Site of tradition:
Department of Classics
How to take this class
Read the assigned materials
Watch and read the abridged lectures
Write a response
Please note that although the audio of the course was professionally transcribed, there are errors in the transcripts.
Read the assigned materials
Tactics of disruption
Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, intro,(p. 1-9)
Disciplinary indictments and decrees (e.g. Sahm on economics p. 1-18, Haslanger on women in philosophy p. 1-15), “Knowledge activism” (Blommaert, “Looking back on what was important”, p. 1-13)
Dividing departments: Anthropology (Anthropology at Stanford); Polisci ("How Cult Internet Character Mr. Perestroika Divided N.Y.U.’s Political Science Department", Observer. 7, January, 2002; Original email by Mr. Perestroika)
Establish new departments (e.g. at Princeton, see also Rooks, Beginnings of Black Studies)
Contemporary Praxis
Padilla Peralta, “Anti-Race and Anti-Racism” (p. 1-31)
Ancient Past
Aeschylus, The Persians
2. Watch the abridged lectures
“The discipline of activism is a consciously pursued strategy for achieving social change through collective action.
Has traditionally devoted more time on questions of ideology, strategy, and tactics than on pursuing an introspective or self-reflective theory of itself as a practice. For better or worse, activism is not a pursuit that grants its participants the free time to think deeply and abstractly. Protesting or building a revolutionary movement does not usually generate income nor time to sustain the leisure to reflect. Withholding resources or giving funds with strings attached that inhibit activism is one of the more effective ways society has for suppressing the flourishing of nascent activist movements. The lack of self-reflection cannot be entirely blamed on the opposition, however.
It is also a symptom of the undervaluing of introspective knowledge by practitioners of activism. Activists are prone to resisting general theorizing about the tradition of activism, devoid of ideological content. Because doing so detaches them from their struggle in the present. Protest is pervaded by a sense of urgency; immediate needs demand immediate action. And this tendency towards immediatism is one-way activism resists knowing itself.
Being detached is sometimes an insult within activist communities because detachment as an activist is hard to distinguish from the detachment of the majority who care little for the struggle. Attachment to the movement of the present is marked by the proper adherence to shibboleths that distinguish those following the movement’s line. And one of the most important shibboleths of all is that a movement's success depends on a correct ideology.”
— Micah
“I would argue that Fanon, Padilla Peralta, and Thomas Kuhn each offer us a way into thinking about an activist notion of truth.
And that's a truth that although it's rooted in the present physical experience of certain actors, has not yet fully arrived from the future. Activist truth involves a bit of faith, a bit of fabrication, and persuasion in order to come to be fully present as truth. And as we pursue this concept of activist truth, we might highlight the resonance between scholarly demonstration and activist demonstrations, or which is another word for protest.
Both involve showing up and showing forth an unacceptable truth that needs to be acknowledged. And both kick up resistance.”
— Chiara
“Now, with Kuhn in hand for this week, we can better appreciate Martin Bernal self-fashioning as a maverick, as a disciplinary outsider, as an interloper. But what I would encourage us to think about is not only whether the outsider is gifted uniquely with the insight to bring about a paradigm shift.
But whether the outsiders in the mere act of credentializing themselves as such have already seated ground, have potentially already lost the game. Because the differentiation between the inside and the outside is one of those surefire ways of maintaining an imagined disciplinary, stability, and integrity.
This differentiation and the intent to police it shows itself at many moments, most robustly of all in the hands of those who would criticize path-breaking interventions, especially ones that diagnose disciplinary complicities in forms of epistemic violence that are rooted in racist and cellular colonialist dispensations.”
— Dan-el Padilla Peralta
“I was reading a piece this morning, a Mediby Sarah Valentine, about how thoroughly the academy invalidates black women as producers of academic knowledge. But acknowledging that intersectional identity begins to remember that these are categories that are produced differentially, historically, and culturally. So how important with this question of rupturing the [00:07:00.00] relationship between whiteness and academic or scholarly expertise, I'm only speaking about the university.
How important is work done within departmental and disciplinary structures of power? And how does anti-racist work in one department or discipline under unfolding solidarity with trans-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary work? What's the relationship of someone like I home to that kind of work? How does anti-racist work in the humanities intersect with that work in the social sciences or the sciences that we touched on this last week in terms of different forms of knowledge?
And how we can pluralistically create a space for honoring different forms of knowledge, and also thinking strategically about what forms of knowledge are most effective in given situations or given circumstances of intervention in anti-racist work.”
— Brooke Holmes
Lecture Transcript
Micah White
Hello, the site for this week is the discipline. I’d therefore like to speak about the discipline of activism. First, though, it's important to acknowledge that we are in a new historical situation that began less than a year ago. So we need to be careful not to simply take ideas from the old world and apply them to the new world. To demonstrate one aspect of this, I’d like to show you something.
Now I could give the lecturers this or this or this, and none of these would be a more or less true representation of myself. As no matter what I choose, you will unconsciously ascribe meaning to what is ultimately meaningless. Like the background of my room, or whether I look like this. Now, back to my boring avatar. Activism is an ill-defined discipline, although from the contemporary vantage point, there are many examples of activists in the past.
The words activism and activist are relatively recent introductions to mainstream language. Describing oneself as an activist today involves drawing an imagined lineage with the historical figures who did not know or use that term. It also involves omitting others who described themselves as activists but whose ideology one does not agree with, such as Rudolf Eucken. Who was the first to describe their approach to life as activism? Eucken won a Nobel prize for literature and was a strong advocate for Germany during world war one.
