Hello, this week, Dan-el and I are going to be lecturing. And the way we've decided to do it is that we're each going to pre-record a brief introductory lecture, and then we're going to have a discussion together, a live discussion. So the readings that we did for this week, I think, were extremely thought provoking.

And there are specifically two different questions that I want to draw out of the reading and talk about with you today. So the first is a question of activist consciousness, or how does one become an activist. And the second is a question related to activist memory or the question of basically how does one grow as an activist.

So for this pre-recorded lecture, I’m going to be drawing very heavily on W.E.B Dubois, whose ''souls of black folk'' chapters that we read I found to be extremely powerful. And I specifically want to zero in first on this idea of how does one become an activist, and he actually describes this, I think, very eloquently in his essay.

He talks about how the newly emancipated, formerly enslaved peoples looked towards different aims, basically different goals to motivate themselves, right? So they had the idea first that they should pursue liberty that they should become free people. Then when that didn't give them the change that they wanted, they looked at the question of well, we need to get on the ballot, we need to vote.

Then when that didn't give them the change they wanted, then they turned to education. And then that didn't work, they turned to this, to basically what Dubois argues is a combination of all of these ideals or what I would argue is they came to grasp the challenge as a challenge of social change itself, how to create social change itself, not necessarily one of self-improvement or changing oneself, but changing the society around oneself.

So we want to understand this process of the development of activist consciousness because this is the process by which people become activists, and we want to create better activists. Activism is largely a self-taught path that begins early in life, although not always. But you will find that most activists who become who make a big impact in the history of activism started very young. And so, one of my concerns or one of my interests, when I think about the question of actress pedagogy, is two things.

One, is the birth of activist consciousness necessarily something that is self-taught? Or can there be a pedagogy that develops around evoking this developmental process in some people? And also, the question of whether or not activism has to be something that begins early in life or if there's a way to stimulate people into coming into activism in later stages of their life.

I think that the W.E.B Dubois speaks to these concerns and questions, especially at the level of the way that he describes the process that by going through trial and error, different ways of approaching the question of how to better their position in society, they develop as activists in their experience. And so, I want to just quote, let me pull up a specific quote that I’m kind of thinking a lot about, which the key moment I think is this in the Dubois, he says, ''but the facing of so vast prejudice could not bring the inevitable, self-questioning, self-discouragement, sorry let me start again.

He says, ''but the facing of so vast of prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement and lowering of ideals whichever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate''. And I’m jumping forward a little bit he says ''nevertheless out of the evil came something good, the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the negro's social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress''.

And in kind of shorthand, we can say that the development of the activist consciousness occurs through the trial and error of trying to, what I would say is basically, a kind of scratching of the collective itch. First, people latch, you latch on to one theory of how to bring about change, then another and then another. Until you finally, I think, come to the problem of well; the change that we desire requires a change of the society itself.

What Dubois refers to as the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. So I want to pull from this reading a kind of a questioning around this process of the development of the activist consciousness. I want to ask specifically, can this consciousness be inculcated or developed in people, or is it something that is really a self-taught, exclusively self-taught? The second thing I want to kind of point out from the DuBois, which really struck me, is that it contains a lot of clues to the lost memory of activism, protest, and revolt. Now specifically, what kind of triggered my attention to this is his reference to the quote revolution of 1876.

And when I read this, I started racking my brain. I said to myself, what was the revolution of 1876? What is it, and I started Googling. And it turns out that it's this powerful episode in the history of American democracy, where a U.S presidential election was undecided. In order to decide the election, the democratic and the Republican Party made a compromise.

And that compromise entailed the end of basically attempts to give enslaved people a fair chance; it was the end of reconstruction. He mentions other examples too, such as Cato of Stono, another activist that I had never heard about. And then a few episodes that I’ve heard about, Nat Turner and the Haitian revolution.

And then, of course, he spends a lot of time talking about the Freedmen's bureau, another episode that I think has not been fully integrated into the history of activism, at least that history of activism, the memory of activism I should say that activists carry within themselves. Which is fascinating, because Dubois calls it one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with the vast problems of race and social condition.

So you see here that, I think the proportion between how great the example is, and how little we remember of it today, says something really powerful and important for activists to think about. So why am I talking about activist memory? Why am I talking about these forgotten episodes that we can see in the reading? Well, I think it's important because a basic way of understanding how social movements are created is that they are created through embedding them in the storyline of protest.

