the space where a continuous
and self-creating history unravels is the soul of the believing Orthodox
Christian, which gives a temporary location to the transcendental spirit
of a single, unified ancient philosophical and byzantine orthodox tra-
dition, and becomes the site for the formation of an authentically
Hellenic territory.

Deterritorializing Hellenism
I entered this discussion of a few major statements about Greek
identity with the purpose of showing how a theoretically informed
notion of "territory" might be of use for analyzing ideal images of
Hellenism. Referring to diverse passages which stake out the bound-
aries of the Hellenic, I have tried to show that Greek politicians, critics,
and poets used this topos to debate ideas of national identity, modernity,
and culture; confer on the heterogeneous populations of the Balkan
peninsula and Greek diasporas a sense of shared space; consolidate
a milieu, coexistence, and succession; designate a standard poetic lan-
guage, tradition and manner of expression; and finally, position the
Greek nation in relation or reaction to European notions of Hellenism.
It is not difficult to see that the idealization of Hellenism has
had a pervasive effect on Greek culture and politics: Greeks appro-
 Minor Field, Major Territories 55

priated it to negotiate their boundaries, their rank and place among

European nation-states, and their developing status in the civilized,
modernized world of the west. A critical analysis of territory has great
potential for research. Many authors and projects can be studied
through it, including the following: Korais' and other proto-nation-
alists' representation of Souli as the place where the spirit of Hellenism
remained alive through the dark ages of Greek history; Solomos'
treatment of Mesolongi under siege in 1825—26 as a symbol for the
Hegelian absolute; Cavafy's Alexandria as a decaying, transitional
Hellenism; Perikles Yiannopoulos' discussion of Greece's geoclimactic
features as the basis for an indigenous aesthetic of "Hellenic Design"
(Ελληνική Γϕαμμή); and the emergence of the Aegean as the focus
of inspiration and adventure for poets and artists of the 1930s. These
and other treatments of Hellenism may be read as efforts to define
a standard for modern Hellenic culture, and thus gain majority status
for a national culture of secondary power, influence, authority, status,
and wealth among western nations.
From all these examples, one can see how modern Greece has
been carving out its own uncomfortable relationship to the major
territory of Hellenism: in almost every case, it leans hard on historical
continuity, which is anything but given or direct. Inasmuch as ancient
Greece has been assigned to the conceptual territory of Hellenism—
which was, after all, assembled and marked by the western disciplines
of philology, archeology, etc.—modern Greek culture stands in the
position of a minority, operating outside the power and dominion of
its glorified past. Hence it finds itself compelled repeatedly to respond,
as Lorentzatos complains in "The Lost Center," to "the European
debate about whether or not we Greeks were the true descendants of
the ancient Greeks" (1980b: 91).
In its contemporaneous relation to the major axis that cuts
through many developing countries, the axis of the developed and
modernized west, it operates, again, outside the standard. This is
reflected in not only Ramphos' insistence that foreign values are not
the values of Greek culture, but also Theotokas' urgent call for mod-
ernization and liberalization. These Greek critics agree that modern
Greek culture deviates dangerously from the European norm. In the
former case, it deviates to its credit, in the latter, to its detriment. In
either case, it does not cut a bold path in unexplored directions.
The image of deviation should be scrutinized further, especially
as it relates to the position of a minor academic field. In its current
state, Greek criticism has not found ways to subvert the notion of a
continuous or monolithic Hellenism; through a variety of unsuccess-
ful, albeit creative successful efforts, it has only tried to link modern
56 Artemis Leontis

