Review of: Antonis Liakos, Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης [Apocalypse, utopia and history: the transformations of historical consciousness], Athens: Polis, 2011. 478 pp

Stavrakakis, Yannis

English

National Documentation Centre - EKT journals

    Historein   Vol 13 (2013)   Questions and Orientations in History during the last 20 years. Part 2       Review of Antonis Liakos's Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπίακαι Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικήςσυνείδησης [Apocalypse, utopia and history: thetransformations of historical consciousness]   Yannis Stavrakakis     doi: 10.12681/historein.238         To cite this article:  Stavrakakis, Y. (2013). Review of Antonis Liakos’s Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις τηςιστορικής συνείδησης [Apocalypse, utopia and history: the transformations of historical consciousness]. Historein, 13,104–107. https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.238Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)https://epublishing.ekt.gr  |  e-Publisher: EKT  |  Downloaded at: 06/12/2022 02:21:50Book Reviews104cepts of cultural policies – the proclamation of a “savant” art, which deserves to be protected by the state and is not subject to the laws of the market – in favour of a culture of divertisse-ment, which is not entitled to such protection due to its massive appeal; fourth, an increas-ing justification of the necessity of cultural poli-cy based on its contribution to economic devel-opment and in striking a balance between the social diversity of nations.In an era of tremendous social and political change, and where the comparative approach has arrived at the heart of scientific research, the present edition is an “exercise of active memory”. It enables the exchange of valuable knowledge and experience at a high level of expertise in the field of cultural policy. It is cer-tain that it will serve as a powerful instrument in the hands of everyone who seeks to deter-mine what it really means to have a public pol-icy at the service of culture and how this policy could be improved if seen in the light of inter-national theory and practice.Antonis LiakosΑποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης[Apocalypse, utopia and history: the transformations of historical consciousness]Athens: Polis, 2011. 478 pp.By Yannis Stavrakakis Aristotle University of ThessalonikiAccording to many accounts, we are current-ly going through a crisis of groundbreaking, even epoch-changing, proportions. The future of capitalism and democracy hangs in the bal-ance, with the link between them – galvanised, in the west, by the welfare-state compromise – weakening continuously, opening the road to all sorts of unpredictable outcomes with-in an extremely volatile global picture. How can we imagine the future? Is there anything that guarantees the realisation of the desire invested in the products of our imagination? And how does our perception of the past in-fluence this process? All these questions, brought once more to the fore by the global crisis, are hardly new; they have existed along-side the development of historical conscious-ness since antiquity. Examining how different societies and social groups, different eras and intellectual traditions (religious, political, scien-tific, etc) have dealt with such issues can prove an invaluable resource in assisting us in our present predicament. This is the daunting task that Antonis Liakos sets himself in this new book. And it is a task that he manages to bring to fruition with incredible erudition and atten-tion to detail, by articulating a vast number of sources and accounts in a coherent, 480-page-long argument, which is both instructive and 105HISTOREIN VOLUME 13 (2013)pedagogical in its scope as well as powerful and challenging in its implications.From the outset, Liakos makes clear what the reader is to expect from his inquiry: “How can [people] think, if possible in a compre-hensive way, the past, the present and the fu-ture? How can they reflect on all the utopias that have vanished, utopias that transformed into dystopias as well as realities that proved to be postutopian? The subject of the book is this question: How – through the expectations, the fulfilments and the frustrations – was our historical consciousness transformed?” (16). It becomes clear that the aim of the book is to study the transformations marking our rela-tionship with the past, both in terms of the dis-cursive repertoires employed to conquer, rep-resent and control access to it (religious texts, utopian narratives, scientific historical tradi-tions, etc) and in terms of the (individual and collective) desires guiding these articulations and over-determining their future-oriented axis. In other words, “historical consciousness is to be examined in relation to apocalypse, utopia and history” (18). Past and future, fear and hope, destruction and construction are thus to be studied in their – often overlooked – mutual engagement. This is obviously a long and demanding journey; in order to facilitate our participation in it, Liakos has organised his material into three distinct parts: The first part deals with the formation of historical consciousness from the early Christian years to the beginning of moder-nity, when apocalypse, utopia and history antagonised each other in constructing the new world. In the second part we will see history autonomising and transforming it-self, through the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, through the scientific and technological will to change the world. Finally, in the third part, which is concerned with the twentieth century and its implica-tions, we will engage with the paradox of turning to history through the boldest ex-perimentations with the future. We will en-counter the entanglement with history at the same time that its meaning was lost. The creation of a historical culture. (18–19)By imaginatively staging the dialectical en-counter between these three moments or tropes – apocalypse, utopia and history – Li-akos reveals the latent currents linking them together. Utopia and history are thus revealed as two distinct but interconnected types of dis-cursive architectonics, of the past and of the future, that cannot exist in separation. What is at stake here, then, is to explore the mutu-al engagement between historical and utopi-an thought. As for the linkage between utopia and apocalypse, here the connection is more obvious to the extent that utopian discourse has often reoccupied a millenarian terrain of temporality, genealogically linked with earli-er apocalyptic and eschatological narratives. In turn, history has structured historical time in ways that can only be illuminated through a comparison between the philosophy of history and eschatological grammar.It is obviously very difficult to do justice to such a complex, dense and extensive argument within the scope of a rather limited review. I will try, however, to highlight some of its ex-tremely productive aspects and stress some of its innovative conclusions. For