When we create a protest as activists, we position our attempts, our movement within the tradition of protests through our references, our behaviors, our locations, our symbolic dates. It's how we signal whether or not this protest is going to be right-wing or left-wing, whether or not it's going to be populist or focused on other concerns like environment. And one example that, like two examples really, the first is when we created occupy wall street, we were very conscious to situate the protest within the trajectory of the Arab spring that was raging at that time.

We wanted the occupy Wall Street to be seen as a continuation of the protests that were happening, you know, across the Arab world. Even though such a connection wouldn't have been made readily by many activists, and maybe even now, there's this kind of tendency to separate them. But there's a power in situating one's protest along a lineage. Similarly, black lives matter is often referred to as the new civil rights movement.

And so, what I’m trying to get at here is that activists carry within themselves memories of the protests that have happened in the past, memories of the tactics that have been used. Memories of the archetypal characters and I’m interested in what happens when we recover whole lost areas of memory.

What happens when we recover the memory of the slave revolts? And all of the different insurrectionary attempts that were made to throw off slavery? This ties again into the Malamud reading, where I think what we gather from there really is this question of the archetypes of activism that were commonplace among abolitionist activists and enslaved people who were fleeing for liberty, namely that they would rather commit suicide or die than return to slavery.

Malamud calls this a dauntless, a dauntless character type, so that's how I kind of refer to it. I’m going to leave with a question; there's so much that can be discussed, and I look forward to talking with Donnelly.

But what I want to leave with is basically this question of what would be the impact of integrating the history of slave revolts into the memory of contemporary activism, right? So that the average activist knew just as much about Cato of Stono as they did about Martin Luther king? Thank you so much, and I look forward to talking more about these thanks.

Micah:         One thing I really like about how this class has started so far is that I feel like we began in the second week, where we ended with the UCLA class.

Now I know that people probably haven't seen the UCLA class, but those who have will see that we kind of ended with these questions that actually came up in the beginning of the pre-season class. Which made me feel like we're going to get somewhere really deep with this class because I think there is something. It's like bringing in the classics is really like challenging us in this interesting way. So yes, what's our first question that we should get started with?

Dan-el:          One of the issues that we were talking about right before we started recording is the place of history and of knowing activist history in helping ground, and really motivate and inform activists, right? So with the boys, we can think about some of the work that's being done in the opening chapter of the souls of black folks, like why lay out in quite painstaking detail, especially in chapter two.

The peaks and valleys of the freedmen's hero, line of reconstruction. Like what is games? And he's clearly addressing an audience; he has a readership in mind. He has a readership whose energies he wants to direct in specifically engaged ways. Why go through this flow by blow? What's at stake?

Micah:         Yes. I think it's really. I mean, I think it's a good question; it's really powerful. I mean, I think that one of the things that's happening here is like that it's almost like he already knows that this information is going to be forgotten, that these memories are going to be lost.

And that he's painstakingly documenting them so that in the year 2020, people will remember in this strange sense. And I think it's so prescient because one of the things that I have learned about activism that's so hard is that people's imagination of what is possible is very much limited to the stories that they are aware of what has happened, right?

And so like even just reading the Dubois, you're like oh like there used to be an actual governmental organization like empowered to help enslaved people become equal. And just like it's just, all this kind of stuff it's crazy. But I wonder, I mean, I think one of the things that we're going to keep referencing the time before the recording. But one of the things that you were kind of talking about was that some of these genealogies can be imagined or they're fictive, or they're not real.

And I’m also wondering at the kind of, and that's part of what's going on with the classics, right? Because both sides are kind of claiming your heritage through these texts. So I guess I’m wondering about like does it matter, this whole question. I want to hear more about what you're saying about this fictive thing, and if it matters that it's imaginary. Or is it okay that activists are kind of creating these imagined connections with possible movements that they're not part of, or something like that if that makes sense?

Dan-el:          Yes. No, this is a really probably question because, on the one hand, it would be easy to oversimplify. And say well, we're all, irrespective of whether we credentialed ourselves as activists. We're all in the business of participating in communities that depend in whole or in part on fictions all the time.

