The A-signifying Semiotics of the Cyprus Divide

Abbreviations

CP – the Cyprus Problem

Abstract

In societies split via interethnic conflicts, how can one envision a space where people are no longer confined in the temporal homogeneity and teleological linearity of nationalist discourses? Can the principles of autopoiesis and a-signifying semiotics–developed by French intellectual-activist Félix Guattari–constitute points of departure from ethnic nationalism propagated by history education?

This essay illuminates certain aspects of the cultural milieu that mediate the conscience of subsequent generations in divided Cyprus. At stake will be the ways by which young Greek-Cypriots are subjected to practices of identity formation through

‘historical sedimentation,’ leading to their loss of selfhood ‘in the signifying process of cultural identification.’ [1]

As a counterpoint, this research paper ventures an a-signifying process of cultural cartography that does not reproduce an already-constructed reality. Rather, it pre-generates a reality that is yet-to-come, no longer in a mimetic but in a poietic, experimental fashion.

I. Introduction

As independent yet still ethnically separated Cyprus joins Europe and assimilates the jargon of multiculturalism, the exclusionary attitudes towards the ethnic Other are palpable in its cultural self-determination. The opening of the checkpoints on the Green Line on April 23, 2003 was greeted with unbridled optimism by the international community. The “Green Line” refers to the territorial division and the UN-supervised civilian movement across the United Nations Buffer Zone.

The opening announced an end to the ethnic divide and the beginning of a European cross-ethic mobility between the Republic of Cyprus and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (henceforth TRNC). [2] Therefore, it was deemed as the prospect of reunification. A comprehensive settlement between the partitioned communities included not just a confederation with two constituent regions, but also political and power equality.

The Foundation Agreement of the island’s reunification was expounded by the UN Secretary, Kofi Annan (hereafter Annan Plan), promulgating simultaneous referenda to the two parties on April 24, 2004. Whereas it was approved by the Turkish-Cypriot electorate, it was suspended by Greek-Cypriots. Since a bi-federal and bi-zonal solution for the CP seemed feasible, why did the Greek-Cypriot populace vote against it? Evidently, the “loosening” of legal and state border strictures produced new kinds of frontiers that intensified rather than upended the divide.

Arguably, the controlling authorities of the Green Line extended the territorial, physical border to an external, mental boundary. But how did the opening of the cross points proliferate the symbolic meanings of the Zone – namely, the Cyprus divide?

In addressing the trope of transferred memory–inter- and trans-generational, familial and cultural–Eva Hoffman contemplates the paradox of indirect knowledge about the Holocaust. She says:

‘The [Holocaust has] informed our biographies, threatening sometimes to overshadow […] our own lives,’ while their connection to it has been shaped by ‘mediated forms of knowledge.’ [3]

Similarly, collective remembrance of the inter-communal struggle in contemporary Cyprus is effectuated through imaginative investment instead of recall. In postcolonial nations such as Cyprus, history education strives to

‘recover the past and reclaim a distinct national identity in the new political order.’ [4]

Such intention suggests a collapse of the nexus among subject, responsibility, and action. The image of the future as a cause of and a retreat to a national past, rather than an advance towards new paradigms, constitutes an effect of imagination and delusion for a reunified island. Not only does this causality impede the reunification of Cyprus, but also, allegorically speaking, it results in a generational annihilation.

What the Annan Plan failed to acknowledge is that the mechanisms of memory for contemporary Greek-Cypriots differ from those of their ancestors. Regarding the post-1974 generation, for whom the living-with-the-divide condition is incommensurable with that of their predecessors, what one confronts here is the problem of “being”: how does the Greek-Cypriot youth be in a space premised on its non-being?

It is my contention that Greek-Cypriots are “born disappearing”, for they cannot experience any real trauma except ‘the belated temporality’ of it. [5] Their memorial inheritance of the split relies on different frames of reference beyond the historical associated with what Dominick LaCapra describes as “structural trauma”, which I will further elucidate to what follows.

What is thus entailed for a people that have been hitherto politically invisible? It is in the usurpation of agency that an alternative logic can arise and herald a potentiality for a non-historically determined future, one that is kept open as a political choice.

