Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape

This chapter traces specific modalities for performing stasis and rethinking
utopianism against the backdrop of the recent financial crisis in Greece and,
generally, of conditions shaped within the totalizing order Mark Fisher has
called “capitalist realism.” Boletsi probes the ways two works deal with the
(im)possibility of resistance from within the neoliberal “now”: the short story
“Placard and Broomstick” (Ikonomou) and an Athenian wall writing that
translates as “I am bored imaginatively.” The empty placard that takes center
stage in Ikonomou’s story and the imaginative boredom registered on the walls
of Athens test different modalities of stasis against alienation, dispossession,
and the contracting of the future. Boletsi argues that both works disengage from
conceptions of subjectivity that rest on the binary of either a passive or an active
subject—either an acquiescent victim or a revolutionary hero who challenges
power from its outside. The story stages the desire for alternative languages by
registering a crisis of representation and the inadequacy of existing narratives.
The wall writing taps into the modality of the “middle voice” to reconfigure
one of the symptoms of capitalist realism—the boredom of unemployment,
consumerism, or an indebted life—into a potential resource for different modes
of being that carry glimpses of utopianism. Both works, albeit differently,
challenge neoliberal imperatives of acquiescence, normalization, or “moving
forward.” Although they stage the limited possibilities for resistance within a
totalizing system, they also enable alternative configurations of subjectivity,
agency, and futurity.