Time, space and educational desire

Abstract

My name is Marianna Papastephanou and I teach Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education at the University of Cyprus. Until my postgraduate studies, which required settling in and travelling to and from Cardiff (Wales, UK) and later, Berlin (Germany), my life had been shaped by the interplay of rootedness and rootlessness that can be associated with living on an island of the East Mediterranean. Growing up in Massari, a small village on Rhodes, (and my mother’s descent being from another island, Tilos), spatial mobility had, until my studies, only comprised hopping from one island to the other. But, at the same time, Massari being very near the sea and the ancient city of Lindos and rather far from the modern town of Rhodes, and Tilos being a very small island of the Dodecanese but with a very rich history, facilitated a kind of temporal mobility, a contact with the past and its indelible vestiges in the surroundings. Thus, life had been marked by that kind of symbolic rootlessness that comes along with, and mitigates, the awareness of the restrictions that insular rootedness imposes, and takes the form of fascination with history, longing for knowledge about other places, languages and world politics and seeking those, as yet indirect, experiences (through books, films and the media) which enrich rooted existence. Rural life and living by the sea suffused everydayness with the more symbolically amphibious element of being, the split subjectivity that recognizes and tries to harken to the complex character of reality. They also encouraged a rather de-centred relation to nature and framed a relatively relaxed schooling and a tension-free, afternoon leisure of play, books, TV and village social life—the very moment that they demarcated the pathologies of a closed society and they set some obstacles to enjoying the opportunities (educational amongst other) that, say, contemporary global cities offer. Born in 1970, I experienced as a child the turbulent political life of Greece and Cyprus. My earliest childhood memories comprise the impact of political events such as the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the collapse of the junta regime in Greece shortly after, and the elation that the restored democracy spread everywhere. In hindsight, I realize that those events had played an important role in the shaping of my present convictions. For, I strongly believe that one must steer clear from both: a callous bourgeois internationalism that takes property, rather than community and humanity, as one’s home, thus ignoring the legitimate claims of a locality which faces an international-right problem of invasion and occupation; and a regressive, un-reflective politics such as the junta’s, which attacked, supposedly in the name of Hellenism, one of the most universalizable things that Hellenism had, historically, been capable of articulating, namely, democracy. Of course, one must also steer clear from less vociferous and more subtle phenomena of discrimination, exclusion and political narrowness and callousness. More generally, I was lucky to belong to those generations whose formative years benefited from the fact that, in the 70s and the 80s, the media had a more ethico-politically cosmopolitan and other-oriented tendency. Upheavals all over the world, along with the international effects of the later phases of the Cold War and the debates over such issues, mobilized visions of collective change—yet, perhaps, in a more disillusioned and cautious sense than in the years before the 80s. Things happening elsewhere and cultural material of a less consumerist nature provoked thought, being broadcast as instances of provoking times rather than as global curiosities. Local TVs lacked the multiplication of choice that the contemporary plethora of channels offers; however, important events in remote places, e.g. the events associated with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were given in the news expositional priority over the more ordinary local affairs—much unlike what happens today when, in the effort, allegedly, to display their impartiality, even international media often depoliticize world events by reducing them to mere manifestations of cultural diversity, especially those events which do not have direct or obvious effect on Northwestern peoples. And the so-called ‘world cinema’, which is now found in specialized shops and promoted by closed circles of intellectuals, was then popularized through a medium such as TV, which disseminated films as diverse as those by Fellini, Pasolini, Truffaut, Bunuel, Sergei Parajanov and so on, and could reach people regardless of class and rootedness in the periphery. I am stating this just as an acknowledgement of an enabling condition of life, with no intention of romanticizing a past which was, perhaps in every respect, a rich set of complex and often contradictory realities.