Neville Morley's Blog, page 30

The Show Must Go On

Well, that happened quickly. On Friday, the latest coronavirus update from the university offered the first indication that they were considering switching teaching delivery from face-to-face to online, from 23rd March, with a decision to be made on Monday. On Sunday afternoon, the decision was confirmed. On Sunday evening, the 23rd March switchover was a minimum, with colleagues in humanities encouraged to change their approach as soon as practicable; I’d been thinking about how to do this for a while, seeing other universities in the UK and US making the change, so was all set to record short audio files, set up discussion boards, contact students etc. Then Monday evening all classes for this week were cancelled so students can, where practical, make arrangements to go home.

Sadly I’d already recorded the introductory chat for my Thucydides class about the ending of the work, so missed the chance to offer some metacommentary on the equally abrupt, unsatisfying truncation of the module; perhaps when I record some concluding remarks at the end of the week, reviewing what I have every confidence [says he defiantly] will be an active online discussion over the next few days. I am struck, however, by how flat and dispirited I feel at this cancellation – much more than I did about the cancellation of face-to-face teaching. No, it’s not that I’m awkward and antisocial and so would rather keep students at the other end of the broadband cables…

Online classes were only ever going to be a weak, inadequate substitute for the genuine thrill, even at 08:30, of interaction and discussion, and the challenge of getting more than three people to say something. But the need to move online was itself a challenge, forcing me to think through the key aims of the class and how best to meet student needs, and I could record lecture clips with specific faces in mind, rather than producing podcasts for an unknown audience – and if nothing else it kept me busy. I was all primed to take student questions and set up Skype conversations and make myself available, and now… nothing.

I’m reminded of Nicholas Craig’s hilarious I, An Actor (while noting that, having worked with some actual actors, I can see why someone might find this deeply insulting…): specifically, where he discusses the pains of unemployment, and the fact that, while an unemployed bricklayer could still build a wall in his back garden or an unemployed accountant do a spot of leisure book-keeping, an actor needs an audience. At least while I’m still in teaching mode, I need that thrill: the performance, the improvisation, the interaction – it doesn’t work very well in front of the mirror, as I already know how I’m going to react…

It’s the same issue with industrial action – on reflection, actually, it’s rather better in some ways, as it’s imposed by external events, though with commensurate loss of agency… It isn’t just a job; it isn’t just about the salary. Academics going on strike is like a child refusing to eat a delicious slice of chocolate cake to show how upset it is. It’s the women’s sex strike in Lysistrata, but with fewer artificial alternatives. We want, indeed need, to teach; yes, lots of time now for research and writing, yadda yadda, but that’s too much delayed pleasure – I need my instant endorphin rush! Listen to me! Write things down when I say something especially interesting! GIVE ME LOVE!

Thankfully there is social media, and blogging. Let’s do the show right here!

The Arrows of Apollo

I’ve been yelling at the internet again… Nothing new there, especially when it’s a matter of people misrepresenting Thucydides; what’s weird is that my target should be Adam Roberts, a man with astonishing breadth of knowledge and insight whose blog posts on literature and science fiction regularly leave me in absolute awe. But even Homer nods, or rather occasionally draws an unwarranted conclusion from a academic article that’s much more controversial than is obvious at first sight.

In brief: Roberts’ article in this morning’s Grauniad surveys the depictions of plague and epidemics in a range of modern science fiction novels and films. His core argument is that all these stories, going back to Homer’s Iliad, demonstrate humans’ wish to find order and meaning in such outbreaks; disease cannot be arbitrary, because that suggests the universe is a terrible, inhuman, merciless place, but rather they must be the result of divine anger or malevolent aliens or human agency. Fine; and Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens is clearly relevant to such an argument, for the way it shows the different ways in which the victims of this devastating event try to make sense of it (including claims that it was actually foretold in prophecy), and the psychological consequences when some people conclude that it is actually senseless and arbitrary.

But that’s not how Roberts presents things; rather, he lines Thucydides up squarely with Homer in the supernaturalist camp:

Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Soon afterwards, Sparta’s enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege – its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions – was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasn’t. But this thought doesn’t occur to Thucydides. It can only be the god.

Really, no. Thucydides discusses those who came up with such an explanation, in conjunction with a couple of other examples of people reinterpreting cryptic prophecies in the list of events; he doesn’t endorse their belief. The closest one can reasonably get to that idea, as Lisa Kallet does in the article which Roberts referred me to as the source for his claim, is the argument that Thucydides doesn’t expressly rule out such a possibility, contrary to the claims of some of his more enthusiastic admirers. I’ve never been persuaded by this; it rests, for me, too much on the assumption that Thucydides cannot plausibly have completely rejected the mainstream beliefs of his time, and therefore anything other than explicit dismissal of any role for Apollo must imply acceptance of it as a possibility. But even if you go along with Kallet’s argument completely, that’s a long way from the implication that Thucydides offers a clear, simple explanation of the plague as Apollo’s doing, ignoring any natural causes.

The spread of coronavirus has prompted a lot of references to Thucydides, and at least a couple of articles already, most of which fall into the trap which Kallet identifies of exaggerating his sceptical modernity credentials; no, he doesn’t actually discover the ideas of infectious disease or pathogens (at best, you can say that his narrative is compatible with modern understanding of disease, precisely because it doesn’t present an explanation but just a lot of symptoms and other data – see Helen King’s work on the reception of the passage in modern medicine).