We're like all in the business of concocting, embroidering, promulgating these fictions by which we stick a claim to our belonging, right? But like I said, it'll be easy to oversimplify along those lines. Because what Dubois’s analysis brings out for me, especially in chapter one, but also through a different set of formulations in the second and third chapters, is that this is not equal terrain, right? This is not the kind of level terrain that would enable all prospective participants in this project to find equal footing.

The terms of engagement are set and are circumscribed by the facts of domination and exploitation, right? So when I think about the labor of engaging and investing in fictive genealogies. I look back at Dubois’s remarks in chapter one on being a co-worker in the kingdom of culture.

And one of the most amazingly astute aspects of that formulation that I grab onto whenever I reread the chapter is that Dubois is clear that this is work. And that's something that I think it can be easy to overlook. There is a labor involved, there is work involved, and this is amenable to a class and structural analysis that centers work. And that has poignancy and relevance for activism.

It has to form part of any activist approach to re-conceptualizing the foundations of and imagining past the boundaries of the effective communities around which we've constructed and continue to construct our political and cultural allegiances. Because what's not at all being lost or sidelined with Dubois’s account is that fundamentally this involves labor.

And in order to do right by it, you have to have a critique of life. And you have to think about the work that goes into these institutions in the first place, right? Like the freedmen's bureau. That was a lot of work that was a lot of money. That was a lot of time, that was a lot of confidence, that was a lot of incompetence, but there were resources that were allocated to this stuff.

Micah:         Yes, absolutely. Yes, I mean, I think one of the things that we were grappling with last week is this question of, just I want to keep. Because I think when we started thinking about this class, the tradition that I was focusing on rupturing was like the classics or the disciplines or the academia like that was the thing that needed change. And this has always been back my mind too, is that I think activism itself is a kind of tradition that needs rupturing.

And so one of the challenges, and I think one of the ways in which the tradition of activism is ruptured is by changing what are the genealogy, or what are the stories that make up the basic consciousness of the activist. And what the left has done is they tell some stories, and they're very compelling, and they're amazing stories about revolution and Marx and Lenin and those heroes that we know.

But I think that what is so powerful about the joining of classics, but also with the Dubois, is that there are these whole other stories that are not told. Like it's not part of the common leftist storyline to think about Cato of Stono or the stories of the women fleeing slavery and killing their children, which was very to me really brought up actually stories from the Jewish war and there are some examples of that in antiquity.

So I guess what I’m trying to think about is, it's almost like I think what I’m gesturing at is we're dynamic, which is like you set out to rupture someone else, and then you get ruptured in this strange way, yes.

Dan-el:          One question for me coming to the tradition of activism, through the tradition of classics, one question for me that remains alive and vibrant is whether in a sense we're dealing with two traditions that have been regularly undoing and redoing each other through these kinds of constitutive ruptures well before our seminar itself got off the ground, or even before we got to thinking about it.

And if that's the case, which I think it is, with reference specifically to Dubois, but also to some of our other readers for this week. We might want to reflect more carefully on what it means that our disciplinary sites have this very long history of engagement with each other. That there have been these sorts of repeated episodes, and that sort of in a way small or not so small fractal, as well as linear speak to the tendency of rupture across space and time as something that's really just sort of embedded in the disciplines themselves, okay.

Whether we're talking about activism or classicism, or activist classicism, all of these formations have as one of their core guiding tendencies, not just a possibility, but like the actuality of rupture. It is the condition of their existence. They rupture, and then they decompose themselves, and then 10, 15, 100 years later, we are back to another moment structure. That's invigorating, but it's also challenging. I think it's challenging because it's really difficult to do the history of these circles of rupture, these cycles of rupture in a way that folks can grasp.

It's not that we're like locked in the logic of the eternal return, but it is to say that there are patterns here, and the patterns require some fine-grained analysis. But marrying that to an understanding of how traditions and the practices associated with them change over time, even as these patterns persist, is a very difficult conceptual enterprise.

Micah:         Absolutely. Yes, and I think it's compounded too because one of the things that I kind of like keep just stumbling over is that the best examples of activism in antiquity are often the ones that are at least documented, right? So it's like Spartacus, it's like the secession plebes. It's like this tiny like two pages. And I mean I think this is such a, I love this example because we read this week.

And it's like this is an example of the people going out of the town into the hills, and they literally, they don't just get reform, they get a whole new structure of power, it's like amazing. It's probably actually one of the best examples of effective protest in human history.

