A Note on the Uprising in Greece

In Greece and capital city Athens, as everybody knows, there has been a series of protests and riots following the tragic killing of a teenager. With all due respect to the victims of these events (family, friends and others related) it also shows the power of affect in a tragic situation like this. A moment filled with anger, brutality and hostility towards the Greek government and the Police is also an air of contentious feelings, impulses jumping between bodies and affects minds. A certain emotional tenor had already been potentialized following massive strikes over pension reform and privatizations, furthering the economic crises in Greece, and large portions of the Greek population could be said to express a certain degree of bodily distress over this situation – bodies were open and in a state of pre-action or proto-active-body-state “tending” towards action (see Massumi 2002) Within a series of violent images across global and national mediascapes (producing sights of action passing via functional technological vectors [Virilio]) there were for example the images of schoolgirls and schoolboys surrounding police offices, literally expressing a wall of resistance with their movements, rhythm and bodily texture; forming a collective body of action, that worked as transversal vectors of affect via media and resonated within other sectors such as the bodies of university staff, teachers and union workers. They were intensive patterns of information or “tipping points” [DeLanda, 1997], small scale events working as catalyzers in a protest cycle, which could possibly turn the social order out of balance and into a far-from-equilibrium state, an intensified “revolutionary” order which self-organized at another basin of attraction [DeLanda 2006].

More but not full, it seems that the full text of the paper will be published in the next issue of Resistance Studies Magazine.