Postclassicisms

By The Postclassicisms Collective

Made up of nine prominent scholars, The Postclassicisms Collective aims to map a space for theorizing and reflecting on the values attributed to antiquity. The product of these reflections, Postclassicisms takes up a set of questions about what it means to know and care about Greco-Roman antiquity in our turbulent world and offers suggestions for a discipline in transformation, as new communities are being built around the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Structured around three primary concepts—value, time, and responsibility—and nine additional concepts, Postclassicisms asks scholars to reflect upon why they choose to work in classics, to examine how proximity to and distance from antiquity has been—and continues to be—figured, and to consider what they seek to accomplish within their own scholarly practices. Together, the authors argue that a stronger critical self-awareness, an enhanced sense of the intellectual history of the methods of classics, and a greater understanding of the ethical and political implications of the decisions that the discipline makes will lead to a more engaged intellectual life, both for classicists and, ultimately, for society. A timely intervention into the present and future of the discipline, Postclassicisms will be required reading for professional classicists and students alike and a model for collaborative disciplinary intervention by scholars in other fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226672458

Book preview

Postclassicisms

Postclassicisms

The Postclassicisms Collective

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67228-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67231-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67245-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226672458.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Postclassicisms Collective, author.

Title: Postclassicisms / The Postclassicisms Collective.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018470 | ISBN 9780226672281 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226672311 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226672458 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Classical philology—Philosophy. | Critical theory.

Classification: LCC PA37 .P67 2020 | DDC 480.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018470

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

PART ONE   Introduction

1.1   Introduction to the Introduction

1.2   Value

1.3   Time

1.4   Responsibility

PART TWO   Concepts

2.1   Agency

2.2   Discipline

2.3   God

2.4   Human

2.5   Knowing

2.6   Materiality

2.7   Situatedness

2.8   Untimeliness

2.9   World

Postscript: On Collaborating

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In this book, we—nine classical scholars, attempting to write not with a single voice but in an intermittently convergent plural—offer a series of reflections on the nature of our discipline: its history, its durability, its peculiarities and preoccupations, its passions, its perversities, and its possibilities. We aim to open a conversation about what classics means now and what it might mean in the future, to us and to others. We are not the first or the only ones to attempt such a venture; nor is classics the only discipline to reflect on itself in this way (see the accompanying bibliographic essays at the end of the book). Nevertheless, we hope that this book—the product of long and intense collaboration—offers a distinctive voice.

This is not a rulebook for how to do classics; it is, rather, an attempt to address a cluster of ambitiously defined questions that have perennially vexed the study of Greco-Roman antiquity and continue to do so today. The nature of the project’s motivating questions and its stakes are laid out in the introduction that follows this preface. Here we wish to say a few words about the affinities and commitments that have oriented us, the methodological principles guiding our work, and our hopes for how this book might be useful. We discuss the logistics and the ethos of the collective labor behind this book in more detail in the postscript.

Fundamental to our project and to this book has been a commitment to collaboration, dialogue, and debate. It is animated by a number of voices, neither fully distinct nor seamlessly integrated, nor always harmonious. At the same time, the we of the project share important points of overlap in our individual perspectives. Despite a range of national backgrounds, all of us are deeply, if not exclusively, aligned, through our training and our professional practice, with the disciplinary formation of classics within the Anglophone world. The majority of us focus primarily on texts, with somewhat less systematic recourse to visual and material culture. Between us, we cover almost all genres of ancient writing; many of us are also deeply engaged with reception studies, different forms of theory, and comparative work. We are, broadly speaking, Hellenists. Doubtless our perspective on the issues of contemporary classics would be somewhat different if we were Latinists, archaeologists, or art historians. The classicism with which we engage is that of the Greco-Roman tradition, although we are well aware that the idea of the classical tradition has all too often obscured the plurality of traditions that might be so termed (e.g., Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Persian) and might be productively studied comparatively.