II. Methodology

Besides its divisive functionality, the Green Line was imbued with connotative significations. The cultural semiotics surrounding the ethnic partition and the political goal for reunification are filtered through local knowledge. The last is crystallised based on which ethnic community one belongs to and their political stance on one of the two sides of the divide.

Herein, it is ascribed to socio-cultural factors, notably those of history education in Greek-Cypriot schools. In allotting a pivotal place to Greek-Cypriot historiography, I do not mean to devalue that of Turkish-Cypriots. However, the refusal of Greek-Cypriots to conceptualise Cyprus as a “hybrid genus”, following the efforts of the leftist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) for a bi-communal education reform in 2003, implies their not-so-fervent desire for a joint state. [6] Their evasive reciprocity for conflict resolution makes conspicuous the ideological undercurrent they seek to dissimulate.

This essay interrogates the multiple significations–abounding in the curriculum of the Greek-Cypriot education system–and their contribution in solidifying national identities. Inasmuch as Greek-Cypriot meta-discourses transmit a series of events as a historical inevitability, they will divulge the ways by which they inhibit action. By revisiting them in a manner that reveals some of their omissions and discontinuities shall dismantle their epistemic certitude, as well as uncover their status as national myths.

To this end, I seek recourse to French theorist Roland Barthes and his text Mythologies in order to examine the workings of myth making. Given that Cyprus is ‘caught in the midst of contested definitions’ and ‘remains an unresolved political question,’ it would be fair to consider it as a state in the making; not one that is but rather one that becomes. [7]

To expose the productive effect of historiography’s betrayal to truth claims is to recognise its inability to attest to the particularity of past events while tackling their reverberation in the present. This points to a truth that rests elsewhere; somewhere that remains to be discovered. Drawing from Félix Guattari’s innovative brand of semiotics and its attendant species of partial-signs, I wish to challenge the dynamics of dominant nationalist ideologies by proposing a micropolitical ethnography of resistance.

III. Historical overview

Touching upon the issue of Cypriot historiography parallels an entry to an academic and political battlefield in that many texts were written from various authors during interethnic upheavals. [8] Most of them used history as the underpinning for their political position’s claim to legitimacy and sovereignty against each other. Albeit contested in nature, an overview of the island’s history is vital in setting the scene.

For Cyprus, three consecutive centuries under the Ottoman yoke were superseded by British colonisers in 1878. Ethno-nationalism, as a negatively defined ideology, took hostage of the two rival communities in the twentieth century. Many Greek and Turkish-Cypriots witnessed a double patriotism that protracted their inter-communal clash. While a regional identification with the island prevailed, a national penchant for Greek and Turkish ancestral roots was also eminent.

As Zelia Gregoriou asserts:

[T]he nationalist orientation to motherlands (Greece and Turkey) would not have survived the emergence of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot identities and the mutual reclaim of Cypriotness if the border […] did not continue to feed the irredentist sentiments of old nationalisms. (Gregoriou, 2003: 3)

Whereas Greek-Cypriots espoused Enosis (union) with Greece, Turkey campaigned for a policy of division (Taksim). By 1960, Greek-Cypriots reclaimed land from Britain. Through the “Treaty of Guarantee” that Greece, Britain and Turkey co-signed, Cyprus obtained its territorial integrity as the Republic of Cyprus. This meant that the three involved parties, including the newly independent state, had to renounce their Enosis/Taksim ambitions.

In 1963, an interethnic dispute erupted and lasted until 1967, with Turkish-Cypriots suffering the most casualties and population displacements. In the same year, Greece’s military junta rose to power and reinvigorated Greek-Cypriots’ aspiration for Enosis. However, Cyprus’ President, Archbishop Makarios, declined alliance with the Greek dictatorship. His policy shift instigated the wrath of Greek-Cypriot nationalists who staged a coup against him on July 15, 1974. This brought the Turkish invasion of the island and the intervention of the UN Peacekeeping Force that instituted the segregating Green Line and rendered the North and the South two distinct domains (UNFICYP).

