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MULTITUDINOUS SEAS

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine”, for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? (Only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice from a BBC radio broadcast 29/04/1937, from the series “Words fail me.”)

HOW SOCIETIES REMEMBER

Concerning memory as such, we may note that our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past. We experience our present world in a context which is causally connected with past events and objects, and hence with reference to events and objects which we are not experiencing when we are experiencing the present. And we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present. Hence the difficulty of extracting our past from our present: not simply because present factors tend to influence – some might want to say distort – our recollections of the past, but also because past factors tend to influence, or distort, our experience of the present. This process, it should be stressed, reaches into the most minute and everyday details of our lives. […] Concerning social memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory. To the extent that their memories of a society’s past diverge, to that extent its members can share neither experiences nor assumptions. The effect is seen perhaps most obviously when communication across generations is impeded by different sets of memories. Across generations, different sets of memories, frequently in the shape of implicit background narratives, will encounter each other so that, although physically present to one another in a particular setting, the different generations may remain mentally and emotionally insulated, the memories of one generation locked irretrievably, as it were, in the brains and bodies of that generation. […] Thus we may say that our experiences of the present largely depend upon our knowledge of the past, and that our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order. And yet these points, though true, are as they stand insufficient when thus put. For images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past, I want to argue, are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances. (Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge University Press, 1989, page 2-4.)

THE RIGHT TO APPEAR

The question of how performativity links with precarity might be summed up in these more important questions: How does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require in order to persist? It is not only that we need to live in order to act, but that we have to act, and act politically, in order to secure the conditions of existence. Sometimes the norms of recognition bind us in ways that imperil our capacity to live: What if the gender that establishes the norms required in order for us to be recognizable also does violence to us, imperils our very survival? Then the very categories that appear to promise us life take our life away. The point is not to accept such a double bind, but to strive for modes of life in which performative acts struggle against precarity, a struggle that seeks to open a future in which we might live in new social modes of existence, sometimes on the critical edge of the recognizable and sometimes in the limelight of the dominant media – but in either case, or in the spectrum between, there is a collective acting without a pre-established collective subject; rather, the “we” is enacted by the assembly of bodies, plural, persisting, acting, and laying claim to a public sphere by which one has been abandoned. (Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, page 58-59.)

NAMPHIO

Very little is known about Anafi for several centuries after the Roman period, until the islands of the Cyclades were occupied by the Venetians early in the thirteenth century after the Fourth Crusade. When Marco Sanudo (nephew of the Doge of Venice) became the first Duke of Naxos around 1205, he gifted his companions with other islands in what was then called ‘the Archipelago’, with Anafi being given to Leonardo Foscolo. Some sources say that the island was ‘lost to pirates’ in 1269, but the story is a little more interesting than this. It seems that a pirate, in the service of one of the Byzantine emperors (Michael VIII Paleologos, 1259-1282), was a native of Anafi, and captured the island from the Foscolo family and was granted both Anafi and Rhodes by the Emperor. The island reverted to Italian rule in 1307 when the Gozzadini, a Bolognese family living in Greece, recaptured it. Pirate raids continued, and local folklore claims that the villagers used to throw beehives down onto the pirates. By the early fifteenth century Anafi was ruled by William (Guglielmo) Crispo (1390-1463), who is said to have built the fortress (kastro) on the rock above the village. Traces of the original building still remain, but were greatly damaged in the Santorini earthquake of 1956. William is said to have built another fortress, named in some sources as ‘Gibitroli’ (Philippson 1899: 112, Eberhardt 1977: 579), at the eastern end of the island. William became Regent of the Duchy of Naxos during the infancy of the next Duke (at the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453), and later became fifteenth Duke, leaving his only child, his daughter, Florence, in charge of Anafi (called ‘Namfio /Namphio/ Nanfio’ in Italian). When she died the island passed to a family called the Pisani. (Margaret Kenna, Anafi – A brief guide, 2017.)