Greece to the standard of Hellenism. Preoccupied with issues of iden-

tity, it seeks to extract for itself constants from ancient Hellenism,
rather than to set this very notion along a path of variation. Thus, it
has perpetuated the view that there is a Greek style indigenous to a
territory of Hellenism, without effectively persuading major forces
that it ultimately defines this originary space. In relation to the western
European/north American tracing of civilization, it deviates, diverges
from the rule, walks the crooked path. Even where it appropriates
Hellenism to negotiate its own boundaries and shape its own space,
it fails to annex itself legitimately.
A more effective way of responding to the hierarchy of disciplines
within the university is to consider the position of modern Greek as
a plateau in the multileveled system of strata that organizes and unifies
the contemporary disciplines of the humanities. Modern Greek studies
may be conceived as one of a number of un-disciplined, discontinuous
epistrata—a borderline case that rides a path of difference over what
deceptively appears as a continuous and solid mass. It cuts through
a heterogeneous grouping of social, political, and cultural vectors that
have been variously categorized as both Greek and non-Hellenic, Eur-
opean and non-Western, familiar and exotic, indigenous and orien-
talized. In this position, modern Greek reflects the situation of not a
radically devalued Other, but what may be named the subversive
"inner Other"27—the other European culture which both invests in
and adulterates a prototype of civilization. Through its internalized
alterity,28 it shatters the continuity of "western Civilization," fragments
the ring of its venerated classical center, and "deterritorializes" Hel-
lenism, finding lines of flight that relay in unanticipated directions.
In the undisguisedly ethnic and political culture of Greece, one
has the advantage of recognizing elements, forms, cultural issues, and
problems of 19th and 20th century western culture, while finding
patterns that undermine the universality of Eurocentric notions (like
the radical disjunction between aesthetic and political culture29). Given
the impracticable and yet compelling prescription that Greek culture
be made in the image of Hellenism, modern Greek studies can bear
witness to one irreparable fissure in the "Eurocentric Self." It should
therefore challenge the notion of legitimate lineage, orderly descent,
and unadulterated western civilization. By exploring the tenuous and
strained relationship between Greeks and Hellenism, the field of mod-
ern Greek may shatter the illusion of a unified origin for European
cultures, and thus play a dynamic role in remapping cultural studies.

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

 Minor Field, Major Territories 57
NOTES

'Lloyd 1987: 162. Until recently in 20th century British and North American
literary studies, a minor work was one of secondary quality, influence, or stature within
a literary canon—a secondary work by a significant author, or a decent work by a
secondary author. If one sought to revaluate the minor (as did T. S. Eliot, for example,
when he praised John Donne and the Metaphysical poets in the place of the once
invincible John Milton), one shifted it to a higher position in a hierarchy that had not
entirely excluded it; for the canon was made up of both major and minor works of
the same cultural substance, and proved flexible as to their order. During the decade
of the 1980s, however, this conception of minor writing has undergone drastic revision.
Interest in the aesthetic evaluation of canonical works, major or minor, has given way
to a concern for minority voices that have suffered exclusion from the western canon.
"Minority" may be defined as a political or cultural category of difference in relation
to a ruling party. This difference is not necessarily quantitive: "Majority implies a
constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate
it [and assuming] a state of power and domination ... a standard measure" (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 105). Minority, on the other hand, is "one's potential to the extent
that one deviates from the model" (1987: 106). Minority discourse is the discourse of
the minority or non-hegemonic as it relates to the hegemonic group according to the
principle of exclusion: woman vs. man, homosexual vs. heterosexual, person of color
vs. Causasian; Jew vs. Gentile—these are the most obvious examples. It is purely a
relational category, made recognizable by its dislocation. Thus women's literature may
be a minority literature in relation to men's, but not to the native Americans', since it
is specifically in their difference from men that women may be identified as a minority
group.
2When, for example, modern Greek is taught alongside ancient Greek (which is
just "Greek," with no qualifying adjective) in departments of classical studies, discussions
inevitably arise concerning its non-classical, if not unhellenic, status as a language and
culture. The field of classics then asserts its right to preserve a venerated canon of
Hellenism. It uses a list of famous authors, grammatical and rhetorical structures,
specific styles and genres, to distinguish and separate the classical "Greek" from the
non-classical. And modern Greek, which lacks the infinitive and the dative case, is left
by the wayside.
'Territory is only one of a number of metacritical concepts which Deleuze and
Guattari use. I recognize that isolating this one notion from the rich set of images and
ideas which they propose does some injustice to their argument; but I find it necessary
and useful for heuristic reasons. It is also commensurate with their model of the book
as "writing [which] has nothing to do with signifying,. .. [but with] surveying, mapping,
even realms that are yet to come" (1987: 5). They suggest that the book, as an a-
signifying machine, should be read for intensities rather than interpretation: whether
and how it works for a given reader, rather than what it means.
4"Deterritorialization" is the movement or "line of flight" by which one leaves a
territory. It can be covered over by reterritorialization, which compensates for it, so
that the "line of flight" is hindered. "Reterritorialization" is the "standing for" (valoir
pour) a territory that has been deterritorialized: the setting up of artifices that serve a
new territoriality in the place of the old territory. The two terms are not symmetrically
opposite in their use. For example, territory is conceived as inseparable from vectors
of deterritorialization (either because it is marginal, or because it opens onto other
assemblages), but not of reterritorialization. For a condensed discussion of these and
 58 Artemis Leontis