The exposure of Cyprus to foreign influences has been the catalyst for the linguistic, cultural, and religious contours of identity to be inscribed. The ambivalent character of Cypriot history fuelled propagandistic and competing interethnic narratives. The implication here being that historiography and nationalism are indissociable deploying history education as the conduit for the ideological agendas of semiotic regimes and causal hierarchies.

The Greek-Cypriot syllabus adopts an analogous model to ethnic nationalism: it accentuates the suffering of the Self while fostering essentialism irrespective of contradiction. Proffering national identity as a given determinant marker, rather than as nascent under specific historical conditions, is symptomatic of homogenisation. National discourses are treated as supra-historical natural entities: anchored in the exclusionary matrix of a hypostasised “common descent” – often promoting continuity and ties through blood. This is a type of kinship arrangement that is common to all Greek-Cypriots insofar as it illuminates the intricacies of none. By virtue of this dualistic pairing of Self/Other, the self-identified monoethnic nation is at once

‘in-itself and extrinsic to other nations.’ [9]

To complicate matters in the instance of Cyprus, one deals with a nation split within itself where the so-called

‘securiti[s]ation of the Greek polis and the exclusion of the Turkish Cypriot [fellow citizens] is normalised.’ [10]

IV. The Annals Genre is a Depolitised Speech

Education in Cyprus is entrusted with the task of interpreting an ongoing and unsolved problem. Nurturing national identities and the collectivity of national bodies is paramount in preserving a continuous flow of experience of past and future. For Homi Bhabha, the evocation of an unalterable national past and–for Cyprus–the advocacy for a future unified island comprises an aporia that incarcerates the post-1974 generation in a ‘double time’ where:

[T]he people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given […] historical origin of event; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification [that] demonstrate the […] living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process. (Bhabha, 2001: 297)

This temporal double-ness begets the conditions for a new national imaginary inasmuch as the latter fulfils the demand for national survival. The Bhabhian ‘double time’ abides by the decrees of history on ethnic nationalism bearing witness to the delimiting strata of the past in relation to the future.

History teaching in Cyprus is performative in its perpetuation of an ever-present chain of signifiers, which brings forth expressions of nationalism. Words make sense through familiar intra-social referents and codes, thereby constituting ample purveyors of a ‘plenitudinous present’ that bestows ‘eternal visibility’ to a national past. [11]

Formal historical accounts on Cyprus testify to a complex temporal structure in which several leitmotifs of communal memory in the present stem from the nineteenth or erstwhile centuries. This creates a national-historical time that confers visibility to the trope of “Hellenism” as the centric, prevalent topos of Greek-Cypriot historiography; either eliding or subordinating Turkish-Cypriots in order to validate its nationalist credentials.

Here, topos accommodates a double meaning: “topos” as place that exemplifies the unwavering pursuit of Greek-Cypriots for annexation to Greece; and as a literary theme that corresponds to the overarching tenets of Greek-Cypriot schoolbooks organised around the history of Greece and the doctrine of Christian Orthodoxy. As this historical format demonstrates, other, “eccentric” figures such as Turkish-Cypriots–let alone the authorisation of a Cypriotist identity discourse–have no rightful position in Cypriot history.

To complement this, Yiannis Papadakis maintains that the canonised ontology of Greek-Cypriot history teaching is akin to an ‘identification stance.’ This refers to stories of national heritage that breed

‘a sense of group membership’ where ‘historic societal achievements [are] used to justify contemporary social arrangements or political actions.’ [12]

His observation resonates profoundly with Barthes’ fine distinction between linguistic and metalinguistic figures. Unlike the language-object, which is a

‘purely signifying’ system that speaks things–hence acts them–the metalinguistic, representational plane of a ‘purely imagining’ structure ‘speaks of things’ and celebrates them (his emphasis). [13]

Myth finds its accomplice in the face of the medieval Greek hero, Digenis Akritas, who embodies the constituent attributes of mythic speech. These are:

