Postclassicisms

The Postclassicisms Collective

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226672458
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

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 antiquity no longer enjoys the public and institutional support that it formerly did, the question is all the more pressing. The matter is complicated because, depending where you look, classics seems to be both under threat and making a strong comeback.

For a start, the cultures of Greece and Rome are being explored in communities, places, and cultures where previously they had little purchase. Indeed, classical inheritances and resonances are surviving and flourishing, as a glance into any corner of the contemporary literary and art scenes will show. Perhaps the decline of classical learning in schools does not matter as much as some might wish to believe. Once the prized possession of a white European elite who jealously guarded the inheritance of classical antiquity through education and pedagogy and who prided themselves on the field’s timeless, foundational status, classics is this no more. It has become global and democratized. It is being consumed outside the classroom and beyond the walls of the museum. The ancients are being made “brand-new” all over again and are passing into hip-hop culture, new forms of poetry, restagings, hypertranslations, and conceptual art. At the risk of paradox, it would be fair to say that the very success and dissemination of classics have done much to dislodge the place of privilege once enjoyed by disciplinary classics, while the discipline has been responding to these changes by transforming itself in turn: it has been enriched, not impoverished, in the process. Developments like these remind us how the classical past endures in no small part because it belongs as much to the world as it does to the professoriate, and in part because that classical past is in essence an unfinished project.

Both points deserve to be stressed. The practitioners of disciplinary classics have always been outnumbered by nonspecialists, who have as rightful a claim as anyone else to owning, (re)appropriating, and transvaluing classics. Not only has the diffusion of classics gone on apace in the past few decades, but the disciplines of classics continue to live in the slipstream of these extradisciplinary movements, just as they always have, which points to its real source of life. Classics is a cultural form, not (merely) a scholarly field, while philology and archaeology are just two of the by-forms of this kind of cultural spread that no single agency can or should ever hope to control, let alone “own.” Attacks on the supposed centrality of classics are for these reasons misplaced, as are hand-wringing worries about its precipitous decline. Classical antiquity has always been changing as the world has changed. And so too has its value. The recent appropriation of Stoicism by the alt-right is a case in point. As classicists we have a responsibility to engage with these realities and not to act as culture’s custodians or police. We need to learn to reconcile ourselves to the fundamentally diasporic and dynamic condition of classics.

Which brings us back to our initial question, only now with a different emphasis. It is one thing to ask what the value of classics is and another to ask about the value of that value. Classicists, of course, do value their study (they would not be engaged in the profession if they did not). And classicists are as familiar as any others in the academy, and possibly more so, with the fundamental contingency of value. To study the ancient past is inevitably to notice the historical processes by which values come to be assigned, transmitted, transformed, and transvalued, both in that past and since then. Plutarch and Lucian were once a staple of the classroom, then fell out of favor, and are now valued again, albeit differently. Other authors seem never to go out of fashion (for example, Virgil and Sophocles), though analysis of the opinions of their various devoted readers may make us wonder whether they are ever really talking about the same author. That is surely one reason why new translations and commentaries are needed on a periodic basis: we renew the past with each new present. But for all our self-consciousness, reflecting on the issue of value that is raised by the study of classical antiquity is something we rarely do with the intensity and frequency that we might. “Value” is not your typical syllabus item in a classics proseminar; nor are you likely to find it addressed in a class on Aeschylus or Catullus, or even in a class on the Parthenon or on Roman religion. In a standard study of an ancient text, manuscript stemmata and problems in textual criticism will get a week or two, earlier generations of commentaries another week, and then it is off to the races, as the course plunges into line 1 and the real meat of interpretation. Value is neither mentioned nor interrogated in these scenes of instruction. It is presumed.

Such reticence is odd. There is no shame in acts of valuation, whether they come straight from the heart or are multiply mediated. Assigning value is something we do all the time, whether consciously or not. The mistake is not to reflect upon our valuations. This is doubly erroneous in the case of classics, which provides an ideal laboratory for exploring the ways in which values come to be assigned, challenged, and reassigned over time. Thinking about the operation of value in relation to the classics provides an opportunity not only to engage reflexively with antiquity but also to reflect on the value of these values, and even the value of value itself: for instance, what values permit us to do, and whether we could ever make our way through the world without weighing, selecting, and rejecting what we encounter. Living in a postclassical age as we do gives us a certain vantage, if not advantage. It heightens our sensitivity to the character of the values that have been associated with antiquity, especially in relation to their contingency and their capacity for change. It can guide us to a more nuanced and deeper appreciation of what it is to value anything at all. It reminds us that we are time-bound (see UNTIMELINESS). If it is the case that classics is less a locus of values than a value system, the problem we face now is how to give ourselves a license to value productively and critically. How can we remain invested in the values that we discover or approve without falling into the easy clichés and traps of inherited value systems: the timelessness of the classical past, its classicism, its humanism, its intrinsic worth, its imperishability, and so on? It is easy to critique the staid values of the classical past, at least as they emerge through the filter of a staid classicism. The harder question is: Can we draw on value as a critical device without destroying value through critique? Answering such questions requires a fuller understanding of how value operates. We offer a few observations that stem from critiquing the systems of value that surround classics itself. We wish to flesh out the precise contingencies that attend value as well as stress its relational and constitutive possibilities. Value builds and it divides. It gives order. In short, we want to expose the work that value does.

The classical past takes on the appearance of a static entity, as if it were standing still while we move on and away from it, but this is an illusion. From one generation to the next, interpretations and understandings crop up that, read side by side, invite the question whether even the same object is being addressed. Examples are rife. Let us take a multilayered one: the Apollo Belvedere. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reading of the statue in 1764, in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, changed the face of art history, virtually creating the modern form of the discipline and setting it on solid classical foundations. But as momentous as his general impac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• part one   Introduction
• part two   Concepts
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index