other important terms, see their final chapter, "Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract
Machines" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 501-514).
'Deleuze and Guattari's proposals for "Cartography" as a critical enterprise are
discussed by Stivale 1985: 20. The analogous terms on the psychoanalytic, linguistic,
and socio-political plateaus are "schizoanalysis," "pragmatics," and "nomodology."
The term, "imagined communities," appears in the title of Benedict Anderson's
much discussed book, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-
tionalism, and in his definition of the nation as "an imagined political community. . . .
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion. ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial
villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined." (1983: 15). He
emphasizes that "imagining" a community does not involve masquerade, fabrication,
or falsity. To "imagine" a community is to offer or consent to a principle of self-
representation, which in turn creates or sustains a particular grouping—one that would
not exist in that form if identity were conceived otherwise.
7An "assemblage" is something that groups and give roots to an unorganized mass
of heterogeneous milieus. It slices territory out of these milieus in such a way as to
provide it with a center, build particular solidarities, and give the impression of order
and autonomy. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 504-505.
"There is a growing bibliography of significant works on the institution of art and,
more specifically, the function of the museum within this institution. See especially
Becker 1982; Bourdieu and Schnapper 1969; Crimp 1980 and 1987; Duncan and
Wallach 1978.
9The nation is the "imagined community" conceived when a heterogeneous group
consents to three basic assertions about the essential identity of its constituent parts:
(a) there exists a social body with an explicit and peculiar character; (b) the interests
and values of this social body take priority over all other interests and values; (c) This
social body must be as independent as possible, and usually requires at least the at-
tainment of political sovereignty (See Breuilly's definition of nationalism 1982: 3). The
State is the apparatus that legitimizes, organizes, manages, and operates the affairs of
a sovereign body. In the modern world, it is designated as "the possessor of sovereignty
over a given territory" (1982: 335), with the qualification that it exercise sovereignty
directly only in the public sphere (given that a distinction between the public and private
spheres is maintained). The sovereign nation-state, a peculiarly modern institution, is
the apparatus specific to a nationalist movement which has achieved autonomy within
a given territory. On the tension between the claims of the state and the rights of the
individuals that constitute the nation, see Breuilly 1982: 353-365. This and other related
topics are discussed in relation to modern Greece in Polis 1987: 147-160.
'"Deleuze and Guattari argue that the town functions according to a different set
of principles from the state. Defined by their entrances and exits, as well as their
networking with other towns, they are points of circulation—"circuit-points of very
kind. . . . Each one constitutes a central power, but it is a power of polarization or of
the middle. . . . This is why this kind of power has egalitarian pretensions, regardless
of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic" (1987: 432). The
state, on the other hand "is a phenomenon of intraconsistency" which makes the points
surrounding it resonate around its center.
"Topos can be translated in certain of its uses as "territory." It has a variety of
meanings in Greek, among them, a piece of ground, place, site, position, opportunity.
In ancient Greek rhetorical theory it indicates a passage in an author or a commonplace
expression.
12From his radio broadcast of 27 August 1988.
 Minor Field, Major Territories 59
"The entire speech appears in H της τϕίτης Σεπτεμβϕίου εν Αθήναις Εθνική
ΣυνÎ-λευσις Πϕακτικά (Athens, 1844). On the history of the text, see Dimaras 1982.
For a remarkable discussion of this speech, as well as the ideology of the Megali Idea,
see Skopetea 1988).
'"Discussions of the modern nationalism are too numerous to cite. Some titles
which I have found useful are Anderson 1983; Breuilly 1982; Kedourie 1970; Kitching
1982; Mosse 1985; Shafer 1972; Seton-Watson 1977; and Smith 1988.
15Here the imagined territory emanating from the Patriarchate functions as the
"space to which identity is attached by a distinctive group who hold or covet that territory
and who desire to have full control over it for the group's benefit" (Knight 1982: 526).
This attachment of identity to territory is a core doctrine of nationalist ideologies. Josiah
A. M. Cobbah calls this "geoethnicity" (as distinct from a non-territorial ethnic iden-
tification). This "involves the historic identification of an ethnic group with a given
territory, an attachment to a particular place, a sense of place as a symbol of being and
identity. This geoethnic identity has been referred to as group politico-territorial iden-
tity" (Cobbah 1988: 73).
16Here I am anticipating another rendering of Hellenism, which places mytho-
logical and historical figures of classical antiquity squarely within the spirit of popular,
everyday life in modern cities and villages, and claims that the virtues of ancient Hellenic
culture are actually present in the people and in their collective traditions. This national-
popular rendering of the classical appears very vividly and effectively in the poetry
and criticism of Odysseus Elytis and the paintings and drawings of Yiannis Tsarouhis.
17I call Psycharis' My Journey a populist text because it persistently and consistently
argues that virtue and authentic knowledge reside in the simple people, who are the
overwhelming majority, and in their collective traditions. For discussions of the phe-
nomenon of populism, see Canovan 1981; Ionescu and Gellner 1969; Kitching 1982;
and Sommer 1983.
18See Benedict Anderson, who shows that the nation conceives of its history as
"idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty
time, ... a solid community moving down (or up) history" (1983: 31).
19There is a perceived disjuction between the Greek state (kratos) and nation (ethnos).
The one is viewed as existing from the time of the legitimized establishment of the
Kingdom of Hellas, while the other is emergent and with a certain teleology. Thus, for
the Greeks following the battle of independence, there was the perception that "a Greek
state now existed, but a Greek nation still had to be made" (Seton-Watson 1977: 114).
20JuSt as nationalist claims of linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural uniqueness
were vital in the effort to achieve self-determination and self-government, so "an as-
sertion of a distinctive geography and history is a vital task in the unification of territory
claimed by nationalist movements. The latter must draw together a complex set of
factors to link the ... diverse people ... physically, socially, and especially psychologically,
so that they identify both with themselves as a 'people' and with the territory" (Johnston
et al. 1988: 7). The term, territoriality, is introduced by geographers to refer to the
processes by which people and institutions develop loyalty to and assert control over
a particular space. R. Sack sees it as involving "the attempt by an individual or group
to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting
and asserting control over a geographic area" (1986: 19. See also his Human Territoriality:
A Theory 1983, esp. 55).
21 Drawing on this Weberian distinction between two types of social groupings,
James Anderson 1988 argues that the nation is originally conceived as a king of Ge-
meinschaft, whereas the state is a kind of Gesellschaft.
22According to Deleuze and Guattari, "primitive societies operate essentially by
codes and territorialities.... Modern, or State societies, on the other hand, have replaced
 60 Artemis Leontis