[A] meaning, which was the real [Akritas], that of history; a signifier, which was the ritual invocation to [Akritas], and the inevitable character of the ‘natural’ epithets with which his name was surrounded [such as St. George or St Dimitrios]; a signified, which was the intention to respect orthodoxy, [patriotism and duty], appropriated by the [Greek culture]; and a signification, which was a sanctified, [institutionalised Akritas], whose historical determinants [were] grounded in nature, sublimated under the name [“Young Warrior Saint”]. (Barthes: 1957: 147, his emphasis)

In such form, the historical object (Akritas) impoverishes itself. It exceeds its meaning and naturalises itself, thereby forming an

‘inverted image of an unchanging humanity, characterised by an indefinite repetition of its identity.’ [14]

This repetition is best instantiated in Greek-Cypriot history. The impact of Akritas’ myth on Greek-Cypriots is manifest both in the naming of Cyprus as Akritikí Megalónisos (The Big Island on the Border)–which subsumes Greek-Cypriots under the heroic analogues of the Greek imaginary–and by the nickname of a Cypriot guerrilla of the 1955-59 revolutionaries, General Georgios Grivas, as Grivas Digenis. Consequently, the death of Greek-Cypriot war defenders is perceived as sacred.

What is problematic about the narration of historical accounts as archetypal Hellenic totalities and representations of religious dogmata is that it neutralises their political or even demotic character. Hayden White explains that the idiom of this epic narrativization

‘is predicated on a notion of continuity, in […] the presence of a single central actor,’

the Greek national figure of Akritas, with which pupils–as members of a (national) community–must relate in all its suffering and/or nobility. [15]

Such narrative figurations blur the boundaries between national history and national narrative, for they postulate a didactic story filled with moral orders that Greek-Cypriots must obey. The narrative memorialisation of the two real historical figures showcases the celebratory hue of this mobile, yet recurrent heroic analogy. When history is presented in this way, it standardises

‘a blissful clarity [where] things appear to mean something by themselves’ on pseudo-objective grounds. [16]

In the same vein, the events of the 1960s interethnic conflict in a secondary schoolbook are relayed from a partial Greek-Cypriot perspective; at once

‘formal and historical, semiological and ideological.’ [17]

Turkish-Cypriots cannot assume

‘access to social existence unless [they are] previously reduced to the state’

of simulacra as “mutineer Turks” that are held accountable for the struggle. [18] This period is construed as one of extremities by the “Turks” (both Turkish-Cypriots and Turkey) against the “Greeks” (Greek-Cypriots). It is also received as a period of mostly “Greek” strife when Turkish fighter planes ‘spread catastrophe and death among the civilian population,’ despite the fact that the Turkish-Cypriot trauma was far greater than that of Greek-Cypriots. [19]

More accurately, “Turks” is an oft-cited derogatory nomenclature that typifies an imagined demonology. In their portrayals, Turkish-Cypriots are relegated to a larger historical category that prescribes them a reductive set of subjectivities intoned as bloodthirstiness/hostility/brutality. This so-called allogeneic group of signifiers contrasts with the notion of sacrificial death and the corollary patterns of sanctity and heroism that Greek-Cypriots resolutely replicate.

As Papadakis rightly contends:

‘this practice inculcates in the historical consciousness of Greek-Cypriots the belief’ that ‘there have never been any other indigenous population groups except the Greeks’ and ‘the presence of any Others was and is parasitic.’ [20]

For the enterprise of nation-building, these “parasitic” elements must first acquire visibility, then assimilation or elimination.

In the current climate of symbolic violence (or micro-physics of power in Foucaultian locution), binary distinctions underline difference so that to erase it. The bent to naturalise the rhetoric of national antagonism with the Turkish side

‘supervenes against a structure which is already naturali[s]ed, depolitici[s]ed by a general metalanguage.’ [21]

The epistemological generalisations that demonise and sublate Turkish-Cypriots into a dialectical opposition with Greek-Cypriots reveal the historian’s ideological thesis and distorted take on historical records. In fact, they confirm what Bhabha professes as the “representative” authority

‘in the fullness of narrative time and visual synchrony of the sign.’ [22]

The historian appropriates one common signifier (“Turks”) while weaving metalingual threads into the tapestry of other significations and forms (hostility/savagery).