What Thucydides is most interested in is the response to the event – and above all its arbitrariness. In a lot of ways his project is precisely that of Roberts’ article, observing the ways that humans tell stories and otherwise attempt to give meaning to events that frighten or baffle them. The Athenian plague is the result of the interaction of multiple events and decisions: the short- and long-term causes of the war, Pericles’ particular choice of strategy and its consequences, and the way – perfectly natural in retrospect – that a disease, having emerged in Africa, makes its way to one of the most-connected hubs of the ancient world. Some people catch the disease, some don’t; some die, some recover. And what people do is either tell stories that make everything simple, such that events are preordained or divinely instituted, or conclude that absolutely everything is arbitrary and meaningless.

Thucydides – like the narrator of Albert Camus’s La Peste, directly modelled on him – offers a third way: a basic belief that there must be some sort of underlying rationale to events that is capable of being understood, even if it escapes us for the moment, hence the drive to record accurately and avoid rushing to erroneous conclusions. He would, I imagine, have been most interested in the human response to coronavirus: the instinct to explain everything in terms of globalisation/conspiracy/politics, the rush to the extremes of panic or insouciance (“it’ll only affect the old; it’s much safer than Spanish flu”), the opportunism of selling magical cures or writing articles that make our particular interests as topical as possible…

It’s The End Of The Discipline As We Know It

I believe there’s now something of a vogue for schematic accounts of world-historical development, built around some sort of organising trope like ‘killer apps’, with far-reaching, if tendentious, contemporary implications. However, so far these seem to be mostly focused on technology and institutions, or built around grand assertions about human psychology, and inexplicably they deal with classical culture only as the/a beginning of a long process rather than as the fundamental cultural theme it clearly is in reality. It’s time to redress the balance. Yes, this is just a short blog post, but editors and publishers can be assured that I can easily turn this into a polemical op ed or trade book just by adding some striking examples, without inflicting any unhelpful nuance on the core thesis. And of course it’s just about Europe and the West; what are you, some kind of cultural Marxist?

Root Position. C6 BCE to C15 CE. Greek and Latin as the languages of government, law, philosophy, culture etc. Greek and Latin studied by anyone intending to participate in pretty well any area of public life. Values of Greco-Roman culture questioned only from within, with no serious contemplation of possible obsolescence. Metaphors: health, energy, authenticity, originality. Key names: too many to mention.

First Inversion. C15 to C19. Classical culture revived as the guiding spirit of government, law, philosophy, culture etc. Greek and Latin studied by those intending to take their place at the top of society, and those seeking to understand and perpetuate Greco-Roman culture to serve society. Values of Greco-Roman culture now known to be contingent and temporary, to be defended against, attacked on behalf of, or reconciled with rivals (such as modern science). Metaphors: inspiration, rebirth, revival, epigone. Key names: Erasmus, Milton, Winckelmann.

Second Inversion. C19 to present. Classical culture identified as pervasive influence in government, law, philosophy, culture etc., in the bad way (ideological, elitist, self-serving, self-deluding etc.); if not so much in the present, then in recent centuries that continue to inform the present. Greek and Latin studied by a few as cultural capital, and otherwise either from force of habit or as means to develop the critique of classical influences. Values of Greco-Roman culture seen as harmful and dangerous – though that doesn’t stop us eagerly seizing on examples of other people still taking them seriously, as material for ongoing project of critique. Metaphors: spectre, zombie, vampire, ideology. Key names: Marx, Nietzsche, Hardwick.

And now? Now the organising trope breaks down, because Third Inversion takes us back to root position, and – leaving aside the bizarre fantasies of certain US-based authors that the culturally enlightened will retreat into new monasteries to wait out the coming cultural apocalypse and then revive True Culture – that ain’t gonna happen. Rather, we’re left with paradoxes: that the study of classical reception and critique of classical influence should be working towards its own obsolescence as an intellectual project, but is actually heavily invested in the perpetuation of that influence while decrying its impact; that we lament the role of classical language learning as cultural capital while trying to find new markets for it; that we see Greco-Roman culture as historically embedded while still implicitly presenting it as timeless.

Perhaps the dominant metaphor is now parasitism: we need Johnson and Cummings to keep citing ancient authors, and alt-right types to keep appropriating the Spartans and Decline & Fall, and foreign policy types to keep coining Thucydides-based theories of global politics, and journalists to keep making crass Trump/Caligula analogies, so we have stuff to denounce. We also need Kate Tempest and Anne Carson and the like to keep producing stuff we can celebrate – but that’s less important, or more obviously self-serving…

Controversy!

So, ‘cancel culture’ has been monetised: just pay Toby Young’s new Free Speech Union a load of money, and then tweet about eugenics, the glories of the British Empire and the size of women’s breasts to your heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that you will not have to stand alone in the face of a howling Twitter mob demanding to know whether this is entirely appropriate.

I’m not totally convinced by some aspects of the business model here – surely the sort of person who knows in advance they’re going to be wilfully offensive, so would pay for the assurance that Spiked! will write an outraged column about people objecting to this, will already be part of this crowd? And are they actually going to ignore a good controversy and opportunity to denounce excessively woke students, just because the target hasn’t coughed up their protection money?