In acknowledging these shared backgrounds and affinities we recognize not only the principled ineluctability of partial perspective—the we here does not represent a claim to universality, or to a synoptic gaze—but also its virtues. It is through this situatedness that we come to confront the conceptual masonry of the world. Many though by no means all of the abiding concerns in the following pages have emerged, for example, from modern engagements with the Greeks and the history of Philhellenism—the long shadow of German idealism, for example, or the contested narratives of the Greek miracle. Yet we also resist seeing these orientations (Anglophone, philological, Hellenist) as reified categories whose boundaries must be accepted in advance as the condition of professional legibility. The members of this group share a centrifugal relationship to the field of classics, an intellectual nomadism, and active involvement in other academic communities (disciplinary and interdisciplinary), often through hybridized professional identities and affiliations.

In this restlessness, we are, of course, not alone. The challenges of disciplinary belonging and its discontents are an integral part of any discipline, and have been so for a long time. At the same time, we would be disingenuous if we claimed to be marginal outsiders, permanently circling the edges of our field. All of us are in the privileged positions of having job security in an increasingly precarious profession; it should be no less part of our own situatedness to acknowledge this relative stability. With that come the advantages of a network: we owe a great debt of gratitude to colleagues, predecessors, friends, and students, whose thoughts and writings have influenced ours and with whom we are in dialogue. The field of classics in the early twenty-first century (like the humanities as a whole) has accommodated and debated a range of theoretical and interdisciplinary trends: structural linguistics, anthropology, poststructuralist thought, feminism and gender studies, postcolonial studies and critical race studies, cultural studies, the history of science and of scholarship, new forms of comparative literature and comparative history, and new philosophies of materialism, or the posthuman. Some of us have been and remain in the middle of those developments, and we feel lucky enough to have come of age academically at a time when many of those questions were already a part of the disciplinary culture we could share with like-minded others. In the last decade, in which our thinking on postclassicism has come to fruition, we have found ourselves looking with excitement to other projects and areas, from which we have learned much. Among such new areas are forms of comparatism that extend antiquity to other geographical or cultural areas; new attention to the methods, theories, and practices of scholarship and of philology; the importance of the senses, affects, and embodiment, as well as of objects and things, in our understanding and configuration of antiquity; the relevance of attention to explicit or implicit political thought; renewed interest in race in antiquity, in the reception of the Greco-Roman canon, and in the formation of the discipline; and new thinking about the temporality of antiquity, whether through revisiting notions of anachronism or by activating a sense of deep time.

In this project, then, we have tried to maximize the capacities for mobility across disciplinary lines and defined fields, capacities that are engendered precisely by a greater awareness of how we come to see as we do and by the techniques of close reading, historical defamiliarization, and critical analysis. To be situated is not synonymous with being locked in place. Among our aims are to question and prod the dominant textualism of classics as much as we undoubtedly still exemplify it; to probe the borderlands between the Greco-Roman world and the world at large; to reimagine the genealogies of the contemporary scholar of classical literature and culture. Our hope is that this experiment—for all its inevitable blind spots—will be a stimulus for future collaborations between scholars working inside and outside the field of classics as it is conventionally defined.

This book is built around a set of concepts, that is, organizing terms that facilitate and structure argument and reflection. The three concepts that are discussed in more detail in the introduction—value, time, and responsibility—are integral to the project as a whole in its aim to reflect on the study of the past in relationship to the pressures—disciplinary, institutional, ethical, political, material—of the present. They thread throughout the individual chapters and help to relate those conversations to one another. By contrast, the nine concepts that we have chosen for those chapters are intended as tactical rather than final. We have sought concepts that would take us to sites of maximum contestation in the field while ideally opening up unexpected perspectives on the questions and problems at stake. And within these chapters are embedded other recurrent frames: the figure of the embodied scholarly self, for example, and the gendering of subjects and concepts.