But it has that same thing you're talking about with the cycles, because each time the tactic is repeated, it becomes less and less successful until finally, they're not even sure if the fourth one is really even an example of it or not, and then it never works again.

So I think that this gets into this, it comes back again this question of imagination. So these episodes, because we lack so much just documentation about what happened, it becomes a kind of imaginary space too that is also probably not real in this weird way. So I don't know, it's very difficult. That both there's an erasure of, that you can't really find what you need there, you can only see echoes of it, it's very difficult, yes.

Dan-el:          And the business of imagination and the limits of imagination goes hand in hand with the comments earlier about fictive or embroidered genealogies, right? So I mean a fair amount of rides on whether you believe that these successions were historical or whether they are all, or at least some of them are imagined with a view to answering to the demands of the communities that imagine them, right?

So whether we're dealing with mid-republican room or late republican early imperial Rome, there was an appetite for reaching far back into the early republican past, into the world of the 5th century BC and locating in that past, a precedent for collective action that involved spatial removal.

And it was very potent as a feat of political imagination to entertain this idea that such collective action was possible and that it could bring about the kinds of governmental and infrastructural rewards that you mentioned. This is something that Libby is attentive to. But how much access  did Libby writing in the closing decades of the first century BC; have to information about the specifics of what had transpired in the early years of the fifth century BC.

I mean, depending on whether you find me in an optimistic or pessimistic place about republican historiography. I’ll give you one answer. I’ll give you another. But the point though, irrespective of what we think about Libby's credibility on this, is precisely what you underlined. These moments of collective action are extremely powerful for the political imagination of later periods.

They serve to build up will on the part of communities that may be trying to think about new strategies for collective action, right? So for our purposes, that matter, because it's important to find in these and other incidents of collective action, and some renewable resources for entertaining how collective action might yield dividends and rewards for us, right?

But that's a myth-making enterprise, at the same time that it's a historical or fact-finding one. Like we have to join in with Libby in imagining a political space, a cultural space that was, for many reasons, including the sheer hurdles of time and evidence, inaccessible to him unless he embarked on a project of imagination.

Micah:         Yes. I think this is really important because I think that, and this actually comes up in the Malamud reading. Because she talks about how basically what the classics can furnish people, is these either patterns of thought or these historical stories that allow you to kind of act more effectively as an activist in your present moment.

And I think just like as a small example, like the other thing that I find so remarkable about the secession is that one of the rights that they get is that they're, I’m probably going to get all the terminology wrong.

But they get their representative becomes sacrosanct, right? So this is a right that, even just that exists as a possibility, is like a fascinating thing for contemporary actors to even consider that you could ask that anyone who kills this person is like violating a sacred law, it's just like I think it's amazing.

So there's one part of this, which is the extension of activist imagination by drawing upon classical resources. There's this other part which is this question of like how we are, how do we define ourselves as activists.

This really came up, I think in the second class, I think we're going to keep tussling with this is basically; it comes out so clearly an essay about the uses of classics and slavery. It's like both sides are waging a kind of activism against each other using these references. So it's just, it's interesting. I have a question for you, though.

Dan-el:          Sure.

Micah:         This is one of these things that people, I don't know what you think about this. Were they just like not better people, but stronger people. This is a weird question, but I’m just struck by the story of, I believe it was a story of Cato’s suicide and his like bowels falling out and all this kind of stuff.

And this comes up because there is, there's this like there's something about the classics where they were stronger, you know what I mean? So like how do we also like think about this, the role of the classics in terms of like yes, like were they superior people somehow. And like, what do you think about this question?

Dan-el:          Yes. This is a tough question to answer because it invites several lines of interpretation. I mean some of which complement each other more readily than some others. So let me sort of briefly suggest two ways of approaching it. So in part of the logic of classicism. I mean, one could argue that this is like sort of so wired into the logic of classicism. It's foundational, and core element is the idea that our predecessors were better.

And if you want to look for economical text that voices that and puts it in the mouth of the character, who gives it very forceful expression. We could turn to Homer; we could even turn to not just the homeowner Catholics, but specifically the person of master in the Homeric epics. I'm always bemoaning the fact that people back in his day, they could do things that you young bucks can't do now.

This big rock that was picked up by one person back in the day requires two people to lift this now. And this is part of the logic of classicism, and it's still to its core, it's the idea that the forbearers, the ancestors, the predecessors, mythic as well as historic, mythic historic.