Perhaps due to his influence, the primary meaning of activism in English from the years 1914 to 1918 was actions advocating in favor of Germany. Rather than, as we might assume today, advocating in favor of leftist political positions such as the Russian revolution, for example. The discipline of activism as a consciously pursued strategy for achieving social change through collective action.
Has traditionally devoted more time on questions of ideology, strategy, and tactics than on pursuing an introspective or self-reflective theory of itself as a practice. For better or worse, activism is not a pursuit that grants its participants the free time to think deeply and abstractly. Protesting or building a revolutionary movement does not usually generate income nor time to sustain the leisure to reflect. Withholding resources or giving funds with strings attached that inhibit activism is one of the more effective ways society has for suppressing the flourishing of nascent activist movements. The lack of self-reflection cannot be entirely blamed on the opposition, however.
It is also a symptom of the undervaluing of introspective knowledge by practitioners of activism. Activists are prone to resisting general theorizing about the tradition of activism, devoid of ideological content. Because doing so detaches them from their struggle in the present. Protest is pervaded by a sense of urgency; immediate needs demand immediate action. And this tendency towards immediatism is one-way activism resists knowing itself.
Being detached is sometimes an insult within activist communities because detachment as an activist is hard to distinguish from the detachment of the majority who care little for the struggle. Attachment to the movement of the present is marked by the proper adherence to shibboleths that distinguish those following the movement’s line. And one of the most important shibboleths of all is that a movement's success depends on a correct ideology.
Still, it is reasonable to observe that in any given historical moment, there are competing activist cultures, each with many tendencies within them. Some of these tendencies are obvious such as pro-voting progressives, do not read Alfredo Bonanno, who was a leading theorist of insurrection anarchism. Techno-utopians in silicon valley, do not read John Zerzan, who is an anti-civilization anarchist.
And critical race activists reject Rachel Dolezal. Some of these tendencies are obscure such as community organizing versus relational organizing or third worldism versus third-world socialism. Or forgotten such as splinter groups among Bolsheviks, to the point of being unknown to those without extensive immersion in a sufficiently mature tendency. Further, activists as individuals and movements as a collective of activists have had more or less sophisticated understandings of the tendencies within their historical moment.
The writings of activists between the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution, for example, tend to have a very nuanced grasp of the various possible political ideologies and consequent revolutionary strategies. The danger of tendencies is when tendencies define themselves excessively against other tendencies, or rather tendencies whose theory of change is to attack other tendencies. As Gail Bradbrook, the co-founder of extinction rebellion, once put it, paraphrasing Sheikh Guevara, ''when the left forms a firing squad, it stands in a circle''. A functional definition of activism will not arise from narrowly defining the discipline as the tendency, the beliefs, behaviors, and words of a particular protest movement.
After all, activism is distinguished by the way its practice changes through successive movements. The movements that best exemplify a contemporary form of activism are precisely the ones that differ in beliefs and deeds from the movements they claim as predecessors. Here, it is reasonable to pause and questions whether a general definition of activism is useful for activists engaged in struggle. Why would activism knowing itself be any help for activists actively protesting?
After all, knowing thyself might be a useful prescription for individuals and a disastrous one for movements and disciplines, especially disciplines like activism that gains so much from harnessing humanity's unconscious creative forces. If we really understood what we are doing, would we still want to do it? The answer is like all things in activism, historically dependent. It may be that the discipline of activism is best served by a knowledge of itself only during certain historical moments.
When it is on the brink of a paradigm shift, grappling with a series of setbacks or nostalgic about its revolutionary past, for example, and not others. All that can be said about the utility of activism knowing itself is that even if it is not deemed useful today, it may be overwhelmingly valuable later. Therefore, if it can be achieved, it ought to be for the sake of future activists.
With a slightly different emphasis Victor Sergey, who is one of my heroes, my activist heroes, once expressed it this way. ''I believe that however bitter the situation one ought to go all the way for the sake of the others and for oneself, so as to gain from the experience and to grow from it''. In other words, if self-knowledge is possible for activism, then it ought to be attained if only because going all the way is an activist virtue.
And there is a strategic value as well. Consider, for example, the cause given for the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks in Aeschylus’s play, and here I’m quoting ''from Athenian ranks, a Greek approached addressing Xerxes thus. When the gloom of blackest night will fall, the Greeks will not remain. But leap to their rowing benches and each by secret course will save his life. Xerxes believed this deception to the doom of his army. In other words, the Greeks guile was due to knowing themselves or at least knowing how Aeschylus would perceive them in order to act differently. And this is where I kind of want to is to, is to leave it today and to welcome our conversation.
When I think about the discipline of activism, rupturing the discipline of activism. I think a lot about how the first step is going to be the development of a kind of introspective and self-reflexive understanding of activism as a discipline, as a discipline that has manifested in many different ways throughout the long history of political unrest. Another thing I wanted to point out that I kind of, a movement that I see happening when we specifically look at the rupturing of the classical, of the discipline of classics.
I think that we saw with black Athena an attempt to do classics versus classics, right? In some ways, black Athena was attempting to be an even better classical study than other ones that were white supremacists or neglecting of a more full story. And I think what we're seeing in the reading that we did for Dan-El's chapter is also a move of activism versus classics. And I think what I’m trying to do is a kind of activism versus activism.
Brooke Holmes
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to handle the lecture this week. Back when we were brainstorming about how to structure the course, and we thought about having the professor's lecture. We also thought about having the professors who weren't lecturing give responses at the end of the week. And one advantage of that structure is that it creates more of a feedback loop from week to week.