the declining codes with univocal overcoding, and the lost territory with a specific
reterritorialization (which takes place in an overcoded geometrical space" (1987: 212-
213).
23At one point he makes this remarkable claim: "Let there be no state, if it hinders
or disfigures the national spirit. If the state cramps the nation, it must necessarily
change shape or disappear. For the state which hinders the nation is superfluous and
harmful. What is needed for the birth of a Hellenic Culture is an independent, that is
a Hellenic political life" (Dragoumis 1927b: 231).
24Gottman 1973: 15.
25The effort to build a nation-state (Hellas) on the site of a national body (Hellenism)
with its own history, language, culture, and physical expanse, is not peculiar to modern
Greece. Juval Portugali studies the analogous Israeli/Palestinian case. Based on this
example, he shows that one of the core doctrines of nationalism is that "Nations can
only be fulfilled in their own territory, with their own state and government," and that
"the nation-state—the unity of people, territory, and government—is the genuine unit
within and through which people conduct their social economic and cultural affairs"
(Portugali 1988: 155).
26A developing discussion about geoethnicity and the world ethnic and political
map may be of relevance here. It has been argued recently that nationalisms are a
territorial form of ideology. According to Johnston, Knight, and Kofmann, not only
is territory a major component of nationalism, but "nationalist ideologies have sought
to interpret the occupation and control of space, both in the past and as a plan for the
future" (Johnston et al. 1988: 3). James Anderson concurs that "Nations, like states,
are not simply located in geographic space . . . rather they explicitly claim particular
territories and derive distinctiveness from them. Indeed nationalists typically over-
emphasize the particular uniqueness of their own territory and history" (Anderson
1988: 18). What must be added to this argument, based on the elaboration of territory
in Deleuze and Guattari, is that the particular physical space or geographical territory
to which a national idea attaches itself is not that which constitutes the uniqueness of
the nation. Rather, it is the ideology which marks the territory, rendering it foundational
and essential, rather than functional and transitory.
2,Rabasa uses this term, suggesting that the ethnographer's confrontation with a
"subject" be dispersed beyond the dichotomy of Self-Other to the "Inner-Other"—that
all too Eurocentric Self that haunts the ethnographer's venerable intention. Evidently,
Eurocentrism is not an 'out there' that we can identify, but the locus where minor
discourses intervene" (Rabasa 1987: 159).
2eHerzfeld, referring to the case of Greece, characterizes this phenomenon "alterity
in itself" (1987: 47).
29Jusdanis persuasively argues that until the 1920s, anthologies and literary his-
tories were being created in Greece on the basis of political rather than aesthetic criteria
(1991).

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