Colonizing the ideal

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Notes

Neni Panourgiá

Columbia University

Department of Anthropology

452 Schermerhorn Extension

New York, NY 10025

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

This is a paper on a particular moment in intellectual history; it is not a paper on architectural history. Its argument has developed over time and has been presented at different forums, so I am indebted to the various audiences, friends, and colleagues who have listened to it, argued with me about it, have made suggestions, and have helped me rethink it. It has been presented at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies and The George Seferis Chair at Harvard University; at the Center for Neohellenic Studies and National Research Institute Seminars in Syros, Greece; at the Modern Greek Seminar Series at Princeton University; at the Anthropology Department, Columbia University; and at the Director's Seminar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. I would like to thank all the institutions for inviting me to their seminars. I am particularly indebted to Carlos Forment, Manolis and Katerina Korres, Mark von Hagen, Stathis Gourgouris, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, David Scott, David Sutton, and Michael Taussig for their generous reading, listening, and commentary. I could not have found a better interlocutor than Rena Fatsea, who has read and listened to my arguments and has helped me to clarify points that initially seemed too obscure to be picked up. The paper could not have been published without the editorial assistance of my Research Assistant Richard Kernaghan, who also gave it a good late read and made important comments and suggestions. It would not have been published at all without the invitation and encouragement of Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis. Research for this paper has been generously supported by a Faculty Development Grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Council at Columbia University. I thank every one and all profoundly.

In the way that Gupta and Ferguson (1992) have problematized the stability of the terms “place” and “space.”

What I mean by this is that even when Gothic or Rococo buildings are built in Greece, let's say, the political structure that finds its articulation in Rococo does not. Greece imports the style without its ideology.

See Herzfeld's article on disemia (1982a), which created the necessary discursive space for the articulations by Jill Dubisch and Loring Danforth, and, much later, by Boyer. For a problematized encounter with neoclassicism see Pavlides and Buck‐Sutton (1995), especially the Introduction. In terms of architectural history, Eleni Bastéa's (1999) seminal book on Greek neoclassicism remains the only exhaustive anglophone assessment of neoclassicism in Greece devoted exclusively to the subject. References to Greek neoclassicism in general books on the history of architecture are too numerous to cite. Some of them are included in this bibliography, but see specifically Bergdoll (2000), and Summerson (1986).

The actual quote reads: “les antiquités grecques, mis a part le fait qu'elles provoquent un grand intérêt chez les historiens et les archéologues, ont avant tout pour le Royaume de la Grèce une signification politique énorme […] le point d'attache entre la Grèce actuelle et la civilisation européenne.”

See Bastéa (1994) on the process of this rebuilding and the difficulties encountered by the new state (1) to finance this rebuilding and (2) to convince the old inhabitants of Athens (until then a medieval city in terms of building and structure repeatedly sacked by the Ottoman army during the various sieges in the course of the War of Independence of 1821–29) in participating in the efforts for an urban plan.

In Benjamin (1978, 147). The paragraph reads:

• The second condition for the construction of the arcades is the advent of building in iron. The Empire saw in this technique an aid to a renewal of architecture in the ancient Greek manner. The architectural theorist Bötticher expresses a general conviction when he says, “with regard to the artistic form of the new system, the formal principle of Hellenic style” should be introduced. Empire is the style of revolutionary heroism for which the state is an end in itself.

Another case in point is the First Cemetery in Athens. As I have already argued previously (Panourgiá 1995), the First Cemetery in Athens, which has become a showcase of funerary art, had as its point of reference not the Kerameikos cemetery of ancient Athens but the Cimitero Monumentale of Rome, a cemetery which had been architecturally specified, where monuments, graves, and statues could be exhibited as art without any restrictions. Funerary monuments were commissioned to sculptors who would have had great difficulty financing their work otherwise, creating the necessary conditions for them to exercise their art and to situate it within the larger framework of European artistic expression. In 1905, in a retrospective assessment of the role of the First Cemetery in modern Athens, the sculptor Th. Thomopoulos noted that the cemetery encapsulates all the movements of modern sculpture. Most of these artists had studied at the first School of Arts established in Athens in the third decade of the nineteenth century by Theophilos Hansen, and were taught according to the curriculum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

I use this term in the way it has been developed by Victor Turner (1977).

See also Panourgiá (2001).