And now that we're going into the sixth week and the midpoint of the course, that feedback loop feels really important to me. These are conversations that are unfolding, and there are topics that have been flagged in the responses last week that I find deeply important for us to keep thinking about together and sitting with together.
Even as we think together about where to take the class forward, and as you think together about where to take the class forward. So I’ve thought about those responses a lot, Vanessa’s posing with the question of art in relationship to activism, as well as thinking about the particular risks of black bodies behaving differently in public space. The risks of violence by differently-abled bodies, depending on how they're raised.
Pasqual’s question of where the work of reading classic texts fits into how we make sense of a life as a scholar, or an academic, or an intellectual a student, citizen. Katie’s important and incisive critique which builds on points that were made in the seminar by Luke, Vanessa, and Dan-El about what gets lost when we allied the different historical and cultural formations of race and gender.
In what C. Ray Bourque calls the negligence analogy between transgender identities and what gets called Fran’s race or what we were talking about as a form of racial masquerade. And I would agree with many of the points in that essay, and I’m grateful to Dan-El for posting the review. And I also wanted to flag that I agree with the critiques that were made in the class, but one of the things that's also weighed on me in the days since then is the association of masquerade or think about racial masquerade in conjunction with trans-identities and transgender identities.
Where I think that language is particularly damaging, and maybe never more so than at this moment, a real vulnerability. And I also have been thinking about like Luke’s question about Scalialogics and, more specifically, the kinds of ethical imaginaries that we enable by working at the local level, all the way up to the trans-national, but a global or cosmic.
So this question of scalar logics is one of the things that I think runs through these responses, there are other threads as well, but I settled on this one because it's changed the way that I’ve thought about the very many and different readings that we did for this week on discipline. So a discipline sort of brings us maybe home, or it brings us to the local. Each of us brings our own set of concerns to this course.
I don't think that means quite the same thing as saying that each of us knows in advance how it could be useful to something we think is important to do. We bring our concerns and our questions and our ideas and our knowledge, and hopefully, we see if we can start to build a set of common concerns and questions and concepts that will be imminent to this community of people.
Thinking together at this point of time, while also participating in multiple other communities and dealing at this particular moment with different stresses and different forms of preparing. So let me say before going into this course, I thought about it in a couple of different ways relevant to the discipline. But one was to think of how just conversations that span disciplines, but also different practices outside the academy, including activism or what we're calling activism.
And the flag, there are different definitions of that. But can help me think, sorry, that these different disciplinary trends, let's say practice conversations can help me think more intentionally and acutely about the work that can be done and desperately needs to be done to deal with a discipline that is still Dan-El puts it in his brilliant essay on whiteness, and the classical imagination is ''a bustling performance site for racecraft''. They're developing and deploying the concept through, raised by Karen and Barbara Fields.
Classics is a discipline that I identified with professionally at a belated stage; my degrees are in comparative literature apart from [Inaudible 00:05:06.09]But I am identified with it professionally, and that means taking responsibility for the power that it does have and working to transform it. At the same time, the very canon of big theory that I met within comparative literature in the 1990s in the early odds creates a discipline that has its own performances of racecraft. And I say that not because I want to make we white classicists, and I know I’m not interpolating everyone in the class.
But I’m reaching out to broader community; we white classicists doesn't mean we should feel any better about our discipline because of other people are also performers in racecraft and other disciplines. But what it does do is it raise questions for me that resonate with this idea of Scalialogics and sites of intervention, particularly within the university and particularly with relationship to discipline.
So even within this site of the university, how should we approach the work of rupturing the vice grip of whiteness and academic expertise. And of male models of authoritative knowledge and objectivity, is cross-disciplinary work. And I did want to flag again thinking the intersectional relationship between race and gender because it has been so potent within the academy.
I was reading a piece this morning, a Mediby Sarah Valentine, about how thoroughly the academy invalidates black women as producers of academic knowledge. But acknowledging that intersectional identity begins to remember that these are categories that are produced differentially, historically, and culturally. So how important with this question of rupturing the relationship between whiteness and academic or scholarly expertise, I'm only speaking about the university.
How important is work done within departmental and disciplinary structures of power? And how does anti-racist work in one department or discipline under unfolding solidarity with trans-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary work? What's the relationship of someone like I home to that kind of work? How does anti-racist work in the humanities intersect with that work in the social sciences or the sciences that we touched on this last week in terms of different forms of knowledge?
And how we can pluralistically create a space for honoring different forms of knowledge, and also thinking strategically about what forms of knowledge are most effective in given situations or given circumstances of intervention in anti-racist work. And then the last question had a trans-disciplinary or interdisciplinary alliances work in the production of public knowledge, and that notion of public is of course really, one of the ones I think we're trying to think through.
It's not one that we've put on the table, and maybe I don't think it's going to be any easier than the language of activism. I teach at a private university; there's no getting around that. And so I think that this question of how anti-racists work within disciplines or the universe who does work with other forms of work, or whether we might also allow for the space that they don't always necessarily interact or productively, or they're not always continuous with one another, but they may inform one another in feedback loops that are not always visible.
Or need to be visible, but we recognize that we're interpolated in different ways, in different communities, and we honor commitments within those communities with who we are within those communities. But even moving outside the university there, it's true that these are very local questions compared to trans-national or national or even civic scales.
And particularly for this class, they risk over-privileging the university or the academy as the locus of our attention. And particularly the site where authoritative knowledge is produced. And this is the pitfall of reading discipline to literally is the bull's eye in which we're narrowing our collective attention. So here's where I would emphasize just how valuable I find our discussions, and especially the responses of Katie and Pasqual and Vanessa and Luke last week.