We’re stronger; we're better. Now depending on the cultural context n which the profession of faith in the strength and unassailable greatness of the ancestors takes root. This formulation could incentivize a profound sense of indebtedness on the part of those of us who live in the present that is haunted by the ghosts of the classical past, right?

We've a sense of incompleteness that we can never live up to the standard that they set. That could cut in one of two ways, right? That could be quite incapacitating, actually, right? I mean, it could be psychologically debilitating to be told all the time that you can never live up to the example of your parents or grandparents, or the mythic forbearers of your community or whatever, right? It can also be inspirational, right? It can be inspirational in a progressiveness way.

And in the 19th-century context, where we see Dubois and sort of maturing into young adulthood and beginning the work of imagining the publications and the political projects that would define his life well into the mid-20th century. We see versions of both. We see communities and leaders of communities who see in the chartering of a specific conceptualization of the classics, an argument to be made, an argument being made about the inadequacies of the present.

But we also see people making the argument that in fact, the classics and the example of the classics is something to strive against, something to overcome, right? And then we get into situations where we see people making the case that actually, we're not only going to attempt to replicate or emulate the classics. We are going to instantiate on new land, and in brave new worlds.

Our own vision of what constitutes classical greatness, and it will be greater than anything that Greece has to offer. I mean, this is something that comes out quite trenchantly in the work of Jose Martin. So there again, we see sort of the opportunities that come with the logic of classicism as grounded in this commitment to validating and upholding the preeminent example of the ancestors.

But the tensions that this provokes, right? And those tensions can be productively purposed, but they can also leave one saddle, to leave community saddled with burdens, some of which serve further to reify the white supremacists domineering geopolitics that were receiving and critiqued in Dubois.

At the boys at the turn of the century, and that we would receive more critique by the boys over the course of the next few decades. But yes, it's a question very much on mind, because he believes that one can use the classics as a means of inspiring the kind of emulation that will be most effective in guiding young African-Americans towards an appreciation of their innate capabilities.

As co-workers in the kingdom of culture. But he's not entirely alien to; it's not entirely alien to him. That this can entail not just risks but also some constraints and that those constraints can be counterproductive or even it can be inimical to some of the work that he seeks to undertaken.

Micah:         That's interesting. I meanwhile you were talking, I kept thinking about how, what's I think kind of ironic or strange is that activism actually has a kind of, I mean to simplify a great deal, I would say it has the opposite narrative. Which is that I think most activists, I think most activists would probably say that activists are getting better, this is what I think.

I mean, I think that at least they would say that the 20th-century activists were the best. So what I’m trying to say is unlike in classics where it's like the best were long ago, I think that activism still has this sense that we're getting better at doing social movements. We're getting better at being activists whether or not this is true; I think there's a kind of more like positive sense.

And I was just wondering about, I was wondering about that. And I was wondering about what that says about activism that we have this kind of more, possibly incorrect, but I guess a progressive vision of where we're going. And I think that what's strange about it though is that, I think that the virtues that were held by people in antiquity, their strengths of character and certain behaviors that are so rare today.

Activism is getting better in the absence of those, so that's what also kind of like interesting for me. And I’m curious about then, what are the virtues of this activist people that are coming alive now and stuff like that. I don't know; it's a very hard time to even like think I feel like in these times, when just the whole, it's not a very calm time to be thinking.

Just whole geopolitically, the pandemic. And so it's almost like we are doing a class on rupturing tradition in the middle of a rupture, and it's therefore so hard to even know where to go, you know what I mean in a certain sense. I think usually it's kind of like you have a trajectory and you kind of know where you want to go.

But with the world, so an upheaval, I think I’m just kind of like trying to see what's going on, I don't know. What's your strategy? Do you have a strategy for trying to navigate thinking through? Like sometimes, it's easier to think than other times. Do you have a strategy for trying to navigate, thinking in difficult times, or I’m just curious?

Dan-el:          A strategy, I’m not so sure. Because we're living in a moment of rupture, it's been difficult to think conservatively and carefully about the reach of the future beyond this moment, right? And that's not entirely foreign to me. So I have to approach the presents as this day-to-day slog.

But the existential dilemmas of the contemporary moment do make it very difficult to embrace, even the kind of project that is coming into being through our collaboration together, right? Because you sit back home and you think oh, this is quite edifying. Then, at another moment, you think it is the end times, it is the actual apocalyptic enzymes.

