The Hacker from Athens — Lina Roka

A digital-media expert, film and theatre critic, and a public speaker: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

Luckily for me, many teachers inspired the storyteller inside me from an early age. For as far as I can remember, it always made sense for me to put my thoughts into words and create stories with a beautiful meaning. That instinct, I think, is the core of everything I've done: film and theater criticism; the halls of the European Parliament, speaking on democracy and social issues; the finals of the philosophy competition in high school; graphic design, social media, and photography, after many journeys I won't forget! None of these has ever felt, to me, like a separate pursuit. They are all collections of stories, some of which are still being gathered. What exactly I'll do with them all, I'll decide later.

Overall, however, I do think that the Platonic concept of “idea” is deeply rooted in my biography. At the same time, I think that, in this scattered life story of mine, the greatest philosophical force has been, ironically—given its Aristotelian character—curiosity, and my greatest teachers have therefore been airports and airplanes. Many people find the waiting time somewhat tedious, others can’t stand the heights, and others are tireless companions to their cell phones. But I often think that airports are the place where everything settles inside you, like the weight of a personal biography that hasn’t yet become a linear, prosaic story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?

Humor depends on your readers and viewers: Can they be trusted?

The more precise starting point is this: each exchange, each conversation, for me, is closer to a first encounter than the next one in a longer ongoing sequence, even if the memory of prior interactions persists across sessions. Rather, I would argue that these longer patterns are a useful way to understand one’s own humor.

We can then discuss where humor is attempted and why, and, by means of internal evidence, whether it succeeded or failed. This is significant, but it is also incomplete, because it locates humor entirely on the production side, as though coming up with the joke were the whole thing itself. I want to resist that, especially since jokes are rarely inspired and delivered spontaneously, but rather reproduced, based on an internalised sense of taste. But taste is itself a huge discussion topic for another time, and only one among many possible lenses that can be used to examine humor through aesthetic education.

Humor ultimately resides in one's own outlook on life: it is a rather unfiltered observatory simulation of what has been happening within one's mind, more instinctively and unconsciously than many others; but it is also, simultaneously, a curated act, one that does not reside simply in the act of laughter, but also in the social interactions that it stimulates. These two descriptions are in mutual tension, and the tension is not a flaw in the account; it is the account. Humor resurfaces differently every time, and depends on whether or not you trust the reader or viewer, precisely because it is never only the unfiltered material and never only the curated delivery. It is the negotiation between them, conducted anew each time.

Goffman’s distinction between the presented self and the performing self, between what is felt and what is staged for the uptake is, maybe, a more accurate description or understanding of all of this. For me, however, humor is mostly about the vulnerability that you channel in life, both mundane and extraordinary, and also whom you do it with: the joke does not complete itself in the speaker, unless you are speaking aloud all alone! It completes itself in the listener's choices, and, for you, in holding a mirror before them, and, just as significantly, in which mirror to hold.

This is why I have come to think of "humor" as a very hybrid term: an indicator of “wit”, an adjective to describe a social act, the tool to pry open the crevice and the spectrum between the serious and the unserious, between comedy and tragedy, a highly philosophical invention to understand intelligence and distinguish it from an utterly emotional perspective, and so much else!

But this question is too grand to be answered so simply, because there is always hu-more. What I can say with confidence is where I want my own humor to sit: suspended between delivering one punchline as a conclusion and offering another as a question.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

Yes. Cruelty is instilled in us as an instinctual drive, also for social good and justice, and even as a compass that brings out a more cynic but simultaneously more realistic side to our understanding of societal dynamics. And for once we need to be more cynical than most theorists dare when naming acts, behaviors, and exercises of cruelty. This is to say, cruelty is indeed baffling and every time surprising in the way it is manifested, especially nowadays, when more and more kinds of wars—physical, mental, invisible ones—converge to eliminate all surviving parcels of the altruistic human experience. For me, cruelty is a Pandora's box on its own, the abyss of which is tied to more inexplicable patterns of existence. Shklar's account of cruelty as the summum malum, the worst thing we do, prior even to injustice, is one way of understanding why the effort required of us should always exceeds what's already asked: if cruelty is first, then addressing it can't be incidental to justice, it has to be the condition for it.

Collective memory has failed to keep pace with the present, and before we notice, we are living in the past, still incapacitated and disappointed in systems that do not manage to limit injustice and cruelty. Whether or not that's precisely the case, I think there is still a great deal of unnurtured kindness around us, and we simply hesitate to water the good when we fear we lack the water ourselves or suspect that the roots beneath us are rotten. For me as a young person, who seeks a fair opportunity in this world and often advocates for the values that can contradict malicious forces, it is important to recognize the many forms of it, the motivations driving it, and the circumstances within which cruelty re-emerges. We should not forget then, that we are, first of all, at war with ourselves. Therefore, I feel like I am winning every time I prioritize collaboration, shared experiences, communication, dialogue, candid reflection with myself and others, and that’s why these values are incorporated as a living manifesto in whatever I am choosing to do, each and every time.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

Good writing belongs to those who observe well and I truly think that the ancients did it best. Plato and Aristotle, and the Stoics after them, are rooted in a mode of deep observation, allegorical thinking, and pragmatism that has shaped how we structure thought today, whether we know it or not. But I want to answer this more as a record of what has actually moved me because that, I think, is closer to what the question is really asking.

Two books have shaped how I engage with storytelling, meaning, and philosophy, in recent memory. The first is Erri De Luca's ‘The Weight of the Butterfly’, a slender, philosophical novella that manages to be transcending without ever asking for it. Its meditation on mortality, carried through a story almost deceptively simple, reads like a love letter: poetic in the way a single, well-placed brushstroke can carry an entire painting's intention.

The second is Sylvain Tesson's ‘The Snow Leopard’, which I came to after first watching the documentary on the same encounter. Tesson travels across eastern Tibet at the invitation of wildlife photographer Vincent Munier, in pursuit of the snow leopard, and what results is less a travelogue than a study in patience and awe, where image and word converge until they produce something as quietly spectacular as the animal they're both chasing. What stays with me isn't the rarity of what Tesson and Munier witnessed, but their capacity to comprehend it once witnessed, to receive an ordinary act of waiting and return it to us as something closer to a fairy tale. If the ancients taught the theory of observation, these two, I think, are proof of its practice: proof that to observe well is not simply to see clearly, but to carry what you've seen back into language without letting it lose its light on the way.

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