The name is absent

91

phenomena and discourses, immediate social networks, the members of which were
variously attentive to similar phenomena and discourses, took on special significance.
The intersubjective relationships individuals maintained, and the common discursive
spaces these individuals engaged with on a regular basis, came to be the micro-scale
foundations for a sense of unity based on a common experience of identity negotiation.
This does not mean that individuals dismissed traditional nationalist discourses of
cultural, linguistic, and historically-based unity, or lost their connection with Greeks
outside their social networks. Rather, the connection to these other people remained but
came to be informed by a more complex perceived commonality: individuals felt
connected with other Greeks by the knowledge that they and their social networks were
negotiating daily life relative to a set of variously similar local conditions and
transnational flows and trajectories. While the specifics of particular localities may have
differed, individuals were nonetheless united by a similar civic consciousness based on a
similar political subjectivity⁹¹.

By the late 2000s, following the temporary nationalist fervor that accompanied
the 2004 Athens Olympics, micro-scale idiosyncratic identity negotiation intensified with
the country’s growing socio-economic problems and deepening international
interconnectedness. During this time there was a proliferation of informal activist groups
which came together in ways consistent with social network-based civic unity, civic unity
based on rhizomatic aggregation of localized individuals, and in some cases both. An

⁹¹ Of note, I am not suggesting that the neighbourhood was in some way replaced by networks, nor do I
mean to evoke images of deterritorialisation or “mobile” citizen versus “territorial” citizen, whereby the
latter is associated with the sedentary, historically conscious and culturally homogeneous (see Appadurai
1991:1998). I am describing something in between, but more towards the deterritorialized; a state of
feeling connected not only by master narratives or “territorial” elements in general, but also increasingly by
intimate, contingent, dispersed or “mobile” elements.

<<   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   >>

More intriguing information