And so what are we doing here, but constructing for ourselves some kind of full work against the final dissolution. The center cannot hold, and well here we are, things are fragmenting. At the same time, though, I have found I think some purchase in grappling with those tendencies and the logic of classicism that I see is most open to contestation, not as some idol or abstract exercise.

But because I see that contestation as part of the work of living. So this whole business of, as we were discussing earlier, struggling with the logic of classicism.

I’m struggling with one of its particular instantiations, right? It's almost of a fetishistic attachment to the ancestors who were greater. It's for me, an entry point into conversations about the threading together, the entwining of classicism and white supremacy.

Something that was a preeminent interest voice. And it's also an opportunity for me to think about how in the hands of the boys and many other African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Diasporic writers who are working their own way through the logics of classicism. We can find resources for the contemporary moment.

But that's not to say that those resources are going to be necessarily up to the task of moving us forward in the contemporary moment. And it's not even, and here I would part ways from some of my colleagues. It's not even that these resources have the capacity to console or to afford any kind of like psychological relief. It's simply that they, as far as I’m concerned, need to be harnessed for the simple reason that as we are seeing in a host of national and international context, the logic of classicism has unleashed many perversities.

And it would be I think important to bring together the work of that classicism study with the work of reading into and through it, the traditions of activism as a way of restoring and making it possible down the road, access to other kinds of classicism that have been historically sidelined on a contingency sideline. So we plot our week's engagement with the boys by reference to Cicero or Libby.

We plotted last week's engagements by reference to [Inaudible] and the constitution of the Athenians. But what is lost when we do this? Like when we construct these genealogies, sure we gain some things. But what is lost? And I would argue that plenty is lost and that we have to be critical about what is lost. We have to develop a set of conceptual tools for mapping what is lost.

And at the end of this project, what I ideally see as one of the more felicitous outcomes would be a much finer way of putting together these sort of histories of fractured tradition as they streak through classicism and activism, in order to better ground communities of practitioners in the work of attending to loss.

Because I mean that you want to talk about the real stuff from this contemporary moment, it is lost, right? It is like the imminence and inescapability of loss. So the better equipped we are to understand the magnitude of that loss, the better equipped it will be to understand what needs to be done next.

Micah:         Nice. I have like more that I could say, but I’m wondering if we should like end on that. I just I feel like what's yes, I think what's so interesting about pairing classics with activism is that on the one hand, you have a field that has been thought about for thousands of years by the greatest minds. And on the other hand, you have a relatively new field that doesn't have the kind of conceptual complexity that is present within I think classics and academia generally.

So you have within the left, there's a lot of conceptual complexity around economic analysis, class analysis kind of this kind of stuff. But when you separate the ideology, and you said look at the questions of like protests and how do they work, and activism this kind of stuff, it's very limited.

And so I think it's really interesting your point; I think we should end with it basically is, and maybe we can carry this into next week. I don't know it's this question of what's being lost because I do think that what's fascinating is that when you bring activism into a space where you're reading about classics, something is absolutely lost.

Because simply in terms of what will be discussed. Even in terms of the reading, how we approach the reading, and what we're reading for. And this is actually something that I’ve been thinking a lot about too. Because in a typical class or seminar, the professors would basically try to be imparting knowledge or at least presenting a, here's our interpretation of the storyline and we're going to like feed it to you kind of.

But with this class, it's like I feel myself resisting it and saying no, I just want to. I guess it's because of this question of basically how is, and this connects again to what I really appreciate about the Malamute. They're talking about basically self-study, the importance of self-study, and they would give curriculums in order to study this material.

And that, to me, is how activism has also learned is through this process of self-study. And so you take a discipline that is traditionally learned through self-study activism and through experimentation, and then you try to teach it.

You can't just impart knowledge, you have to try to ask questions, but it becomes very difficult. And so something is really lost. But I feel a total reluctance to trying to A push people to ascribe to a certain set of belief systems around what activism is and is not and all this kind of stuff.

And also, being like that activism as a knowledge should be humble in the face of like we have small cults, we can do small things like oh, here's an example of a protest in antiquity. But we don't have those episodes they weren't the main focus of classics. And maybe that'll be one gift that activism can give, is to be like let's work more on those episodes for the next 2000 years or something. So yes, I’m trying to think on a meta-level about what this class is doing, in what time it's doing it and how it is, and what it is to bring a basically a novice discipline in contact with a the oldest discipline as it were and what that means.