When I went forward to thinking about discipline as a site, and for thinking about this class, the sense of despair that whatever we're doing or I’ll just personalize it that I’m doing that is useless in the face of the crises and the mass of suffering around us. It raises the question whether it's ever or even now worthwhile or energies into the labor of studying or reading, writing, or talking or making structural changes in a department or in the humanities council in the university.
And I really appreciate Katie’s point and take it really seriously about the risks of dealing with this anxiety by simply patting ourselves on the back. Or measuring ourselves against colleagues we think are doing even less, setting the bar really low, or aligned ourselves defensively to think about the value of what we're doing. And make this point because it takes us back, I think, to scalar logics and what it means to think structurally about the space that we're operating within and the community we're trying to build there. And to be imaginative in relationship to the possibilities and also the constraints of that space. And the nature of the community that we find there, and the interlocutors we find there.
And so that point I hope can help us return to the question that I wanted to leave us with, which was to think how we can think together more precisely and more critically and more generously about what kind of work we can do together in this class at this moment, under these constraints.
So what kind of a site is this? So I hope that that's a conversation that we can have this week, and I’m really looking forward as well to continuing the conversation in the coming weeks, as with any service. So thank you, and I look forward to talking tomorrow.
Chiara Ricciardone
This week, we're focusing squarely on the site of the discipline and department of classics. And the readings offer several very tempting modes of response. At first, I thought, oh, maybe I should make a declaration about classics about Sally Haslinger, Claudia Sam, or Blommaert about philosophy economics and anthropology, respectively.
We could focus on the data-driven research that's needed, the concrete actions we could take, or the philosophical principles that would guide us in fixing classics. We could dictate a kind of institutional change, a second tempting response to argue that we should follow the model of anthropology at classics, sorry, to argue that we should follow the model of anthropology at Stanford in dividing the department of classics.
Or perhaps, even the model of African-American studies of founding a whole new space or discipline of antiquity studies as Martin Bernal called upon us to do. It's tempting too to treat Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions as a playbook for a revolution in classics. To set ourselves the tasks of identifying the problems that the old paradigms can't solve.
To predict the new phenomena, erased classics will reveal. To demonstrate what it would be like to belong to a community governed by the new paradigm. And to make the aesthetic case for the manifold and manifest beauty of a democratized classics. Looking especially at pages 154-59 and thinking about those moves. But I’m not going to do any of those things; my ambition is both greater and more modest.
I take my cue from Frantz Fanon in the wretched of the earth, who says that, to tell the truth, the proof of the success of decolonization lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. So , though, it's almost impossible to ask this question at a time when so much is changing. The question that I am preoccupied with is what is the role of classics and this total change of the world? And when I ask about role, I see classics as both a subject and object.
How will classics as a discipline, as a department, as an object of knowledge change in the total and the process of total world change and the process of decolonization and the end of white supremacy? But also, in what ways can classics or classicists as subjects catalyze that change. Kuhn tells us that a paradigm shift involves the total redefinition and re-conception of all two familiar concepts.
So today, I’m going to forward three concepts that are or will change in the paradigm shift that is already underway but by no means guaranteed in the world and in classics. They are activist truths, the value of the classics , and difference. So the first concept that I want to develop is activist truth, and again, I’m taking my cue from Frantz Fanon and arguing that activist truth is the truth that's indexed to the future rather than verified against the present.
So Fanon says truth is that which hurries on the breakup of the colonialist regime and speaking about in the wretched of the earth. Here's the full quote, but that's the line I really want you to hear as I read the longer thing. The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age among the people, truth is the property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul can shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood.
His or her dealings with his or her fellow nationals are open. They are strained and incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the breakup of the colonialist regime. It is that which promotes the emergence of the nation. It is all that protects the natives and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context, there is no truthful behavior. And the good is quite simply that which is evil for them. Page 14, if you're curious.
So this was a passage that provoked a lot of resistance in me initially because of my training in philosophy. There's, I think, a valid concern that this position might be an instrumentalization of truth. If we accept that quote truth is the property of the national cause, are we not also obliged to also accept Donald Trump's lies. As I came to think about this passage, I realized that Fanon here carries out a classic move of the francophone negritude movement of earliest 20th century to reclaim or redefine racist stereotypes in a positive way.
But he also develops a philosophical concept of truth that's worth considering in its own right, which is an antagonistic concept of truth. ''The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood''. And it occurred to me that in all the moral hoo-ha around speaking truth to power, there's perhaps not enough attention to the ways that guile, concealment, mythification, and falsification that always and necessarily attend to the production of truth.
There's not enough attention to the ways that guile, concealment, mythification, and falsification interact with the production of truth. And there's not enough attention to the ways that activists might pose and utilize their own lies against the lies forced upon us by the status quo. We can talk about the ethics of this together, especially if , we can avoid the trap of moralism.
Remembering that politics at times must un-tether itself from ethics because there are no morally perfect choices. But if you remain unconvinced or if because there tends to be unconscious bias against black authors, let me also make the point about activist truth through a white author, and that's Thomas Kuhn. And his work in the structure of scientific revolution argues that science is the product of contested world views.
And that the image of science as a continually additive and progressive motion towards better and better truth conceals a more conflictual and antagonistic view. So, for example, he says early in the preface to the work that early scientific fields, that what differentiated them was not a failure of method; they were all scientific. But what we shall come to call their incommensable ways of seeing the world, and of practicing science in it.
Yes, so Kuhn's work also points to the ways in which a group of thinkers who are trying to install a new truth have to persuade and bring about the members of their community to a truth that doesn't become fully present until it is accepted by that community. Finally, I think Dan-El also touches on the need for and the reality of an activist notion of truth.