The prominence of concepts may seem to some readers to render the whole exercise overly abstract. It is worthwhile, therefore, saying something about the reasons why they play such an important structural role in this book. First, concepts, whether implicit or explicit, are central to group formation, and also to understanding it, and the group formed by students and interpreters of Greco-Roman antiquity is no exception. Communities are gathered and sustained by a range of mechanisms. Within disciplinary classics, the most conspicuous mechanisms that have founded scholarly communities have tended to be text-based (e.g., the classic authors that form the basis of graduate reading lists) and technique-based (e.g., skill in the ancient languages and in disciplines like epigraphy, paleography, or numismatics); consequently, the conceptual apparatus underpinning the field has tended to be underacknowledged. We have sought both to provide a conceptual anatomy of the field and to engage critically with the concepts in question. It is not exactly the much-debated question of the place of theory in classics that occupies us. We aim, rather, to sharpen the tools that could enable us to theorize together, constructively and critically, about the work of interpreting the Greco-Roman past and its long and diasporic afterlife, and thereby to enrich and expand the practices of classical scholarship in the rapidly changing social and intellectual climate that we all inhabit. Our choice of concepts is an attempt to contribute to an expanding toolkit for analyzing the nature of the discipline.

Second, we have sought out concepts that are especially multivalent and complexly textured in the hope that they might serve as opportunities for working through problems that all too often are resolved prematurely into polarized binaries (e.g., historicism versus presentism, or activity versus passivity). Frequently, dilemmas we encounter in our work would be best understood not only as a choice between an either/or but also as a both/and: for example, when we are asked to choose between sexuality as constructed and as biological, meaning as determined by texts and by readers, or the significance of a text or artifact as delimited by historical context or universal. But if the both/and is to be a viable and durable alternative to the clean and specious articulation of either/or, it will be crucial to map out its intricacies. A concept ideally creates a space for thinking through a problem productively, with a sense of getting somewhere (and getting somewhere together), rather than oscillating between opposing poles in eristic futility. A well-chosen concept therefore has the potential to replace the gray area of indeterminacy with the iridescence of a multifaceted object. Moreover, each concept offers its own particular strategies for addressing problems that threaten to sprawl out of control and to become too general, banal, or abstract to offer our practices much sustenance. Just as the group of concepts engaged here is not exhaustive, so too the paths we take through them are certainly not the only ones possible: we hope that they will suggest different itineraries to others.

Finally, a concept is a strange kind of beast, in historical terms. It is certainly dependent on local contextual networks of meaning, and signifies in relation to other concepts as well as to phenomena and events; but it is also an indispensable (if imperfect) vehicle for travel between different historical periods and cultures. In a number of the chapters here, we treat the concepts in question as emergent within antiquity itself, polymorphic over the long course of classicism, and firmly located and active within various modern and contemporary theoretical positions both inside and outside of classics. The point is not that the concept of materiality, say, or god is the same at all times and places but rather that these concepts can help establish a shared language that is transhistorical without being universalizing. The concept thus becomes a way of bringing together and elaborating resources for thought that are drawn equally from classical antiquity, from the postclassical study of antiquity, and from contemporary theoretical debates.

Our use of concepts, then, is designed to be user-friendly in the sense of helping to inform and prompt reconsideration of the practices of classical scholarship and, more broadly, of any sustained engagement with the Greco-Roman world. It is our hope that this book might be stimulating for a wide range of readers, both students and professional classicists at all stages of their careers, not only scholars of antiquity but also anyone who is drawn to antiquity through their work or just through their curiosity, whether they are situated inside, outside, or on the threshold of the academy. We envision this volume as providing food for thought, and for useful disagreement, to introductory graduate courses in classics and related fields, for younger and older classical scholars facing and forming a rapidly changing discipline, and for those readers who look on our field from outside with curiosity as to what is happening in it (for example, scholars of and participants in classical traditions other than the Greco-Latin one). The essayistic mode reflects an attempt to free up ideas and arguments while limiting annotation to short bibliographic essays at the back of the volume. We have at times risked generalizations (the Greeks, the moderns, the nineteenth century, etc.) in the interest of addressing questions on a larger historical and conceptual scale, aware that the manifold elements that make up these general patterns also expose their fragility. We sacrifice detail reluctantly, but in the hope that this strategy will allow for observations that will be compelling to a wide range of readers.

