Whose Canon? Bringing Iphigenia and Plato Closer to Home
[T]he canon, that transparent decanter of Western values – Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Whose Canon is it, anyway?”, in Group Material Democracy (Education and Democracy section), p. 72.
Dominant ideologies, usually with a nationalistic streak, have used the classical canon as a propaganda machine—primarily through our education systems. But when we peel off layers of reception that have affected the meaning of these texts we reveal something much more subversive to the established order that we originally thought. Iphigenia in Aulis is really about a barbaric murder of an innocent presented as a political necessity. High school kids are taught this play as the story of the ultimate patriotic martyr. But if we imagine Aulis closer to home, what then? – Magdalena Zira
The Belgian writer Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992) was a lawyer by training, not a classicist or a philosopher, but she was convinced that it was important to get to grips with Platonic philosophy. She studied Plato through a self-designed curriculum, which she followed while raising her two daughters. In a diary entry from 1930, for instance, Lilar records studying Plato from 9 o’clock in the morning until lunchtime. Yet her interpretation of Platonism (and Neoplatonism) helped her to articulate an entirely idiosyncratic way of viewing the world that championed the coexistence of multiple viewpoints. Lilar’s study of Platonism therefore shows a different kind of classical education at work: her self-prescribed course may have started from an impulse to follow the canon, but it ultimately enabled her to interpret the world on her own terms. What, then, does this mean in the context of the discipline? Does her classical education “count”, or is she an “amateur” classicist (if she is a classicist at all)? The above photo combines a page from Lilar’s Journal en partie double (published in 1986), which juxtaposes her diary entries from the late 1920s with those from the late 1970s, and passages from the 1921 Loeb edition of Plato’s Theaetetus, translated by Harold North Fowler. – Jenny Messenger.
I’m the man you think you are: Personal and Professional
If the concept of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is accepted by people other than tenured academics, perhaps every idealistic program or youth program won’t be judged solely by whether it helps people get jobs. Maybe you can let people come in, excite their minds, and develop their ideas and thoughts. – John Deveaux “Roundtable” in Group Material Democracy (Education and Democracy section), p. 58.
If, as Martha Rosler argues [for some context, see our previous post here] “quality” and “elegance” were the watchwords of the eighties, then surely “personalisation” must be one of the watchwords of today. However, personalised commodities are dependent on the construction of consumers through their data – their “data selves” as the Experian adverts have it. At a time when the marketisation of the British Higher Education system is being ever more aggressively advanced, we see that student data could be up for grabs by companies. So, as students produce increasing amounts of data, which are then used to further the marketisation of education, does this democratise information and education in an empowering way, or does it sideline a truly participatory form of education in favour of structuring student and university behaviour according to consumerist processes? For Classics, which has often been associated with students of high socio-economic backgrounds, what impact will the emphasis on earning potential have on efforts to make the subject more accessible? Will we cater to the students’ data selves or something else? Furthermore, in a discipline which has wrestled with universalising narratives about the often quite different cultures under its study, does the personalisation motive pose a new challenge to ongoing aesthetic debates? “Quality” may still be important, as Minus Plato argue [in the earlier post, see above], but our conception of the relationship between producers, commodities, and consumers is changing. – Rhiannon Easterbrook
Jean-Michele Basquiat’s Jawbone of an Ass deploys big names from Greco-Roman antiquity – from Homer to Hannibal to Hypatia – as a means of critiquing
western power structures. Some of the scholarly analysis of Basquiat’s frequent and intense reception of Classical antiquity tends to comment on his informal education in these topics; neither was he trained as a “professional” Classicist, nor did he graduate from high school. On the one hand, attention to Basquiat’s sources of knowledge about Classical themes seems important for attempting to access his choices and motivations; on the other hand, excessive focus on his lack of formal educational credentials feels like an attempt to legitimize an act of Classical reception that unapologetically doesn’t ask for or require it. How to do better? Reflecting on how particular types of educational experiences lend legitimacy (or illegitimacy) to the cultural and artistic production that engages with the past is relevant to the question of “democratizing” the teaching of Classics. In recent years, the trend across US universities is to teach Classical literature and mythology–particularly in English translation–to non-major students, who often lack formal training in Greco-Roman history or ancient languages. We ask students in these courses to write papers that document their responses and analyses of the texts; how should we respond to and contextualize these interpretations without acting as exclusionary gatekeepers? At the same time, it is of crucial importance for our contemporary society to advocate for the legitimacy of formally-acquired, deep, specialist knowledge as a form of resistance to the intentional devaluation and abasement of scholarly expertise promoted by the “the experts are terrible” (April 2016) rhetoric of contemporary political discourse. – Colleen Kron.