But it also raises the question of whether there are any further business opportunities in this area… Academics! Are you worried that your research is too obscure, nuanced or sensible to attract the sort of attention and media gigs you nevertheless feel you deserve? But you’re still unwilling to strip out the ambiguity and pull out a dog whistle? We’re here to solve your problem: for a very reasonable fee we will weaponise your findings and make them the new front in the culture wars. You retain deniability and the possibility of claiming to have been misinterpreted, if you decide not to commit fully to our truth-telling mission – and if you do, Toby Young has an offer you may not be wise to refuse…

Them Too?

So you like to party with the students. Ain’t that kinda skanky?

Now, I’m not saying that watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer should be a compulsory training element for all new university teachers – but it would certainly have been better than the training I received when I started, namely none at all. This isn’t about the series’ depiction of teaching styles (copious material there, especially with regard to different Watcher philosophies) but the handling of student-teacher relationships and the negotiation of appropriate boundaries. Basic Buffy message: ick. Or worse.

More specifically, the plot lines of relevant episodes include: predatory giant insect exploits and abuses naïveté of teenage boys, secret Student/teacher relationship ends in murder/suicide, paranoid and controlling teacher starts covert surveillance of favourite student and seeks to break up his relationship… The most positive scenario on offer is the profound embarrassment and awkwardness of the Wesley/Cordelia hook-up, which is possibly a bigger deterrent than the prospect of having one’s head literally chewed off.

In the absence of such exemplary fictions… The basic assumption in introducing research students to teaching in my day – this has surely improved – was that you’ve been at the receiving end as a student so you’ll know what to do. That’s problematic in teaching terms (especially when it’s a matter of negotiating the differences between Oxbridge supervisions/tutorials and the sort of teaching that normal universities do), but I wonder now whether it’s also problematic insofar as it assumes continuity and commonality between the undergraduate and postgraduate states, rather than emphasising the student/teacher distinction. There’s certainly no bar to socialising together, and it’s not at all obvious that there’s a bar on relationships – after all, the grad student doesn’t have a lot of power, even when it comes to grading work, and certainly doesn’t think of themselves as powerful.

In a similar manner, stressing to postgrad students that they’re proper researchers now, all part of a big academic community, can blur the extent to which they are also still students, who cannot, structurally, engage with their supervisor or other academics on a completely equal basis. With the result that, in comparison to a school context, academic/postgrad relationships are less clearly marked as student/teacher, and so taking those relationships beyond the purely professional can appear less obviously problematic, especially to those with a motive for downplaying or ignoring their problematic aspects. Socialising together after research seminars and at conferences is presented as an essential part of academic socialisation; as a student, you’re encouraged to develop closer relationships with important figures – perhaps with the assumption that it’s the senior party who gets to decide how far it’s appropriate for things to go.

The stand-out line for me in Erin Thompson’s piece about her relationship with The Professor, published in Eidolon back in November 2018 (which, together with the follow-up discussion, especially from Helen Morales, is what prompted me to start writing this post, and then never got round to finishing it until seeing Charlotte Lydia Riley’s Men, Behaving Badly article this morning) was this: “As a professor I have too much power”. That has at least three significant implications. The first is that this isn’t just about sex, even if that’s the focus of a lot of current discussions; the expectations of running errands, fetching coffee, doing unpaid work etc are also problematic, and it’s interesting that Thompson says she felt she could say no to the sex but had to say yes to everything else.

The second is that this power includes the capacity to confer benefits, not just threaten reprisals, and that it may be attractive in itself; the model of innocent victim being coerced into sex may be appealingly simple, but it doesn’t help us understand the problem if we simply ignore the junior party’s agency (Helen made this point). And that suggests, as has been observed by plenty of people already, that we may need a more complex idea of consent: as something that isn’t always a clear-cut yes/no (even if that’s how it has to be understood in legal contexts), as something that’s a process rather than a single decision, and – most problematically – as something that may be a free choice and nevertheless constrained. In which case, claiming – entirely genuinely, rather than disingenuously – that “it was fully consensual” isn’t actually the knock-down argument it’s generally assumed to be.

I can think of three occasions during my first few years as a lecturer when a student made it clear – to the point, in at least two out of three cases, where it became a joke among colleagues – that they were interested in something more than a purely professional relationship; given my basic social obtuseness, it’s possible that there were more that I didn’t notice. This wasn’t a matter of me exercising my power and status, except by accident; it may not actually have had much to do with my power and status on their part; but power and status were nevertheless embedded in the situation, simply by virtue of my role.

There was never for me any question of responding to these signals; to return to Buffy-speak, Because It’s Wrong. My approach – and I do wonder in retrospect whether this was correct, or actually a different sort of power-play – was to act entirely oblivious to them until they stopped trying. Dragging out the agony but allowing things to return to normal, versus bringing things to a quick and clear conclusion at the expense of a deeply embarrassing conversation and subsequent awkwardness…

Which is to say that, while I may have done it badly in practice, I had no doubt it was my responsibility to try to manage the situation, not just not take advantage of it. Third point: power, responsibility, Spider-Man, yadda yadda. It’s the opposite of the Melian Dialogue mentality (which is of course weighing heavily on my mind this week as I’m in the middle of rehearsals for Do What You Must on Friday): ‘There is justice only between those of equal power’ – because they can’t settle things by force and so have to find an alternative. No, it’s the responsibility of the one with power in a given situation to try to ensure justice, to find a way through the many grey areas of academic life, to protect the weaker (even against their own judgement or desires).