See E.M. Butler's The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, but also Artemis Leontis's Topographies of Hellenism, and Susan Marchand's Down from Olympus. Lambropoulos's The Rise of Eurocentrism remains indispensable in relation to the debates in Germany on the importance of Greek thought on the development of European (particularly German) identity.

See Lambropoulos (1993, 61) on Klopstock. Hegel's response to Klopstock articulated the debate as to whether the fundamental imaginary structures of Europe are secular or religious, a debate that has obviously not been resolved yet, as is evidenced in the recent discussions and dichotomies that developed during the discussion on the European Constitution that took place within the European Parliament about the inclusion of Christianity as one of the forces that created Europe. Hegel's specific quote reads:

• Others, trying to give the Germans an imagery of their own once more, an imagery that was home‐grown, cried “Is Achaea, then, the Teutons' Fatherland?” But this imagery is not that of Germans today. The project of restoring to a nation an imagery once lost was always doomed to failure … And what the poet cried to his people in relation to Greek mythology could be said both to him and his nation with just as much right in relation to the Jewish; they could be asked: Is Judaea, then, the Teutons' fatherland? (Hegel 1948, 145)

Fallmerayer practically, unwittingly, and absolutely unbeknown to him, spawned Folklore as a discipline in Greece by developing the racialist theory (supporting the German political Slavophobia) that what we know as Greece had been invaded so often and for such long periods of time by the Slavs and the Albanians that “not a drop of Greek blood runs in the Greeks' veins.” See Herzfeld (1982b) on Greek responses to Fallmerayer and the development of Greek Folklore as a discipline, but cf. Gourgouris (1996) on Fallmerayer's argument; and Panourgiá (1999) on Nikolaos Politis's response to Fallmerayer.

We should keep in mind that the whole project of the Grimm brothers – of collecting and editing Germanic fairy tales – was at the heart of the Heimatschutz.

See Papageorgiou‐Venetas (1971) on the matter of the young king's relationship to antiquity.

I have tabulated these chronologies by using a number of sources (Etienne and Etienne 1992; Tsiomis 1985a, b; Rigatos 1985); the primary sources themselves (see Chronologies above); and readings by and on particular architects, theoreticians and early historians.

See Summerson (1986, 76).

Philhellenism has been described as that intellectual and political movement in Europe that, through an affinity with classical Greek thought, supported the cause of the irredentist movement in Greece in the late eighteenth and early to mid‐nineteenth century. For an unorthodox and far more convincing reading of philhellenism see Gourgouris (1996).

The literature on Caylus is almost exhausting. Indicatively (and not exhaustively) I mention here two very interesting references to Caylus's project: Jan Assman in his treatment of the subject of how Egypt developed a highly articulate and self‐reflexive thought; and Jacques Le Goff on the revolutionizing of archaeology by Caylus.

For a luminous reading of Vico, see Said (1978).

As the title of his treatise belies.

Etienne and Etienne (1992).

On the debate between Rome and Athens (what Rabinow terms neo‐grec and neo‐roman) see Rabinow (1994, 54).

Tsiomis (1985b, 144). In all fairness to Maurer, he was not the first to have articulated this need for mimicking of the ancients. Winckelmann, in 1766, had already identified the need for mimesis in art, in his assessment of the absolute beauty of specific ancient art objects: “The only means we have of being great, or even inimitable, if that is possible, is to imitate the ancients” (quoted in Etienne and Etienne 1992, 61). What separates the two statements, of course, other than Maurer's syntagmatic position, is the fact that Winckelmann recognizes the possibility that imitation can participate in the production of a greatness that might contain the absolute within it through the possibility of its inimitability.

See Von Klenze's work on Christian architecture (see Rosenau 1983, 143ff.), among others.

See Rabinow (1994).

I use panopticism the way it has been argued by Foucault through Bentham.

The issue of the Parthenon Marbles has become a subject of the American University Legal Case.

Obviously this is a grossly inadequate mention of the Makronissos camp, the whole project of “reformation” of dissident soldiers, and the architectural interventions on the island. See further Iiatrides (1981), Voglis (2002), Panourgiá (2003).

See also Panourgiá (2001).

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neni panourgiá

Neni Panourgiá Columbia University Department of Anthropology 452 Schermerhorn Extension New York, NY 10025 USA E‐mail: [email protected]