As the lived memories of 1974 turned into an inherited post-trauma, the exigency to nourish a longing for return to the Turkish-occupied north resumes to be politically pressing. The educational mantra “Never forget and struggle”, incorporated in Greek-Cypriot schools in the mid-1980s, became a pedagogical and moral framework prompting students to conserve the struggle for a unified island.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that for the Greek-Cypriot youth this national objective is discursively vacuous: it fails to afford a vision of the future in a reunified Cyprus. The lacunae left by these new nationalisms is restored through other imaginings and nostalgic yearnings. Following LaCapra, a “crisis or catastrophe” can be reconstituted as

‘the origin or renewed origin of the myth’ in order to ‘serve an ideological function’ and sanction policies ‘that appeal to it for justification.’ [23]

Regarding Cyprus, the itinerary of rehabilitated nationalisms spirals around two focal aims: first, to preclude the cultivation of a Cypriot national identity–encompassing Greek and Turkish sensibilities; second, to deprive pupils of the political freedom to choose a concept of “Being” and citizenship that is no longer congruous with essentialist or autochthonic terms.

The educational credo “Never forget and struggle” performs a Saussurean redoubling that presupposes subjects of modern thought as transcendent and empirical. The phrase’s signifying semiology posits a concatenation of already ‘formed substances’ of content and expression. These reside

‘along the horizontal syntagmatic axis’ and combine with a virtual constellation of ‘substances along the vertical paradigmatic axis.’

The ‘signification and interpretation along these two axes’ works in tandem ‘with an individuation of subjectivity.’ The last involves the linguistic ‘subject of enunciation’ (the “Never forget and struggle” instruction) and the personal ‘subject of the enunciated’ (the young Greek-Cypriots), ‘both of which are subjugated to the signifying chain.’ [24]

Christopher Hitchen’s ironic sentiments on the Cyprus divide are relevant to this rigid segmentation of the sign. If ‘another wall fell’ with the territorial border opening but the mental, internal division remained intact, then Cypriots are condemned to a life as

“people long written-off as hopeless victims of ‘ancient hatreds’ and tribal feelings.” [25]

When modes of critical inquiry such as historiography imitate trauma, they violate their commitment to objective-truth claims. By enacting an international politics of reunification, the UN force participated in a larger signifying system of knowledge-formation that continues to modulate the remembrance of the past. [26] This strategy is imperialist in the sense that it colonises, tabulates and reduces the CP to language.

Furthermore, the manifestation of the CP as a matter of national security has served as a regulatory routine, for its demarcation mobilised narratives of victimisation and consolidated national identities. Young Greek-Cypriots are recast as a submissive group to a subjectivity. In epitomising what LaCapra names structural trauma, they operate as performing bodies of victimhood accounting for a national tragedy and defunct spectres they only share a symbolic relation with.

The above accounts are framed to corroborate nationalistic selective memory processes. Ethnographic research conducted by Papadakis across different age and ethnic groups surfaces a series of incompatible chronologies and topologies of the Green Line. Whereas Greek-Cypriot elders locate the partition during the violent outbreaks in the 1960s, the young correlate division with 1974. [27] Above all, Turkish-Cypriot history is not only informed by a different chronological order, but also by a varied topology of the divide. Instead of a singular genealogy of the division, these views originate numerous

‘ethnic clustering behind walls of fear, securiti[s]ation and restriction.’ [28]

What is paradoxical about Cypriot historiographic explorations is that they impart different interpretive schemata of the same history, while appointing a polarity to Greek and Turkish-Cypriots. As Barthes clarifies, myth

‘is filled with a situation’ that ‘must appeal to such and such group of readers and not another.’ [29]

Qua informative and commemorative objects, history books attend to the dual duty of reflecting their cultural notions through the will and ‘intermediate position’ of their commissioners–be they governmental, local or state agencies–and reinforcing them. [30]

As the foregoing educational examples and findings illustrate, the crossing of borders–inaugurated with the opening of checkpoints–is not grasped as a singular event that disrupts separation. The Green Line, which was installed on August 16, 1974 to reify the ceasefire strip, became a Line: a fixed signifier and semiotic mark used to instate, circulate and regulate the peace-keeping force; as well as a self-referential register that upholds the physical, geopolitical, and ethno-cultural split.