And we might extend this to the responsibility of senior colleagues, university management and other institutions to ensure justice, protecting the interests of students and early career academics against those who have power over them – and also protecting colleagues against the temptation to take advantage of their situation, by setting up clear rules and enforcing them properly. As Charlotte notes, academia is built on power and the attempt to hide that power – not least by pointing to supposedly superior forces like ambiguity, uncertainty and collegiality which tie one’s hands…

Weaponised Imperialism

What can Thucydides tell us about the current state of global politics and the likely direction of future developments? As I’m writing a book for Princeton UP called What Thucydides Knew, it does suit me very well that people keep asking this question – even if they then keep offering the same tedious answers. I struggle to see, for example, what contribution this morning’s op ed in the New York Times makes to our understanding of anything, beyond the fact that it’s a Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army trotting out boilerplate Thucydides Trap stuff about tensions in the South China Sea, rather than one of the usual suspects.

It’s a bonus, therefore, when someone offers a new and potentially interesting take on the question, even if I disagree with a lot of it.* In their recent article in Foreign Affairs, ‘The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire’, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman develop the parallel between the United States’ weaponisation of its dominant position within global financial systems, such as threatening to freeze Iraq’s accounts at the Federal Reserve or exerting control over the dollar clearing system to coerce financial institutions into acting as its proxies, and Athens’ actions within the Delian League, above all the transfer of the League’s treasury to Athens where it was used solely for Athenian benefit. Contrary to either the IR Realists or the Thucydides Trap crowd, they argue, what Thucydides’ account shows us is that the greatest risk facing the United States is the hubris and temptation to abuse one’s position that comes with imperial dominance: “Athens’s decision to turn a common treasury into a system of tribute and subjugation alienated its former allies and precipitated its fall from power. The United States may be starting to recapitulate this dismal history.”

I’m old enough to have felt a certain amount of deja vu on reading this: the idea that Thucydides warns against imperial overreach was widely canvassed twenty-odd years ago, in response to the Thucydides-loving Neoconservatives’ “we’re an empire now, and we create our own reality” take. But of course that was focused on the exercise of actual imperial force, launching of over-confident overseas military expeditions etc., whereas the distinctive claim of Farrell and Newman is that we need to understand current events in terms of ‘weaponized interdependence’ (International Security 44.1 (2019)), the coercive manipulation of globalised networks by those who occupy dominant positions within them. Far from reducing or removing international conflict, as the more optimistic cheerleaders for globalisation proclaimed, a networked, integrated world simply creates new weapons and new fields of struggle.

My initial thought, in deciding to scribble something on this topic, was that it would be interesting to explore in a bit more detail whether this ‘weaponized interdependence’ could be usefully applied to classical Greece. However, everything in Farrell and Newman’s substantive article emphasises its irrelevance to ancient history; their focus is on the networks of international finance and electronic communication, on the SWIFT payment system and the control of internet protocols, on institutions developed to generate market efficiencies and reduce transaction costs. None of these have the faintest analogues in a period when, if we can talk of ‘globalisation’ at all, it’s about growing consciousness of the wider world, not any sort of time-space compression through developing technology. The hubs and choke-points of ancient networks were entirely, rather than only partially, located in physical space. Perhaps there is more mileage for the idea in the rather more integrated Hellenistic or Roman worlds, which did see the substantial development of systems of law and exchange that transcended regional boundaries…

The one thing which looked as if it could conceivably be relevant is the mid-5th century standards decree (aka the coinage decree), whereby members of the Delian League were required to adopt Athenian weights and measures and use Athenian silver coinage, which perhaps worked to the benefit of Athenian traders and certainly gave Athens some control on the flow and availability of coined money. But this also emphasises the differences once again; whereas F&N focus on institutions that were designed and legitimised, at least ostensibly, as measures for the benefit of all, but which have subsequently been manipulated by dominant players as a new form of imperialism, the standards decree was from the beginning a product of already-existing imperial control, and never seen as anything different. Not so much weaponized interdependence, in other words, but interdependence at spearpoint (as, of course, was so much of the economic integration of the Roman Empire).

Does this matter? Insofar as F&N’s argument in the Foreign Affairs piece is that, as an imperial power within the global finance system, the USA will be tempted to abuse its dominance and the example of Athens shows this won’t end well, then no: it doesn’t matter that the Delian League was more like NATO than SWIFT, where the point at issue is the tendency of power to breed hubris, especially in the hands of reckless demagogues.

The problem is that they seem to be using Thucydides to make a different initial point, before exploring the hubris theme: to imply that the Delian League was like the international payments system, and so Athens’ abuse of its position is a strong analogue to US behaviour; hence, whatever it might claim or even think, it makes sense to think of the US as an imperial power, and hence Thucydides’ warnings about the consequences of imperialism come into force.