As scholars who gratefully acknowledge that we have over the years been shaped by exchange with our own teachers, colleagues, and students, we are keenly aware that our field depends both on its members, who continue to make the improbable life decision to devote themselves professionally to the study of classical antiquity, and on those who have chosen otherwise for themselves but who nonetheless continue to find nourishment and stimulation in ancient Greek and Latin texts, history, artworks, physical remains, and ideas. We hope that both kinds of people will want to read this book and will find much in it with which to agree, as well as disagree.

Scholarship, like literature and art, is both timely and untimely. The writing of Postclassicisms spanned a period of historical turbulence that saw the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, and a resurgence of nationalism and right-wing extremism around the globe. Classical antiquity is being deployed, not for the first time, in the service of white supremacism, and incivility and hostility are finding sustenance in an increasingly polarized cultural environment. At this moment there is a new call to examine how classics is being implicated in systemic injustice, and to oppose the intolerance, exclusion, harm, and violence that often have been and are now being inflicted under its banner. The urgency of developing critical and diagnostic tools for disciplinary reimagination has never been clearer to us. We are also acutely aware that such work must go hand in hand with action. In the past, the study of antiquity has been a spur to change of all kinds; classicists have been among those protesting injustice and the effects on its victims. We support the many ways such work is being undertaken in the present by friends and colleagues, and affirm our commitment to this cause.

Alastair Blanshard

Simon Goldhill

Constanze Güthenke

Brooke Holmes

Miriam Leonard

Glenn Most

James Porter

Phiroze Vasunia

Tim Whitmarsh

PART ONE

Introduction

1.1

Introduction to the Introduction

This book is an experiment in rethinking classics by introducing new critical concepts. These concepts are not authoritative or definitive; nor do they capture the entire range of our understanding of postclassicism. They are, in one sense, exercises: training our thoughts on these concepts, and working through what they mean for us, has been a means of sharpening and refining our understanding of the central challenges and opportunities of our subject. It is the task of this introduction to explain why, to us, they have particular purchase, as well as why we believe that these specific words speak to the issues that we face now. To do so, we will need to outline what we mean by classicism, classics, and the post of postclassicism.

Classicism is a construction of Greek and Roman antiquity as at once an ideal and an origin, at once beyond time and located in time, a value-laden narrative that stands both as paradigmatic for mainstream society as a whole (i.e., the classical tradition is imagined as continuous and integral to the genealogy of a present that is often framed, implicitly or explicitly, as European and Western) and as the structuring principle of the academic discipline known most commonly in the Anglo-American world as classics.

What defines classics (the discipline), most would agree, is, fundamentally, the study of the classical world, however we choose to define that. But that study is also a reflexive process, which is to say that we also observe how we collectively as a field study the classical world and how we as a society relate to it. It thus requires making judgments as to which methods are appropriate and which not, how to assess the results of our studies, and how to communicate them to our peers in the modern world; and these judgments require a self-awareness about the likely effects of our interventions in the wider intellectual and social spheres. Classics, therefore, is constituted as a dialogue between the study of a body of ancient material, on the one hand, and the intellectual and sociocultural framework(s) of our own era, on the other. It may also deal with intervening moments in history: for example, a philologist establishing a new edition of an ancient text will need to account for and explain textual convergences and divergences in medieval manuscripts; or a scholar attempting to theorize Greek tragedy may find herself explicating and assessing influential models generated in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, such as those of Hegel, Schlegel, and Nietzsche. These intervening moments or events can also shape the discipline in often unnoticed ways, which should be all the more reason to expose and interrogate them.