Both at the beginning of his article when he talks about the ever-presentness of the concept of whiteness and classics, and how, therefore, it's a bit difficult to point out to the fish that they're swimming in the white water. But also at the end, near to the end of his article that we read for today when he says that dismantling white supremacy within classics will require ''disciplinary gatekeepers to grant authority and belief to the variety of mechanisms by which these scholars have been sidelined from the production of knowledge deemed legitimate or acceptable''.
In other words, I take him to mean that we must persuade or force the powerful figures in the classics to community to grant the real effects of racism, and also to grant the status of knowledge, truth, and authoritative scholarship to the work produced from within the de-colonial paradigm. Dan-El may disagree or object to having his work corralled into an idea of activist truth. So we will see. But I would argue that Fanon, Padilla Peralta, and Thomas Kuhn each offer us a way into thinking about an activist notion of truth.
And that's a truth that although it's rooted in the present physical experience of certain actors, has not yet fully arrived from the future. Activist truth involves a bit of faith, a bit of fabrication, and persuasion in order to come to be fully present as truth. And as we pursue this concept of activist truth, we might highlight the resonance between scholarly demonstration and activist demonstrations, or which is another word for protest.
Both involve showing up and showing forth an unacceptable truth that needs to be acknowledged. And both kick up resistance. Activist truth, okay. The second concept that I think will and is changing in a new paradigm has to do with how we talk about the value of classics. And taking up this question, I’m responding to Brooke's question in the second week about how to conceive the object of value that would be shared between insider and outsider thinkers or between activists.
Between let's say, institutional thinkers and activist thinkers. Or in Kuhn’s terms, between normal science and revolutionary science, allowing for ambiguity between those categories. This specific idea about the value of classics that I want to think about is conceiving classics as currency. And this is also picking up on my conversation with Dan-El about the wages of whiteness and the relationship between the politics of race and the politics of class.
So I just want to spend a little bit of time experimenting with what happens when we conceive of the value of classics as currency. As we saw in the second week, the value of classics is more typically framed in terms of its civilizing benefits, for its calming effect upon the soul, and it's solidifying effects upon the imagined community of the nation. If we instead take up the idea that classics is a currency, we see several things at once. The first is that, like , most objects of value, classics are unequally distributed. Despite either Hall's interesting work on classics in class, I take this to be an uncontroversial point. Second thing that we see is that while not a universal currency, classical knowledge has often been exchangeable for status, power, beauty, admiration, authority, and more.
In Malamute, for example, we saw the ways that Africans, Americans, and abolitionists traded classical knowledge for status as fully human, while anti-abolitionists tried to deny that same possible exchange. Like other objects of value land, gold, oil, and water, in the near future, if not already, we know how those things came to be invested with value. They became necessary to producing a desired way of life. And here, I’m thinking with Humphrey about the way that desire animates the classics.
So how did text of Greco-roman antiquity become invested with that kind of value? Well, it was largely through the labor of elites, typically wealthy European males. And that labor was made possible in turn by the invisible labor of wives, servants, and chattel slaves. So it's possible that thinking about classics in terms of currency allows us to start making a case for reparations of classics.
We can also remember that the invention of currency facilitates trade, and ask about what we can trade, what can we exchange the currency of classics for? Basically, if you'll permit, my intuition says that there's a wealth of associations and activist tactics that we invoke when we think about classics as currency, whether it's reparations equal pay, the question of inflation and deflation.
The question of fiduciary duties, redlining boycotts, when we conceive of classics as currency and the departments of classics as banks and its printing presses. New avenues for activist scholarship may appear. Indeed, there's even a strange material and historical coincidence that might also induce us to take up this line of thought. Richard Seifert has argued that it was the invention of coined money in Ionia, the abstract, exchangeable money that could be the, sorry.
Richard Seifert argues that it was the invention of coined money in Ionia that underlay the invention of early Greek or pre-Socratic metaphysics. It was the idea of a single substance that underlies everything, and that could be exchanged for anything, that allowed a similar philosophical move to be made by those first metaphysicians. So classics as currency. The third idea that I want to take up is difference as antiphony. And in thinking about difference, I’m returning to Audre Lorde's reading, the reading we did with Audré Lorde in the first week. In which master's tools refers to division, and in which Lord works to forward a concept of difference as generative and magical in it's power.
The perennial difficulty when we're thinking about difference in power is how to escape the master-slave dialectic without re-instantiating it. And I think a transformed and transformative classics will address this paradoxical question of how differences can co-exist with equality. Here I want to turn to the Persians, one of the earliest tragedy that we have by Aeschylus. In which he imagines the resounding defeat of the imperial Persian army at the battle of Salamis through the eyes, voices, and bodies of the Persian court.
In this play, the perennial difficulty takes shape, as is this a play that celebrates the brutal Athenian victory over the Persians? Or does it critique it, by way of producing sympathy and identification with the conquered? No doubt, the answer is instructively both, for perhaps you cannot do one without also doing the other. At least, you can't win first prize without doing so.
In these last remarks, I just want to set the stage for a possible conversation about the role of antiphony in the play, as a way of thinking about difference from and within classics. And here, my thinking, as in the other points, is very much unfinished, very much in process, very much an invitation to collaborate. But I’ll just point to the three times that very near the end of the play, that Cersei says cry out, antiphone all to the chorus, and this is three times in the space of about 25 lines 10:40 to 10:66.