Dan-el:          Maybe our discipline is the novices discipline, and yours is the oldest. I don't indulge that habit simply out of an effort to turn the tables; I venture that as a possibility just because in thinking about the forms of disciplinarily that I occupy, one of my questions of late has been so what degree is, am I making choices that presumed adapt to the discipline of historical death, right?

That may in substance and in practice be a little more than a consensual agreement between present-day practitioners, right? I mean, so like we construct our own myths of the discipline all the time. And it could be that the myth of the disciplines antiquity is among the most durable and seductive of those.

Another way of approaching it would be to think about the kinds of practices that are sort of emblematic of being within these fields, and being within these disciplines. And so on the one hand, you have a discipline that in its academic form, i.e., the form that it takes within the academy as an institutionalized paradigm of power prefers certain outputs and demands of its practitioners, certain outputs that are legible to other members of the discipline.

These normally take the form of publications or thoughts and things like that. And even well these days, I’ve been thinking a lot about thanks in part to an invitation from a trusted editor, what it might mean to write a people's history of ancient Rome or something like that, very soon. But there we get straight away into what I think is so typical of the myth of classics is a discipline with this antiquity.

Because the outputs that it prizes in the contemporary configuration of the university landscape are not outputs with a great deal of historical depth to them. Like this business of writing monographs, for example, in order to secure advancements in the profession is not that old. If you want to buy into the idea that this is a discipline that has this incredibly long trajectory, right? Well, if you look at the formations of knowledge production within the discipline and you begin historicizing them, you realize that well; actually, those formations themselves are not that old. You know what is really old?

Collective action in the streets. I mean like that's really old, right? So like that to me is the simmering tension, right? How to move continuously and with attention to the boundaries by which discipline certify themselves between, on the one hand, a discipline that credentializes itself it's super old, but that may actually be in some of its most salient manifestations much younger than its foundation myth makes it out to be.

And on the other hand, the discipline that provincializes itself as insistently new. But that rides on really millennia of historical engagements and commitments around forms of practice and ways of situating and negotiating polarities of power. And then these are old; these are really old. So that's my card, that's the card I’ll play.

Micah:         Yes. I mean, it's a really good point. There's this Egyptian papyri that documents like the first recorded example of a protest, you know they're like overthrowing the king. And so like yes, it's true, but what I would say is that it's almost like that for I don't know three, four, five thousand years activism was done in a kind of unconscious way.

And that the part that is new now is the thinking about it part, like the more conscious strategizing about it part, which comes with its own problems and pitfalls. But you're absolutely right; the history of activism is as old as the history of civilization, so yes. They're both very long traditions.

So it's good talking to you, I feel like that, and there's a lot of like, I would never say this, we're still recording. But the thing about the Dubois I will just say since there are people want to know. Boy that essay hit me hard on an emotional level. There's like some stuff in there I was like this is like so true to just my experience of everyday life, and I just am like.

And then the other thing that struck me is you look up this guy's like biography, his like CV and he's like hello, like is there anyone today who even has a CV even close to W.E.B Dubois. And then you look up what happens, he leaves America, he goes to Ghana, and he dies there. And all of a sudden I was like, wow, I don't know, it's hard, it's a hard thing. But it's good to be in like it's all of a sudden you're like wow, I’m reading a real one of the greats, you're reading one of the greats here.

Dan-el:          It is a classic; it is a classic, right? But like again, the relationship with Dubois is the same kind of relationship constructing; a relationship with him, I should say, is not dissimilar to some of the relationships that logics of classicism seek everywhere to sort of build-up, right? I mean, he does seem towering.

The scope of his emotions is enough to be stupefied. But I mean, what kind of affect does that suppose or should that inspire in us? Right. Should have fire the sense of oh, we couldn't rival that. Not if we had 90 years of our own to do the kind of work that he did.

That I think is part of the of the difficulty that [Inaudible] in identifying and aligning oneself you know with one's chosen ancestors, right? I mean, if one really does want to claim to voices as an ancestor, then there are some repercussions. And those repercussions take it can be tracked on a number of different registers, but affect is one of them. And I think there's one with which we'll have to do a fair amount of thinking, I suspect.