Therefore, it is a succession of rehearsed political practices of subjection that solicits the normalisation of the divide. The figurative “normality” of the Line as a representational index and a tantamount

‘interpellatory capacity of the state’

facilitates its performativity as a physical and mental barrier. [31] The post-1974 generation is enforced to cohere along discursive lines where causes are attached to their effects.

But how can this be countered?

IV In conclusion: The Pedagogical Autopoietic Moment of Newness

Barthes is less sanguine about a mode of resistance capable of dissipating the mythic nebula of ideology. He only tangentially suggests that myths could be ruptured from within on the basis of a third-order semiological system. In the spirit of Bhabha’s call for a present that is

‘blasted out of the continuum of history’

and actualised via borderline expressions of cultural difference, Félix Guattari valorises the principle of transversality. [32] Contrary to Althusser’s ‘structural causality’ laid out by horizontal stratifications and vertical readings of phenomena, Guattari proposes a transversal topography of the social terrain. [33]

Indeed, for there to be a solution for the CP, it must be heterogeneous to the causal chain of nationalist narratives and their ritualised continuity through cycles of repetition. Concerning Cyprus, a transversal operation neither involves the utopian conception of a tabula rasa for regional expressions of Cypriotism nor resolves the Greek/Turkish-Cypriot binary. It merely re-negotiates the border-crossing experience as an event of chance encounters rather than ready-made judgements.

In this respect, it marks a decisive shift from the textuality of the “archive”, i.e., namely, the stratified forms of retrospective knowledge–to the territoriality of the “map” or “diagram”–or what I designate as a local, micropolitical ethnography of resistance. Maps and diagrams are open,

‘detachable and reversible, susceptible to constant modification,’

and thus eschew settled spatio-temporal coordinates. [34] They neither reproduce the transnational and empirical servitude to “motherlands” nor represent a transcendent Idea for a grand European scheme of reunification. Rather, they inflect the above two to the extent that they are near-indistinguishable, albeit incompatible, from the thing mapped.

Guattari’s modus operandi features the modes of subjectivation and the social codification of signs, both of which he entwines with

‘political forces coming from a possible outside.’ [35]

His declared “outside” refers to existential territories that can emerge and confound us as unforeseeable events. The Greek-Cypriot educational system forecloses responsibility granting no freedom to the Greek-Cypriot youth for political action–much less to Turkish-Cypriots against whom an uncritical hatred is all the more amplified. Not to take part in any political programme, constantly in fear of some unreasonable alterity, would throw Greek-Cypriots into a metaphysical trap that looms in their silencing of Turkish-Cypriots.

For a re-politicisation, Guattari invokes an ethico-aesthetic rather than an apolitical and scientific methodology. In a word, his method is one of experimentation at the expense of interpretation. The latter tautological model gazes backwards to an already-known homogeneity; the former creative cartography of de-hierarchical subjectivities looks sideways into the future of an undreamed-of heterogeneity. Transversality

‘puts together semiotic links and a great interweaving of material and social fluxes.’[36]

This leaping across scales of

‘the social and the subjective, the material and the semiotic’

resounds on the same wavelength with Bhabha’s theory of in-betweenness. [37] But unlike Bhabha who emphasises the consensual or conflictual qualities of these interstitial affairs, Guattari favours a processual exchange of values, where a subject ‘engenders itself as existential territory’ through a process of singularisation he calls autopoiesis. [38]

The autopoietic nuclei of subjectivation introduces the aesthetic paradigm proper: it is

‘a force for seizing the creative potentiality at the root of the sensible finitude’ before it yields to representational lures. [39]

The axiomatic turn from the rhetoric of temporality to a more politicised spatiality mobilises the experimental politics of what I term “aestheticised democracy”.