In turning financial relationships into a tool of empire, the United States follows in the footsteps of ancient Athens. The experience of this predecessor does not augur well for Washington. Athens used its financial power to abuse its allies and in doing so precipitated its own ruination. The United States risks doing the same…

Like Athens, the United States and its allies have created a shared treasury of sorts: the global financial system and the complex institutional arrangements that underpin it… And like Athens in the Delian League, the United States has been the first among equals, reaping enormous benefits from its central role in global finance and from the supremacy of the dollar…

Powerful states can build extraordinary collective goods that benefit their allies and themselves: a jointly funded defense league in the eastern Mediterranean, in Athens’s case, or the vast network of relationships that underpins the U.S.-led global financial system today…

This is all the wrong way round. Athens turned its political and military superiority into a source of financial advantage, not vice versa. Yes, the Delian League in its original incarnation can be seen as a collective good; but the transfer of its treasury to Athens was a manifestation of Athenian dominance, a key example of the abuse of its power, not the creation of a means by which it would then be able to establish dominance and abuse it. Inter-state financial relationships in the fifth-century Aegean are a product, rather than a tool, of empire.**

This still doesn’t matter very much, except to historical pedants like me – and mainly as further evidence of the rhetorical role of Thucydides references in International Relations and Political Science. The Foreign Affairs article seems to be grounded in the assumption that dressing a perfectly cogent argument up in a Thucydides costume will make it more persuasive and accessible to a wider readership; that enough people are primed to think of current geopolitics in Thucydidean terms (even if this is a return to the America = Athens view of the Cold War or the Neocons, rather than the America = Established Power = Sparta perspective that’s been more dominant recently) that their view of the United States can be influenced by offering a different account of Athenian behaviour.

Of course, it’s probably relevant that the usual “we’re not Athens, we’re Sparta” response has absolutely no purchase in this context, given that the Spartans didn’t have money at all…

*Possibly unnecessary declaration of interest: I’ve written a couple of things in the past on Henry Farrell’s invitation, and he was kind enough not only to cite me in this article, but to tag me in on the Twitter…

14. As would the tendency of a democratic imperial power to elect dubious demagogues, who then try to squeeze allies for all that it can. Finis (all this with apologies to @NevilleMorley – at least this provides him with another dubious IR use of Thucydides to roundly deplore)

— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) January 24, 2020

** This isn’t a universal principle: the obvious exception would be the Megaran Decree, whereby Athens excluded Megaran citizens from all the markets of the Delian League – and while Thucydides notoriously says very little about it, it’s clear from e.g. Aristophanes that this was widely seen as a significant source of Spartan hostility. But this looks very much a like a direct sanction, which F&N expressly exclude from their analysis of weaponized interdependence.

 

No Failure, No Try

“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.” Yoda’s philosophy really is rubbish; terrible pedagogy (as discussed here, the Sith are much better teachers) and terrible advice in general. Manifestly, his power is not infinite (there’s a great calculation of Yoda’s energy output by Randall Munroe of xkcd), so – for all his “that is why you fail” smugness – it’s clear that his approach amounts to attempting only things he already knows are within his capacity, and avoiding anything else. It’s the Force equivalent of research funding applications that define all their intended outcomes in advance, confining them to things that are definitely doable (if not already done and ready to be reported) – which is to say, the majority of research funding applications. Yes, research funding bodies are probably all run by Jedi: tradition-bound, results- rather than process-orientated, and smugly opaque and mysterious.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading Shawn Graham’s fascinating and provocative Failing Gloriously, an academic memoir of misadventures in digital humanities and archaeology – highly recommended to all. In place of Yoda, we get Batman – or rather Batman’s dad: “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” How we learn, without trying something that we don’t know whether we can do or not? How can we do anything new, without accepting the possibility that it won’t work? It’s the philosophy that drives the journal Shawn founded, Epoiesen – including the abandonment of traditional peer review (which tends to promote risk aversion and conservatism, and the strict policing of other people’s attempts at adventure) in favour of public responses where the reviewer, too, is encouraged to throw off their shackles for a bit. Try, fail, try again, fail better…

Now, I would have to confess that I have a terrible fear of failure and embarrassment – it’s one of the main sources of my frequent issues with writer’s block – and hence a tendency to stick to things that I know I can manage. I can keep scribbling things for this blog even when struggling to finish what should be a perfectly straightforward academic piece, precisely because it’s a kind of safe space – if blogging did actually ‘count’ in some sort of professional academic metric, I imagine my brain would freeze. But it’s also the case that most of my writing here is all too safe; I get words onto the page, which is better than nothing, but they are rarely risk-taking or important words, just snide takedowns of Thucydides misattributions or self-deprecating commentaries. Which is why I can get them written, but why perhaps this isn’t such an achievement after all.

And if I wasn’t already feeling slightly ashamed at my pusillanimity, at the same time as reading Shawn’s book, I caught up with Foluke Adebisi’s We dream, we write…

I think sometimes we write to fulfil certain visions of the world – academics write what will get them promoted, get them the job, get them tenure. We do what is expected. Professional writers write words that they know will sell, because those words sold before. And so we lose the transformational power of words, because we play it safe. We put chains on our words and so put chains on our world. We hold back and do not send our words on errands into the darkness. 

“We do what’s expected”; certainly true, and it’s clear that one of the inhibitions affecting what we do is that demand: don’t try, do, and according to these external expectations. It’s about product, not process – and sometimes the uncontrollable impact of the product: not my teaching, but whether or not students I’ve taught get well-paid jobs; not my research, but whether someone else decides my research is useful in a quantifiable manner. But it is (also) about the chains we choose to put on ourselves – the way that we internalise and prioritise these expectations.

The word I immediately associate with the stuff in Epoiesen is ‘play’: unconstrained experimentation, for pleasure or just to see what happens, the process as an end in itself, rather than everything directed towards a specific goal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious and productive, but it does away with the fear of failure – failure would be having a miserable rather than enjoyable time, and in that case you just do something else. The closer research or writing can come to play, the fewer the chains – or at least the lighter they may seem?

