Grammar and its Political Affordances The Resonance of the Middle Voice from the Greek Crisis Decade to ‘Post-Crisis’ Imaginaries

Binary modes of expression are intensified in crisis times. Recent crisis rhetoric—e.g., on the Eurozone crisis, the so-called migration crisis, COVID-19—shows an overreliance on the binary of active and passive voice, casting crisis-stricken subjects as either passive victims or (threatening) agents, responsible for their plight. Drawing on the notion of grammars of crisis, this chapter approaches grammatical categories as conceptual and interpretive lenses that can modulate understandings of subjectivity, agency, temporality, memory, and relationality. Within this framework, it tests the political affordances of the middle voice in languages of resistance that challenge the neoliberal governmentality of crisis. As a distinct grammatical category, the middle voice vanished from modern languages, but its semantics are still present in several languages. The middle voice has also been theorised as a discursive mode that unsettles dualisms between passivity and activity, subject and object. Building on such theorisations, the chapter tests its workings in three wall writings in Greece during the country’s financial crisis (2009-2018), asking: How is the middle voice mobilised in contrarian languages and how can it become a useful tool in emancipatory struggles? Can it articulate a relation to the world that resists the neoliberal governmentality of crisis? How does its use in current-day activism recast the cultural memory of past languages of resistance? To broach these questions, the chapter examines how these writings (1) intervene in the present of their emergence (the Greek ‘crisis decade’); (2) evoke and recast the past, i.e., the cultural memory of the Greek 1990s and early 2000s, as well as past social and protest movements beyond Greece; (3) resonate in today’s Greek public sphere, after the purported end of the financial crisis, as part of the cultural memory of the crisis, but also within a new political narrative of rebuilding, growth, and the promise of happiness.