Just as a cartographic subjectivation engages in an interface between the discursive and non-discursive, so too are diagrammatic points indispensable to sign production. Albeit antinomic in Saussurean Law, Guattari has been labelled as a radical materialist semiotician. For him, the privilege that Saussure accords to form over matter is no longer tenable.

Indebted to Louis Hjelmslev’s algebraic modality of glossematics, Guattari propounded the diagrammatic mode of a-signifying semiotics. Detouring through Hjelmslev’s expression-content and form-substance dichotomies, Guattari elicited the third, singular layer of “purport” or matter as suitable to his diagrams. As Hjelmslev states, ‘the purport is an amorphous continuum’ that language turns into formed substances. [40] Interestingly, these two interpenetrate one another, for language congeals purport into form ‘by the form’s being projected on to the purport […] on an undivided surface’ and in reciprocal solidarity. [41]

This means that to free Greek and Turkish-Cypriots from the double-bind that subordinates them to the formal signifying chain of signifiers as national Greeks/Turks composites is to initiate interactions across the affective and existential continuum of the matter.

As Simon O’Sullivan aptly puts it:

‘the diagram […] is its ability […] to communicate without meaning.’ [42]

In Cypriot terms, the tenor of diagrammatic thinking is neither reiterative nor explicatory of the inherited post-1974 trauma. To the contrary: it is coterminous with real time-space, working through and moving things on to lived life in pragmatic, transformative dimensions. The function of “aestheticised democracy” can be situated in the amorphous plane of material flows and abstract figurae. Having ‘the role of a partial enunciator’ for contingent facial, gestural and nonsensical semiotic articulations, it interrupts the performative language of historicism nestling within the syntagmatic and paradigmatic networks of signification and denotation. [43]

Greek-Cypriots will sustain their political non-beingness if the national allegiance to Greece perseveres or the onus of reunification arrives from external players. It is in complexifying linguistic variables that this a-signifying economy of partial-signs accedes to discourse. In doing so, it carves out new pathways of reference for the northern and southern parts of Cyprus. Due to their unfamiliarity, however, these a-signifying figures do not address an already existing community. Rather, they lay the groundwork for a community-yet-to-come.

The more a-signification communicates with the singular components of matter, the more amenable it becomes to a collective enunciation in place of a monolithic individuation. If Greek-Cypriots are let to discover their common culture and mutual suffering with Turkish-Cypriots, they can re-engineer their volatile past together. Rather than filling the lacunas of history teaching within the discursive encodings of language, they can usher processual, creative moments across an unformed continuum that is coextensive with the social sphere.

These moments can be incarnated in local, micro-dispersions such as bi-communal workshops and/or joint education research projects, which will animate a critical, multi-perspectival approach towards history. Under the aegis of a-signifying semiotics, the micropolitical ethnography will emancipate the future from the manacles of the present, while lending back to the latter the full potentiality of its becoming contra its performativity. For every historical, pedagogical configuration of strata, there is always an aleatoric, autopoietic rupture. The event of reunification is yet to throw the dice and map out its passage across the Green Line.

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[1] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 2001), p. 153.

[2] In 1983, the self-proclamation of statehood from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was decried as legally invalid. Instead, the UN Security Council recognised the Republic of Cyprus as the country’s sole valid authority, which led to an international economic embargo against the TRNC. Suggestively, the economic gap deepened the ethnic separation.

[3] Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public

Affairs, 2004), p. 25.

[4] Miranda Christou, ‘A Double Imagination Memory and Education in Cyprus’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2006), 285–30, p. 285.

[5] Dominick LaCapra, Writing, History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p 82.

[6] Turkish-Cypriots invited Greek-Cypriots in a curricular affiliation that would foreground not just their diplomatic inter-ethnic instabilities, but also their socio-cultural cooperation. Their revisionist endeavour suggests a resurgence of a pre-nationalist phase for Turkish people during the Ottoman Empire, where a primordial co-existence between Muslims and Christians juxtaposes the current ethnic dispute.

[7] Christou, ‘A Double Imagination Memory and Education in Cyprus,’ p. 286.

