Cultural Politics and Populist Uses of the Ancients

Abstract

Populism is a discourse made up of a specific signs, techniques, strategies, and truth claims that set in motion certain ways of talking about "the people" ( laós ). This discourse has served to regulate Greek culture for nearly a century. It offers the story of an indigenous organic community struggling to express itself authentically and to survive against outside threats. The populist investment in the ancient past happened in two successive stages. First, demoticists (like Psiháris) appropriated all aspects of the national past, including classical Hellas, for a Roméic present. Then modernists (like Elytis) incorporated ancient images and texts into a high modern idiom as transubstantiations of the everyday. Both demoticists and modernists depicted the Neohellenic "people" as the true bearers of the classical heritage, of which foreign powers were seeking to deprive them. In this manichean order, power perpetually evades "the people," while freedom becomes a question of aesthetic deposition rather than political practice.