Shifting Boundaries: Language, Community and the "non-Greek speaking Greeks"

Abstract

matter, is embedded in a power/knowledge nexus. 4 It always operates at an institutional level, be it the academy, state institutions, political parties directly associated with national states, or scientific, literary, historical and political associations operating in other state formations. By privileging a conception of the nation as the ordering principle of reality, nationalist discourse forged a new thinkable order of things whereby cultural and social experience, notions of time, space and community assumed a novel significance. Here a specific relation between discourse and reality is operative. Nationalist discourse purports to express a preconstituted national entity which is accorded an objective pre-and extra-discursive status, an entity whose values, qualities and dispositions are deemed recoverable and knowable because real. In fact, rather than expressing an already existing community, nationalist discourse constitutes it by signifying aspects of experience as objective signs of national existence. Thus, the important thing is not raw experience but its particular interpretation, not reality as such but the meaning assigned to it. This could happen when particular, that is selected, questions are asked in relation to a specific vision of the community in mind by specific groups of intellectuals and bureaucrats who present themselves as expressing "national interests". In addressing historical, linguistic and cultural issues necessary to produce truth claims about the national community in view, this discourse shapes the form and direction of cognitive fields such as history, linguistics and ethnography. As such, nationalist discourse not only constructs its own symbolic realm where everything is measured against a nationally meaningful order of things. It also develops the cognitive tools to control and corroborate it. This link between nationalist discourse and knowledge entails neither the view that this discourse simply subjected aspects of knowledge under its ideological hold and therefore those cognitive fields influenced by discourse should not be counted as true, scientific knowledge, nor that discourse by rectifying its errors and classifying its formulations, through its association to these cognitive fields, undid its relations with ideology. In the first place any clear distinction between ideology and knowledge is impossible. It is crucial to understand how nationalist discourse controlled meaning and imposed its own representations of reality through its connection with the aforementioned cognitive fields, despite, or maybe because of, its ideological status. That is why I give particular importance to the operations of selection, omissions and exclusion that underpin the portrayal of the national landscape.Two examples will serve to clarify my point. A crucial element of nationalist discourse is the establishing of national continuity -a precondition of representing the nation as subject of history. The vision of continuity is indispensable to any nationalist discourse. For our pur...

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