Now, there are reasons why we might feel nervous about breaking down the barriers between ‘work’ and ‘play’ this side of a post-scarcity utopia – the capacity of ‘do what you love, love what you do’ to become an instrument of exploitation within capitalism, the colonisation of all our waking hours by work (the justified ridicule aimed recently at that “how baking muffins makes me a better marine biologist” article). But this should be about the transformation of the work space rather than the colonisation of the leisure space, both changing the attitude with which we approach work, and trying to remove (or at least ignore) some of the things that make it feel like drudgery and inhibit our creativity and willingness to take risks.

Teaching as play: not the stale communication of information, or the aggressive power games of the Socratic Method, or the desperate attempts at imparting employability skills, but the collective exploration of ideas and debates in a way that develops knowledge and skills as a by-product. Research as play, whether cooperative or competitive (in the right spirit) or the quiet pleasure of solitary puzzle-solving, without the constant anxiety that it might turn out to be a bad or fruitless idea; trying new games, trying to get better at existing games, modifying the rules or developing completely new ones. And recognising that the negative reactions of some people may just be that they prefer chess to Call of Cthulhu…

Postscript: It’s an odd coincidence that I’m also in the middle of re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is all about these issues (among other things): the fact, most obviously, that on the anarchist planet Anarres ‘work’ and ‘play’ are the same word, with the individual free to choose how to occupy their time but making that choice in full, unavoidable consciousness of what their society needs of them. Pursuing the life of the mind in the middle of a famine, as the central character does, is always a problematic choice; especially when the results cannot be predicted or guaranteed, let alone easily put to use. The alternative, on Urras, is equally uninviting and inhibiting, even if at first apparently more conducive to research: science in the service of an authoritarian state with a very clear idea of what the results need to be.

The central character eventually returns to Anarres with a better sense of its virtues, and of why he belongs there, than before; it is home. But he doesn’t return alone; he’s accompanied by a character who appears only in the final chapter, an alien from a far older civilisation than either Urras or Anarres, who wants to take the risk of exploring this society: “We have tried everything… But I have not tried it.” As good a motto as any.

Chasing Cars

Remarkably, the results of a search for “ancient history” on the jobs.ac.uk website currently include an advert for a Demi Chef de Parti. I cannot help but interpret this as a personal Sign. Back when I had finished my final undergraduate exams, and for various reasons was pretty sure that I’d messed things up to a degree that would preclude any hope of funding for a PhD, I had to think seriously about what I should do instead, and came to the conclusion that I would really like to be some sort of chef. Of course, I had no relevant qualifications or experience, so it was fortunate that the PhD funding did turn up after all, but it’s a salutary reminder of how rarely in my life I have had any sort of career plan.

No plan? Aha! But what about academia? you cry. Well, kinda. Do I really look like a guy with a plan? Perhaps I do, but it’s an illusion. I’ve basically always done what I’ve been told by someone to do, combined with what seemed like a good idea at a given moment. I just chase ideas like a dog chasing cars; I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I properly caught one. So to speak. Put another way: there’s a thin line between interdisciplinarity and flexibility, and incoherent dilettantism; between breadth of interests and a butterfly mind; between a significant (relatively speaking) profile on social media, and a tendency to get distracted by Twitter memes. If it makes any sort of sense in retrospect, it’s accidental.

And you may say to yourself: this is not my beautiful job. And you may ask yourself: how did I get here? And you may say to your Head of Department: I actually have no idea what I’m doing.

It is, of course, a sign of considerable privilege to be able to admit this without fear of consequences (apart from making my HoD nervous, I guess; sorry, Barbara). It’s a sign of even greater privilege – not least, but not only, the fact that things were really substantially easier for early career people twenty-five years ago, in terms of what one had to have achieved to be a serious candidate for a proper job – that I could have aimlessly wandered through academic life and still ended up here. It may well be a specifically Cambridge or Oxbridge issue, in two ways: the lack of helpful career role models when I was a PhD student (other than: stay in Cambridge; if not, move away and try to get back as soon as possible), and the fact that this didn’t really matter, at least back then.

This isn’t intended as a self-pitying lament so much as a self-indulgent wallow. It’s not primarily a work/life-balance thing; not that that’s perfect – my music practice is slipping, again, and I’ve been meaning to get round to another lot of brewing for about a month and a half – but I have a good idea of what I need to do, even if I don’t ever quite manage it. No, this is about the balance within the work, and specifically within the research side of it (I’m always going to prioritise teaching and try to fit everything else into the time remaining).

In brief: (1) I take on far too much (and always have done, but the too much increasingly is too much, either because I’m older and tireder and less inspired so it all takes longer, or because I get more invitations to speak and write stuff than I once did); (2) I am hopeless at prioritising any of this, (i) because my default position is still to feel desperately pleased that anyone has asked me, and if I turn it down maybe I’ll never be asked again, (ii) because I tend to feel obligated and guilty at upsetting people’s plans, (iii) because I am too easily attracted to others’ suggestions and can immediately think of things I could perhaps talk/write about (the whole chasing cars and being distracted by shiny objects thing) and (iv) I haven’t the faintest idea what other system of priorities I should be using.