a start, it is important to register the critical distance that Liakos takes from an idealised understanding of his own profession: he is very much aware of the different types of historein, the different ways in which distinct cultures represent their past; in addition, he is not afraid to accept the constitutive ambiguity that this recognition in-troduces into his subject-matter (61). But, in-terestingly enough, this distance does not Book Reviews106translate into cold detachment; on the contra-ry, the way he presents the relation between history and prophecy, the apocalyptic imagi-nary, and the implications of eschatological temporality all reveal empathy and a strong determination to trace the importance of such phenomena for our current predicament. In addition, the accounts offered manage to cap-ture the antithetical political investments and uses in which theological concepts have been implicated, sanctioning both historical continu-ity and obedience as well as rupture and revo-lutionary change (112, 132, 139).This constitutive ambiguity that Liakos is so good at acknowledging must have been, how-ever, intolerable for many (individuals and communities) throughout the ages. In fact, modernity itself has marked an attempt to es-cape this ambiguity and refound human con-sciousness and behaviour on new rational, ob-jective and stable grounds (148). By embracing modernity and the nation-state, by becoming in its turn a mechanism that uses the past to consecrate and legitimise the present, histo-riography detached itself from envisaging an alternative future, something that became the constituency of utopia (165). Here Liakos’ abil-ity to map the complex dialectic between uto-pia, history and power relations, between what is recognised as scientific/progressive and what is not, and – most importantly – between the “benign” and the “malignant” repercussions of what counts as science (the case of theories of evolution is indicative in this respect, see 222) is to be thoroughly recognised and cel-ebrated. The same applies to his treatment of the relationship between historical conscious-ness and national identification, something he has already researched in his previous work. What marks the radical crisis of the utopian imaginary – with all its eschatological over-tones – is clearly the dystopian realities pro-duced by the attempts to implement it within modernity (with the Holocaust and the Gu-lag being two associations that immediate-ly spring to mind). Liakos follows closely this crisis and traces the new (ethicopolitical) bur-dens and challenges it places on historical dis-course: history assumes the role of a redemp-tive process of recognition of past traumas, the public function of collective memory (319). However, this role and this function can only be something articulated a posteriori through the active intervention of the historian as a bear-er of a particular ethical duty or collective mis-sion. At the same time, it marks the evacuation of history itself from meaning, an aporia regis-tered in contemporary historiography. Liakos relates this development with antihumanist trends in European philosophy and gradually articulates its more promising aspects as they have been reflected in English social history, where the intellectual praxis of history involves an (ethicoscientific) exercise enabling us to es-cape determinism and acknowledge the open-ness of the future (346–7). The postmodern turn, the debate on the so-called “end of his-tory” and the limits of the human in an age of cyborgs constitute the topical themes bring-ing this long journey to a close. This indeed re-mains an open-ended exercise and the read-er is left in an aporetic state. However, Liakos’ accomplishment is that this is not a frustrated aporia, an aporia that induces ontological un-certainty and angst; precisely because by go-ing through the 480 pages of the book, on top of accumulating useful information, the reader has also acquired a new reflexive ethos, a new ability to deal with history and the multitude of challenges it poses. Most importantly in my view is that this book will be able to cultivate this ethos in an audi-ence that extends well beyond the group of professional historians. It is addressed to the average interested/learned reader and will 107HISTOREIN VOLUME 13 (2013)prove a work of reference for years to come, both in terms of its rich content as well as of its straightforward and reflexive style. By avoiding any type of determinist argument, by opening itself to a type of informed, interdisci-plinary free association, so much lacking from our academic literature, Liakos negotiates a safe passage through an immense variety of traditions and debates, endowing the read-er with equal freedom to associate and draw her/his own informed conclusions. The result of meticulous study and of an unrelenting de-sire to highlight the intertextuality of historical discourse as a sign of richness and intellec-tual advancement, rather than as a danger for some sort of essentialist purity, this is a contri-bution of immense power and reach.Nikolas RoseThe Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First CenturyPrinceton & Oxford: Princeton UP, 2007. 350 pp.By Vasia LekkaUniversity of AthensThere is, it might be said, too much de-scription, too little analysis, too little criti-cism. Where so many judge, however, I tried to avoid judgment, merely to sketch out a preliminary cartography of an emer-gent form of life and the possible futures it embodies. And in doing so, not to judge, but I hope, to help make judgment pos-sible. To open the possibility that, in part through thought itself, we might be able to intervene in that present, and so to shape something of the future we might inhabit (258–259). With these words, Nikolas Rose sums up quite successfully the main purpose of his The Poli-tics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Sub-jectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Rose, the author of major works in the field of social sci-ences, such as The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939 (1985), Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (1989) and Pow-ers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (1999), has done extensive work on a variety of issues, extending from eugenics to the con-stitution of the modern subject and the links between biomedicine, biopolitics and bioethics. In recent decades, there has been a remark-able trend among historians, social scientists and philosophers to focus on the relations be-Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Review of Antonis Liakos's Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης [Apocalypse, utopia and history: the transformations of historical consciousness]

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Review of Antonis Liakos's Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία: Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης [Apocalypse, utopia and history: the transformations of historical consciousness]

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