This, we hope, is a relatively uncontroversial description of our subject. For the purposes of this introduction, we further describe and explore this anatomy by considering and critically analyzing three constituent parts of it: value, time, and responsibility.

Value marks the investment that we, as moderns, make in the culture of the past: the reasons, that is, why we are drawn to it. These reasons may be intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, political, or affective in nature. They may be explicit or implicit. As classicists, we always turn to the past because we want something from it, even if we cannot articulate or do not know exactly what that is. This may be broadly true of all academic disciplines. What is different about classics is that the value that we as scholars place in our material is replicated (albeit, of necessity, inexactly) in an entire socially constructed architecture of valuation that subsists, however faintly or powerfully, within the structures of our educational institutions and the historical self-fashioning of cultural traditions that cross national boundaries and sometimes persist over millennia. Particularly but not exclusively in Europe since the Renaissance, the classical world has been the object of a repeated cathexis, wide and deep in extent, a fixation or focalization—which has also, predictably, been accompanied by moments of contestation and repudiation (or—better—revaluation and devaluation). To be a classicist, therefore, is to participate, however obliquely or indirectly, in a social process of valuing that is far bigger than any of us. To be a critical classicist, then, will necessarily involve exploring the nature of these processes of valuation.

The second fundamental component of our discipline is temporality. By this we do not mean anything particularly abstruse, in the first instance; our observation is simply that the classicist’s primary task is to mediate between present and past, either directly (when, for example, a scholar in the twenty-first century considers an inscription created in the third century BCE) or via more complex intermediaries (when, for example, that same scholar considers how the inscription has been curated, whether the find spot was properly recorded in the eighteenth century, and what the text might contribute to long-standing scholarly debates). Classicists do, of course, navigate space as well as time, arguably increasingly so as the geographical boundaries of the classical become pushed outward and antiquity as a whole begins to look more interconnected. It is, however, through temporal distance that classical value is created. If the hypothetical inscription mentioned above is disclosed to be a modern forgery, this changes not just its evidentiary value for the scholar but even, in a cruder sense, its financial value for the owner. The algorithm is, however, not as simple as the older something is, the more valuable—for as classicists well know, not all survivals from antiquity are valued equally at all times by all moderns. To put it another way, time is not a straight line from now to then, indicating ever-increasing value. Temporal difference may be an indispensable aspect of classical value, but it is not self-evident where the value itself resides: whether intrinsically in the ancient object itself or in the contingent and unstable structures of modern society that effect the valuing (as some forms of reception theory and cultural constructionism might suggest) or, perhaps more likely, in a complex, shifting relationship between the two, which is moreover not possible to generalize in the form of a single model.

Finally, responsibility. Because the classicist’s personal valuation of antiquity bears a relationship, however contestatory, to the normative valuations of it by society at large (which may, for sure, be multiform and even contradictory), every act as a classicist is also a political and ethical one. In some respects, this hardly needs stating: when one deals with issues of contemporary urgency in a historical setting (race, empire, gender, civilization, migration, . . .), for example, there will evidently be repercussions for contemporary ethics and politics, and the scholar will be judged—often diversely judged—in terms of the responsibility or not of her treatment. But there is another dimension. If we value the objects of our study, then we have a responsibility to them, too—as well as to our peers, alive or dead, who more or less share that valuation. If you care for—in the sense of having an attachment to—an aspect of antiquity (be it a text, artifact, historical principle, philosophical idea, or even linguistic structure), then you also have a responsibility to care for it in the other sense (cherish and sustain it).

This, we submit, is a reasonable anatomy of the discipline of classics (albeit not the only one possible). One might say that value marks the affective and aesthetic dimension (e.g., I study Sappho because she is a great poet); time marks the historicist (e.g., I study Sappho for what she tells us about a culture unlike our own); and responsibility marks the ethico-political (I study Sappho because it is important for the modern world to have female literary greats, but also What difference, if any, does it make who a scholar of Sappho is?). What we aim to do in this introduction is to interrogate these terms and their interrelationships critically and reflexively. The nine concepts explored in the remainder of the book are generated out of this reflexive process: they are presented not as reductive solutions to the problems we raise here but as (we hope) new angles of vision that will leaven our discussion of these central challenges for the classicist.

