ABSTRACT
The social organization of heritage reflects wider discourses of belonging and beholding one’s image in the cosmopolis of late modernity. Employing a structural model of institutional analysis whereby one instance of modernization in a marginal place of Europe is comparable and co-relational to other ones, I explore the dialogics of modernity. This supports the psychosocial study of affective leitmotifs that frame human migrations and ideological mobilities. Throughout the book I have sought to replace critical theory’s dialectics with dialogics: the Bakhtinian argument allows for a reassessment of Benjamin’s dialektische Bilder (dialectical images), prioritizing their hermeneutic adaptation in different polities. Acknowledging Adorno’s fear (Jay 1973: 206–11) that his colleague had resorted to blunt equations of commodity with the ‘archaic’ (preserved in heritage myths, for example), I support a thesis whereby creative repetitions emerge as novel productions rather than eternal returns of heritage. The Nietzschean ‘eternal return’ figures below as by-product of systemic autopoeias, sustaining the reification of anthropophagy in global consumption milieus out of institutional choice rather than instinctual or archaic inclination. Dissidence and rebellion against the system thus split Bilder production into centre-induced and lifeworld-induced without precluding communications between the two domains. The metaphor of illumination is anything but random in a book dedicated to the politics of prestige that globalization inflects through the marketing practices of creative industries. The Greek case moderates the verdict offered by globalization theorists such as Pieterse (2006: 1250) who contend that ‘cosmetic cosmopolitanism’ seeks to produce a gloss that overlays local realities (Archibugi et al. 1998; Gowan 2003). Although the argument that the market logic of such communicative globalizations has feminized the education of desire applies to Greece’s position in global value hierarchies, the search for prestige has been part of both the neoliberalization of cultural industries and critical theory’s emancipatory project.