Of course, perhaps no one does, but they are simply more focused and thorough, and sensible enough not to try to do everything. At least sometimes, I wonder whether I would be a better ancient historian if I wasn’t also determined to do all the classical reception stuff (or vice versa), and a better academic if I didn’t also do all the social media and blogging and attempting to write more general works for other audiences despite clearly being too abstract and pretentious to do it very well (vice versa probably not so applicable – though it is true that I have various ideas for general essays that have either ended up as half-arsed, largely ignored blog posts instead, or are still just sitting in my ‘future ideas’ file, long past their sell-by dates).

All this has come up this week because of a specific instance of “it’s all too much, can I just not?” that I won’t bore you with, leading into reflections on how to try to get on top of things, leading to this sense of impasse. I don’t have any particular ambition, now that I’m pretty well resigned to postponing the novel until after retirement. There are books I’d quite like to write – but are they the books I ought to be writing, and am capable of writing? How can I know, or decide? Am I trying to carve out a distinctive and coherent intellectual reputation, or should I be – or should I just carry on chasing after random shiny things and just hope it all turns out okay? If I respond to invitations, rather than trying to work out what I really want to do, I do at least have the reassurance that someone else thinks it’s a good idea…

What I really want to do at the moment is brew some imperial stout and try making kimchi for the first time. Sadly jobs.ac.uk isn’t showing anything very relevant there.

The Melian Dialogues

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Attendance is free, but numbers are limited, so please register HERE.

Modern receptions of Thucydides return time and again to the Melian Dialogue, the great confrontation between the imperialist Athenians and the representatives of the city of Melos; sometimes because it is more or less the only section that is read, but still more because of a widespread perception that it encapsulates Thucydides’ message and even his sensibility, and perhaps above all because of the sheer dramatic power of the text.

‘Questions of justice arise only between equals; otherwise the strong do what they want and the weak have to comply’; this is cited as the essence of ‘Realism’ as a theory or attitude. However, such readings tend to be simplistic and deeply problematic. They assume that the words of the Athenians express the thoughts of Thucydides himself, and that they are an accurate account of the world as it is and should be. The Melians’ statements are largely ignored, on the assumption that their view of the world is hopelessly naïve and optimistic – partly because most of these readings ignore the wider context of events, above all the fact that it is the same Athenian arrogance that then leads them to launch the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Further, by taking these assertions of Realpolitik at face value rather than as rhetorical claims, these readings turn a complex debate between different arguments and assumptions about the world into a simplistic normative treatise, closing down ambiguities and counterfactual possibilities.

The fact that the Melian Dialogue looks remarkably like the script of a play has long been recognised by classical scholars, and discussed as part of broader debates about historical verisimilitude and the role of speeches in Thucydides’ account; F.M. Cornford, for example, saw it as evidence of the influence of myth on Thucydides, echoing Attic tragedy rather than sticking to proper historical values. We can instead see it as a powerful means for Thucydides to explore these complex issues and competing values, with the historical setting giving the debate additional power and pathos rather than being in contradiction with it. The theatrical presentation – echoing the agon of more conventional tragedy and comedy – serves to throw the confrontation of different rhetorics and perspectives into sharp relief, pulling the audience’s sympathies backwards and forwards between the two sides and their claims; in place of an imagined Thucydidean doctrine, it offers multivocality and ambiguity.

It is only a small step from seeing the Melian Dialogue as a dramatic exchange within Thucydides’ text to imagining how it might have been performed and received in a public recitation, and from there to imagining a full theatrical performance. But just as reading this passage as a dialogue forces us to focus not only on the arguments but on how we imagine they must have been delivered, so imagining it as a performance raises questions about how characters might be dressed, how they should move and interact, and how the setting might be varied. Further, we can not only abstract the Dialogue from its historical context to emphasise its relevance to modern wars, but consider how unbalanced power relationships can be found in many situations besides inter-state conflict – state and citizen, employer and employee, husband and wife, parent or teacher and child. In performance, meaning is made through the exchange between performers and spectators, not just handed down as a monolithic truth by an authorial voice – or, in the case of Thucydides, by would-be authoritative interpreters.

There is precedent for presenting the Melian Dialogue on stage; most obviously, in the various productions of John Barton’s adaptation of Thucydides (with additions from Plato), known variously as The War That Never Ends or The War That Still Goes On (1967, 1991 and 2006, with a BBC version in 1991 that can be partly viewed on YouTube), as well as a more recent Greek adaptation, Lessons of War, by Giannis Lignadis, directed by Dimitris Lignadis (2018). The Barton productions are characterised by their lack of theatricality, presumably because they are designed to focus the audience’s attention on the text: costumes are minimalist (dark suits in most cases; ordinary clothes in 2006, as the whole production was presented as actors workshopping the script; quasi-uniforms in the case of the BBC production), and the actors scarcely move.

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The Lignadis production is more striking, with the Melians (in dark suits) standing within an upturned table as if in a cage, being harangued by an unseen speaker via a microphone – but still quite simple and static. The choice of relatively straightforward staging is understandable on the assumption that this is the only time the audience will encounter this unfamiliar text, so the emphasis must be on the words. However, it limits exploration of the Dialogue’s dramatic possibilities and hence its capacity for multiple interpretations, as does the embedding of the Dialogue within the story of the Peloponnesian War, so that inter-state relations are the only kind of power dynamic evoked.