[8] For a comprehensive academic survey and multi-authored historical accounts, see Andreas Polydorou, Istoria tis Kyprou (History of Cyprus) (Nicosia: YAP, 1991).

[9] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 148.

[10] Zelia Gregoriou, ‘Reckoning with the divide in Cyprus: The Performativity of Borders’ HAGAR Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2006), p. 3.

[11] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 151.

[12] Yiannis Papadakis, ‘Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus’ History & Memory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008), p. 129.

[13] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 143.

[14] Barthes, Mythologies, p. 141.

[15] Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (London: Johns Hopkins university Press, 1990), p. 25.

[16] Barthes, Mythologies, p. 159.

[17] Barthes, Mythologies, p. 111.

[18] Ibid., p. 152.

[19] Vally Lytra, When Greek and Turks Meet: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship since 1923 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), p. 129.

[20] Papadakis, ‘Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus,’ p. 132.

[21] Barthes, Mythologies, p. 143.

[22] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 144

[23] LaCapra, Writing, History, Writing Trauma, p. xii.

[24] Bruno Bosteels, ‘From Text to Territory: Félix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious’ in Deleuze & Guattari New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 162-3.

[25] Gregoriou, ‘Reckoning with the divide in Cyprus: The Performativity of Borders,’ p. 7.

[26] See Thomas M. Wilson, Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) for a more detailed analysis of borders.

[27] Yiannis Papadakis, ‘The politics of memory and forgetting in Cyprus’ Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2004), 139-54.

[28] Gregoriou, ‘Reckoning with the divide in Cyprus: The Performativity of Borders,’ p. 11.

[29] Barthes, Mythologies, p. 119.

[30] Ibid., p. 139.

[31] Louis Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (New York: Monthly Review Press: 1971), 170-7.

[32] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 8.

[33] For Althusser’s theorisation of structural causality, see Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 182-93.

[34] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 12.

[35] Bosteels, ‘From Text to Territory,’ p. 154. Here, subjectivation refers to subject-formations irreducible to normative parameters. For a relevant extensive critique, see Nick Butler, ‘Subjectivity and Subjectivation’ in Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies (London: SAGE Books, 2011), 210-3.

[36] Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, trans. Janis Forman (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 223.

[37] Bosteels, ‘From Text to Territory,’ p. 152.

[38] Félix Guattari, ‘Institutional Practice and Politics’ in The Guattari Reader, trans. Lang Baker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996), p. 125.

[39] Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 106.

[40] Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 49-60.

[41] Hjelmslev, Prolegomena, p. 57.

[42] Simon O’Sullivan, ‘On the Diagram (and the Practice of Diagrammatics)’ in Situational Diagram, eds. K Schneider and B Yasar (New York: Dominique Lévy, 20 06), 13-25, p. 14.

[43] Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 18.

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Bibliography

Althusser, Louis, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (New York: Monthly Review Press: 1971)

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972)

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Christou, Miranda, ‘A Double Imagination Memory and Education in Cyprus’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2006)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

Gregoriou, Zelia, ‘Reckoning with the divide in Cyprus: The Performativity of Borders’ HAGAR Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2006)

Guattari, Félix, Molecular Revolution, trans. Janis Forman (New York: Penguin, 1984)

_______, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)

_______, ‘Institutional Practice and Politics’ in The Guattari Reader, trans. Lang Baker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996)

Hjelmslev, Louis, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press)

Hoffman, Eva, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004)

LaCapra, Dominick, Writing, History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2001)

Lytra, Vally, When Greek and Turks Meet: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship since 1923 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014)

O’Sullivan, Simon, ‘On the Diagram (and the Practice of Diagrammatics)’ in Situational Diagram, eds. K Schneider and B Yasar (New York: Dominique Lévy, 2006)

Papadakis, Yiannis, ‘The politics of memory and forgetting in Cyprus’ Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2004)

_______, ‘Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus’ History & Memory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008)

White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (London: Johns Hopkins university Press, 1990)

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The A-signifying Semiotics of the Cyprus Divide last modified: 16 December 2020

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