And the word caught my attention because it seemed like one of those words that the authors, the translators opted not to translate. The Greek is anti-Dupos, it's a rare word it's glossed in the LSJ's re-echoing, but it seems ambiguous because and part of its rarity. Dupuis means noise, sound, or din, and the prefix anti and compositions, as you might know, can range from an oppositional sense as in over against opposite, one against another, to a more mutual sense.
As in return for, or as an [Inaudible 00:16:32.09] to cry out in response. Or as an equal to or like corresponding to, rather than counter. On balance, the sense of the word here in the Persians seems a little bit less antagonistic and a little bit more reciprocal or mutual. Because of the way that the chorus answers or sees, e.g., for example, a wholesome gift in response to woe, or my duty is here o master lord. Or simply, oh, oh, oh. So I began looking into antiphony, and it's role in dramatic production, and it turns out that antiphony is a call and response ritual that's quite typical of lament.
And when it's still a common practice in modern Greek lamentation, and scholars have understood it as building solidarity at the same time as permitting personal expression. A kind of interpenetration of individual and collective. Similarly, some scholar of hip-hop has understood antiphony as a structure of calling and listening that reconfigures the self and the other. What I find really evocative about this formal feature is that it potentially reaches beyond the two parties that do it, the call and response of the Xerxes and the chorus, who are potentially antagonistic in their relationship as past and present.
And so antiphony is a response that reaches beyond the two participants to involve and activate the spectators. So some commentators have argued that specifically in the Persians, the antiphony is meant to bleed out from the stage and to involve and activate the spectators. So I find it quite interesting this idea that a formalized ritual of difference activates people to participate in a ritual which they would otherwise only view as a spectator.
That seems like a politically powerful idea. In modern Greece, and the antiphony ritual laments, the form also produces the solidarity without, ''solidarity without consensus that anthropologists have highlighted it as a distinctive feature of ritual, and here I’m drawing on the work of Marianne Gover Hoffman. I think she's at Northwestern. And she argues that in the Persians, by constructing its polyphonica chorus as a temporary opponent to Cersei's, Persians the play opened to the Athenians the possibility to mourn with the Persian characters.
So I find myself a little bit less interested in the way that Hopman. So Hopman ultimately can't resist the sense of closure that a participatory morning ritual would offer, so she falls down on this side of the play being somehow evoking compassion, rather than being a celebration of Athenian violence. In contrast to her, I’m wondering about an antiphony that could induce a morning ritual for the old classics and for the old world. A ritual that enshrines and plays on differing voices in order to make way for the new. This possibility assumes, of course, that Kancha, the self-image of classics as eternal and immortal, that the classics are as mortal as we are.
And that there might be something to mourn and let go of in making way for a new classical paradigm. So I’ve tried to sketch some possibilities of what might transform and be transformative in the classics, in the sort of total world shift that might seem to be underway. I tried to develop; I tried to say that classics might develop and employ a notion of activist truth, that classics might develop an understanding of itself as a currency.
And then ask about it's more just distribution. And that classics might seek within itself the resources for thinking difference as generative, not a tool for division and conquest. And that perhaps antiphony, which I still don't fully understand, might be one way of starting to do that. Thanks so much; I’m looking forward to talking with you all.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
My framing remarks for this week will center on Aeschylus’s Persians and on an influential reading of the Persians that has redefined disciplinary politics over the past few decades. That has participated in a broader project of interrogating the foundations of classics and classics adjacent disciplines.
So he spoke in confident pride of the god-given future; he knew nothing. The Persians, which we're reading for today, stand at the head of a methodological intervention with major consequences, not only for literary studies, post-colonial studies, near eastern studies but for the humanistic disciplines as a whole. The intervention is Edward Said's Orientalism, which was published in 1978.
Orientalism, as many of you know, was a book that inaugurated a fresh wave of thinking about Europe’s imperial manipulation of knowledge about Asia. A manipulation for which Said sketched the genealogy that extended deep into Greco-roman antiquity. Said was repeatedly taken a task by critics for historical or literary-critical missteps. Some of these missteps were, in fact, genuine errors of fact that Said moved to acknowledge or remediate.
Other perceived or described mistakes turned out on closer examination to be exhalations of disciplinary anxiety from folks who were doing the equivalent of what we might call concern trolling. What comes to mind here are comments such as those of the UCLA historian Nikki Ketty, who bemoaned 15 years after Orientalism's publication that ''I think that there has been a tendency in the middle east field to adopt the word Orientalism as a generalized swear word, essentially referring to people who take the wrong position on the Arab-Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged too conservative.
It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So Orientalism for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan''. This style of argument, iconoclastic work that diagnoses the collusion of empire violence and knowledge, is a problem because it has led to some scholars being tagged with a ''generalized swear word''. Orientalists in the years after Said's book came out, is the swear word that Ketty has in mind.
But one could plausibly swap that out for racist and be on terrain that's more contiguous with today's ongoing conversations. This style of argument has never seen to me to be exceptionally sophisticated. The simple reason that I’m primed to I appeals to the criterion of ''whether scholars are good or not in their disciplines'', somewhat wearily.
One of the core undertakings of Orientalism was to identify the replication of academic knowledge about the Middle East, as intimately enmeshed in settler colonialist and extractive capitalist violence’s. And it seems to me captures to revert to a vision of scholarship, whose standards of goodness and not goodness fail to take those violence’s into account.
But the most pronounced lack of sophistication in Ketty's assessment of Orientalism seems to lie in it's ability to recognize the ubiquity of those heuristics by which we designate scholars is good or bad all the time. Without substantive immersion in the specifics of their work. We rely on shortcut heuristics all the time, and in fact, one of these has been at the foreground of our conversations, tradition.