Do What You Must, my new project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council as a belated follow-on to my 2009-13 project on the modern reception and influence of Thucydides, aims to explore in depth the theatrical possibilities of the Melian Dialogue. It’s a collaboration with two exciting theatre companies, Arch 468 and fanSHEN. In the first phase, a cast of professional actors supported by a Director-Dramaturg and a Forum Theatre practitioner will spend a week workshopping the piece, with me present throughout as academic consultant, creative sounding-board and observer. The aim is to draw out key emotional and intellectual pivot points to locate the negotiation in a real-world psychological context. Through exploring potential interpretations, settings and stagings for dramatic renderings of the dialogue, we will offer new understandings of the work that extend beyond traditional academic readings to provide a more deeply resonant and emotionally rooted basis for engaging with the text.

This concludes with the public performance of versions of the Dialogue in different iterations exhibiting shifting theatrical and philosophical interpretations. We will thus provide a unique opportunity for the audience to encounter the text in a more visceral and robust way than usual, viewed from multiple perspectives, emphasising multivocality and evoking multiple meanings and questions – and you are all warmly invited, whether your interest is in the reception of Thucydides, the reinterpretation of classical texts in performance, the broader issues of power and justice or the capacity of theatre to provoke thoughts and bring issues to life. The performance will be followed by a round table discussion with me, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord of Arch 468, Emma Cole (Bristol) and Edith Hall (KCL), with plenty of opportunity for questions and debate.

We’ll be moving into Phase Two, which I will write about in due course…

 

Hot Rocks and Fazed Cookies

Very many years ago, when I was writing up my PhD, I was hired by an eminent ancient historian to do some preparatory work for the publication of a volume of their selected articles, including making recommendations on which of their numerous important contributions should be included. The utterly rubbish nature of my performance in this task can be deduced from the fact that said volume didn’t appear until years later, thanks to someone else’s work, with no trace at all of my efforts, and generally I try not to think about it too much because of the embarrassment. But reflecting on the experience does raise some interesting questions today.

The central issue (among the central issues…) was less my incompetence and more a radical divergence in views about what such a volume should be. My basic thought process, reviewing these decades of scholarly output, was along the lines of: this article is seminal, but it was published in JRS so everyone knows it already, whereas this one is almost as good but completely obscure, so that definitely needs to go in the volume. In musical terms – because why the hell not? – I unthinkingly approached the task as a fan, focusing on b-sides and rarities that offered a complex, multi-faceted view of the artist in question, whereas it became clear that what was really required was a blockbuster Greatest Hits with detailed liner notes.

I’m still not entirely sure that I was completely wrong; but then, Sci-Fi Lullabies is my favourite Suede album, and I own all the Bob Dylan Bootleg series… Okay, there are relatively few historical Dylans, whose incidental jottings and abandoned experiments would still find an eager market (Syme? Momigliano?). On the other hand, how many historical Eagles or Madonnas are there, whose work will sell to a load of people who don’t already know the classic numbers? Surely most of the people likely to be interested in such a volume would indeed already be familiar with JRS pieces?

Of course, it’s possible that I’m making a category error in imagining this to be a commercial project at all; insofar as the publication of a Collected Articles volume is better understood as tribute and celebration, the obvious thing is to include the pillars of that reputation, i.e. the biggest, most familiar and influential hits. It’s a mark of status simply to be given a Best Of compilation, and it’s perhaps easier to justify this if the collected pieces already display their quality through their original place of publication.

Do things look different today? I am now conscious of having made an enormous assumption in the work I did for this project that every likely reader would be based at a university and so have access to things like JRS – my focus was on the fact that not every likely reader would be at Oxbridge so wouldn’t have access to the more obscure stuff. It is now the case, I think, that anyone in a North American or Western European university has access to an astonishing range of resources, probably including all the stuff that would have counted as obscure twenty-five years ago – it’s the world of Spotify, rather than HMV, so to speak; at the same time, as I’ve commented before, there are very many places in the world that don’t have (legal) access to any of it.

If we go back to the musical analogy for a bit: it’s now possible to dig back into an artist’s entire oeuvre or to explore the whole development of a genre, relatively easily, but the sheer volume of stuff that’s now accessible has created a space for curated playlists and the like – in academic terms, the rise of themed collections of articles, companion volumes and detailed bibliographies.*

That seems to leave a space for primers in the work of particularly influential artists/historians, though I can imagine a continuing tension between readers wanting a handy compilation of key works by X on a specific theme and X wanting to showcase the breadth of their interests, without being allowed multiple volumes in which to do this. And the number of important pieces that appear in edited volumes, that are less likely to be available in digital form, means there is still an important role for the Greatest Hits format – the recent Keith Hopkins Sociological Studies in Roman History III does precisely that task of making accessible a couple of widely-cited but not easily accessed articles.

I do wonder about these issues from a personal perspective; not that I’m likely to produce such a volume, both as being insufficiently eminent and important and as having far too miscellaneous interests to produce a coherent collection, but in thinking occasionally about whether there would ever be scope for a tidied-up anthology of stuff from this blog, or whether its easy accessibility online means that anything else would be utterly pointless (though Ruth and Martin’s Album Club managed it…).

More concretely, as I continue the very slow process of making old publications available via this blog, it occurs to me that the obvious approach is to ask what, if anything, any of my readers would be interested in reading. Yes, I need to update the Publications page with more recent stuff (and I do feel I need to respect reasonable embargos), but otherwise do feel free to make requests in the comments…

*Note to self: at some point, must get round to annoying people by claiming my much-maligned compilation of Key Quotes in Ancient History as the invention of historiographical sampling, so to speak…