This book, and postclassicism as a term, thus take up a set of questions around what it means to know and to care about Greco-Roman antiquity in our turbulent world. We aim to define and map a space for theorizing and reflecting on the value we attribute to antiquity. In part, the book grows out of the study of the reception of antiquity, which has offered some powerful critiques of received ideas of the classical. Reception studies has enforced renewed attention to the ways in which classical antiquity comes to us already received, filtered, colored, and stained. It also offers an opportunity to recognize all over again that we ourselves are necessarily a part of this process: reception is not something that can be separated from the ancient artifacts and from ourselves. Our study of the artifacts and of their reception is already inevitably a moment in their reception. The practice of reception studies encourages us, moreover, to be sensitive to historical circumstance and at the same time skeptical about the capacity of contextualization to exhaust the meaning of an object: every new context generates new questions and new meanings. In these ways, the intensified study of the mobility and persistence of ancient objects across space and time has illuminated with new clarity the methodological complexities inherent in the study of the ancient world. For one thing, the very vastness of the field opened up by reception studies reactivates deep-seated anxieties about the limits of the ancient world as an object of knowledge, understood in both idealized and disciplinary terms—an anxiety that helped to constitute the professional discipline in the late eighteenth century in the first place. It has created, in other words, an epistemological quandary about what counts as part of the study of classical antiquity, by challenging the historical role of the canon in limiting our engagement with the Greco-Roman past. What is more, in returning our attention to our situatedness in the present, and indeed in our multiple, evolving presents, the discipline of reception studies has encouraged a return to questions of value and of our responsibility to our contemporaries.

Postclassicisms places these epistemological and ethical concerns—not new, but newly urgent—in conversation with the broader history of classicisms. With the prefix post, we mark a double relationship to classicisms that is at once temporal (we stand, all of us, in a position of posterity to earlier forms of classicism) and figural (we aim to reflect critically on a multiform intellectual and axiological tradition to which we are still joined). These sibling aspects, in their dynamic relationship to one another, also constitute and reflect classicism’s multiple modes of engagement with its object, as both ideal and genealogical. This project acquires urgency when we acknowledge the historical position in which we write, in which the value of the classical is no longer assumed. This is not at all to deny the tenacious hold of classical antiquity on claims of value but rather to acknowledge that the study of ancient Greece and Rome is no longer integral to the major paths of cultural formation in North America and Western Europe. Rather than bemoan the decline of classical education, Postclassicisms takes it as an opportunity to interrogate afresh our forms of attachment to the classical past and our justifications for its study. Interrogation does not mean blanket critique. Indeed, one of the aims of the project is precisely to reclaim ancient texts as rich and unexpectedly generative resources for thinking about not only our own relationship to them but also about time, matter, agency, and other terms that are central to contemporary debates beyond the borders of disciplinary classics.

Postclassicisms thus aims to reimagine our disciplinary practices of knowing the Greco-Roman world and our strategies for mobilizing that knowledge in the present, to reinvigorate a critical engagement with modernity’s construction of itself through antiquity, to discover unexpected ways of interpreting antiquity within the rich tradition of antiquity’s reception, and to open up new spaces for collaboration, experiment, and conceptual innovation within a community that encompasses not only classicists but also others who study the ancient Greco-Roman world (philosophers, archaeologists, political theorists, etc.).

1.2

Value

What is the value of studying classical antiquity? This is one of the most difficult questions a classicist can ask about her field of study. In a world like our own in which the unassailable value of the classical inheritance is not regarded as self-evident, let alone a foregone conclusion, and in which the study of classical