Especially with not only in fields such as classics, pedigree, and institutional affiliation as shortcuts for identifying interlocutors as participating within a tradition. Have for some several centuries now, given members of this specific interpretative community that heuristic shortcut. That the distribution of educational pedigrees, institutional affiliations, and disciplinary authority could, upon careful scrutiny, be shown to fall in line with structural asymmetries of racist and subtle colonialist violence is what is too bad.
Not it's naming as such. I make this point narrowly and deliberately in response to colleagues such as Robert George, for whom labels such as racist are ''a vile slur end''. But in broader terms, I want to offer up the capacity of disciplinary and departmental formations to command respect as a topic of conversation for our meeting today. How do humanistic disciplines command respect and deference? One aspect of this command performance, and one that is apparent in Ketty's diagnosis of what she believed, of what she actually believed to be the limitations of Orientalism.
Is the attempt to shore up the proposition that there is an inside and an outside. Those who stand in the inner circle of disciplinarity and those who stand beyond it. Now, with Kuhn in hand for this week, we can better appreciate Martin Bernal self-fashioning as a maverick, as a disciplinary outsider, as an interloper. But what I would encourage us to think about is not only whether the outsider is gifted uniquely with the insight to bring about a paradigm shift.
But whether the outsiders in the mere act of credentializing themselves as such have already seated ground, have potentially already lost the game. Because the differentiation between the inside and the outside is one of those surefire ways of maintaining an imagined disciplinary, stability, and integrity.
This differentiation and the intent to police it shows itself at many moments, most robustly of all in the hands of those who would criticize path-breaking interventions, especially ones that diagnose disciplinary complicities in forms of epistemic violence that are rooted in racist and cellular colonialist dispensations.
To return to Saeed for a moment, it's worth revealing here that I quoted Nikki Ketty's judgment from chapter two of Martin Kramer’s ivory towers on sand. A gentle reminder about the collapse of Middle Eastern study that was written by one of Bernard Lewis’s students. Having come under fire and Orientalism, Bernard Lewis, a long-time eminence at Princeton, gave as good as he got when it came to stringent criticism through his own words, as well as through the words of his students.
Martin Kramer, in his book, attempts to enforce the distinction between disciplinary interiority and exteriority by playing a card that will be well known to us at this point. And that is the differentiation between scholar and activist. So let me quote Kramer now had Saeed he writes kept his political and professional commitments separate, he would have remained one more advocate of Palestine in the west.
Articulate, this adjective well, how I love this adjective because it's a semaphore of racecraft. In a way, Kramer continues, most likely to appeal to intellectuals, contentious in a way most appropriate to the political weeklies, op-ed pages, and nightline, yet still a specimen of American ethnic politics. But in his Orientalism, Said blended Palestinian passion, oh, and now we start getting to the racists, and academic virtuosity so that they reinforced one another. It only gets better, and by that, I mean worse; I think there are many low points in Kramer’s accounts of Saeed.
But what I want to do in the next few minutes is turn to a technology because we're really dealing here with technologies for the delineation and circumscription of disciplinary formations. For this exercise, I need to say a few more words about Said's interpretation of Aeschylus Persians in Orientalism. An interpretation that has elicited varying and sometimes conflicting reactions from classicists over the years.
Well, Said is sometimes duly invoked as a guide through the terrain of race, ethnicity, empire only then to be set aside; one example of this is Eric Ruins 2011 rethinking the other in antiquity. There have been some sustained and highly imaginative efforts to contend with this reading of the Persians, beginning with Edith Halls inventing the barbarians. These efforts have yielded some effective strategies for rethinking the marriage of tax and of Greco-roman tax, to the construction of disciplinary and specifically departmental authority.
So I’ll end my mini-lecture today by spelling out what I think those strategies are. But first, what does Said have to say about Persians? His book plays with interiority and exteriority as constitutive of disciplinary practice. ''Orientalism, he writes, is premised upon exteriority, that is on the fact that the Orientalist poet or scholar makes the orient speak, describes, the orient renders its mysteries plain for and to the west''.
Then a few sentences later ''the principal product of this exteriority is of course representation, as early as Aeschylus play the Persians, the orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening otherness into figures that are relatively familiar in Aeschylus case, grieving as the attic women''. That's the bare bones thesis in the introduction. When we come to chapter one entitled the scope of Orientalism, Said seizes on the choruses verses that follow the messenger's disclosure of the news from salamis; I’ll quote the translation that said used for lines 548-557.
You can find the text for this at page 38 of the translation that we used. ''Now all Asia’s land moans in emptiness, Xerxes led forth oh, oh, Xerxes destroyed whoa, whoa. Xerxes plans have all miscarried in ships of the sea. Why did Darius then bring no harm to his men when he led them into battle? The beloved leader of men from Susa''. What matters here, Said writes, ''is that Asia speaks through and by virtue of the European imagination, which is depicted as victorious over Asia.
That hostile other world beyond the seas''. To Asia are given the feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster that seemed thereafter to reward oriental challenges to the west, and also the lament that in some glorious past Asia fared better was itself victorious over Europe''. Following similarly suggestive commentary on Europe, but he's the Spock eye, in his opinion, ''the most Asiatic of all the addict dramas'' Said hammers home his point.
A line is drawn, he contends, between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate, Asia is defeated and distant. Aeschylus represents Asia, makes her speak in the person of the aged Persian queens or Xerxes mother. It is Europe that articulates the orient; this articulation is the prerogative not of a puppet master but of a genuine creator. Whose life-giving power represents animates, constitutes, the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries''.
In a graduate history pro seminar many moons ago on the west coast, I sensed eyes turning to me, one of three classicists in a room that was otherwise sweaty with first and second-year history Ph.D. candidates as we all try to make sense of this passage. From the gays of our professor for the proseminar, a historian of 18th century France, I got the sense that when it came to Persians, disciplinary authority resided in me somehow and that I was expected to ham it up.
Much in the same way that I did the other week when I put on my historian's mask to criticize Foucault, but then asserted a counter posture of anti-mastery. It was almost like I was granted advanced credibility as a contender in the ring against Said because I came to enveloped in the aura of Greco-roman classics. Rising to that expectation, I remember saying something to the effect that Said's analysis was lacking or not sufficiently appreciative of the place subtleties.
I hope to god that I didn't say it was insufficiently rigorous. Distant from my conceptual horizons at the time was any method for expanding upon my intrigue at the queen's vision of two women and the strife that arises between them. It's only more recently as I re-read Gayatri Spivak's questioning paraphrase of Dara Dye in death of a discipline. It's called to ditch logo fractrocentric modes of community that welcomed the brother but that only intermittently admits the sister.
Then I began to wonder whether this dream's conjuration, a frictive sorority, could offer material to our disciplinary revisionings. I’m very much looking forward to the publication of Bonnie Honig's book on a feminist theory of refusal, which I think will move in broadly a similar direction. But with explicit reference to Europa thesis Pockeye. In any case, what I didn't offer in class was a critique of the genealogical conceit of this section of Orientalism.
And how that conceit was itself integral to endowing me with the authority that I simultaneously relished and also felt conflicted about and sought to keep at arm's length. It was for Rose Vasunya, who gave that conceit a good work over in a 2003 essay for parallax on reading Edward Said.
And it was my bad luck that I encountered this essay only after that pro-seminar was packaged away into the archive of graduate school memories. Here's what Vasunya has to say, and I’ll quote him at length. ''To trace the roots of Orientalism back to Greece, is to bestow on Hellenic antiquity, a sanctity of origin or founding point of reference. Which, in the light of the history of European thought, has come to appear extremely problematic.
Saeed himself has been much chastised for presenting literary history in the form of a unified and continuous grand narrative, extending from antiquity to the present day. In fact, this criticism misses the point, since Saeed was keen to suggest an Orientalism that the authoritative nature of the unbroken European cultural tradition was founded on massive denial and violence.
The idea that a post-enlightenment discursive formation could be traced back in any unmediated sense to ancient Greece was a self-validating European construct and fantasy. While many Hellenists have maintained a scrupulous concern for methodology and for the historical location of their work, it needs to be said that some, whether deliberately or not, have continued to practice a scholarship in which ancient Greece maintains its position of privilege.
Scholars of antiquity who have attempted critiques of Orientalism thus have regularly also reaffirmed the sovereign authority of the very tradition that they seek to call into question. If Saeed's work presents the east-west distinction as the problematic and phantasmatic retrojection of a modern European tradition. This is a distinction that Hellenists have perpetuated implicitly or explicitly in their writings.''
This brings me to briefly elucidating the strategies that I referred to earlier, the strategies that I see as animating encounters with Said, especially within classics, but that also I think play a role in the discursive configuration of power that departments of classics and other classics adjacent disciplines pursue in attempting to differentiate themselves from forms of scholarly practice that are deemed not legitimate for the purposes of disciplinary authority.
So the first strategy is to cover up the tracks of reification and to naturalize the return to ancient Greece. And this is as characteristic of Said's own paradigm-shifting intervention, as it is of more traditional and more high bound projects of locating oneself within, as well as on the margins of the discipline.
But covering up the tracks of reification requires very specific steps, ones that have to do with the setup and deployment of graduate and professionalized training as a way to minimize the likelihood that exacting scrutiny will be applied to this cover-up. So here, I pause to note briefly that I located my encounter with Persians through Said in a graduate pro-seminar that was not offered within my Ph.D. conferring department at Stanford. It was offered out of the history department.
And this brings me to the second strategy, which is to enshrine that reification and that naturalization in departmental norms and cultures. One thought that occurred to me after the pro-seminar was well on it's way to becoming a memory was that I had not encountered Said in a classic graduate seminar at all. And that I had not been tasked with reading Aeschylus in dialogue with Said in any classics graduate space at all.
Finally, the signature strategy, the one that has already come up multiple times in this lecture, is maintaining the inside-outside divide in all of its various iterations. One of the most, if not the single most prominent inside-outside divide concerns the fissure, the gap that is presumed to separate the scholar from the activist. And that is a division to which we have been applying a great deal of pressure in our meetings and in the design of the class.
Of course, there is I think the valuable question, the important question of how we operate in what broken Constanza in their contribution to the marginality, oxford volume termed in open field. And how we espouse and seek to model open fields of disciplinarity. But fundamentally, what I think about when I think of open fields are spaces that are not marked at every sort of single point of transition by the presence of checkpoints of inspection.
And I use the language of the checkpoint deliberately to center what for me has been one of the most enduring takeaways from Said, which is the inter-articulation of the politics of departmentality and disciplinarity and the politics of borders. And it's that conjoined politics, and it's significance for theorizing the multiplication and division, and in some cases, contraction of departments and disciplines that I’ll leave you with for our session today.
3. Write a response
This is an open invitation to reflect on this week's readings, lectures, and discussion. You might choose to highlight a neglected point or perspective, reframe a debate, extend a line of inquiry, pose a lurking question, identify an important pattern, raise a challenge, or something else.