Nothing Left to Lose: Fighting and Freeing the Curriculum
I would advocate not only a greater integration of the curriculum, but also getting the students to analyze the Eurocentric and phallocentric materials that are being put before them. They need the tools to understand how those cultural objects exert their power and create or sense of identity. It’s not enough for me to stand up and say that Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon does violence to women. I have to explain how it does that and why it does that. – Susan Cahan “Town Meeting”, in Group Material Democracy (Education and Democracy section), p. 94.
As Bertolt Brecht once wrote: “The classics are already dead. But if they are dead, when did they die? The truth is, they died in the war. They are amongst our war victims.” But are “the Classics already dead” and is Classical learning dying? Is Brecht right in counting the Classics among the casualties of the First World War? After experiencing the horrors of the First and Second World War, Brecht revitalised the Classics to the contemporary stage. But he unearthed another, primitivist, and barbaric Greece, which resulted from imperialism and war. This is evident in the staging of his adaptation of Antigone (1948), in which four horse skulls were suspended from the top of four posts arranged in a circle. Therefore, the Classics and Classical learning are not dead, but the notions of superiority and sublime stillness attached to the Classical world are. – Rossana Zetti.
Education by women, for women has been suppressed for centuries—if not millenia. Raising the Skirt, a UK-based project founded in 2014, aims to change that. Taking its cue from Baubo, the original female activist who flashed the goddess Demeter to make her laugh, Raising the Skirt encourages women to reclaim their vaginas by raising their skirts. Literally. During its three-day workshop, Raising the Skirt teaches anyone with a vulva about sexual politics, the body, and personal health in a safe space geared towards emotional healing. Ending with a communal anasyrma (pictured above), the project reconnects its cis/queer female and gender fluid participants to demonized or suppressed women like Baubo and her skirt-raising sisters (the Irish Sheela na gig, Hindu Lajjā Gaurī, and Palauan Dilukai, among others). In doing so, founder and artist Nicola Hunter hopes to raise an “anasyrma army” who has “peace within our bodies but fire in our hearts.” Hunter’s initiative teaches us that it doesn’t matter whether the anasyrma, in all its ancient forms, ever really happened. It’s the impact the anasyrma has on us and the truth that we, classicists/artists/women, take from it that counts. – Margaret Day.
Afterwords: Towards a Liberated Classical Education
This is a great discovery, education is politics! After that, when a teacher discovers that he or she is a politcian, too, the teacher has to ask, “What kind of politics am I doing in this classroom?”. That is, “In favor of whom am I being a teacher?” By asking, “In favor of whom am I educating? the teacher must also ask, “Against whom am I educating?” – Paulo Freire in conversation with Ira Shor in Group Material Democracy (Education and Democracy section), p. 104.
“Everyone who tries to burn a canon creates another one, because what you leave behind becomes another canon”. These words were written on the wooden construction, a Trojan Horse, designed by Daniel G. Andújar and built by the fallero artist Manolo Martín, which was displayed then burned during last year’s documenta 14 exhibition. They cycle of destruction and regeneration in canon-formation is a key issue at the heart of both the “Education and Democracy” section of the original Democracy project by Group Material in 1988-1989, as well as the present online exhibition Classical Education and Democracy as part of the Minus Plato project Our Ancient Group Material. In his essay “Whose Canon is it, anyway?”, excerpted in the section on “Education and Democracy” in the book published as part of Group Material’s Democracy project, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. articulates the tension between replacing one canon with another while editing The Norton Anthology of Afto-American literature:
The editing of this anthology has been a great dream of mine for a long time, and it represents, in the most concrete way, the project of black canon formation. But my pursuit of this project has required me to negotiate a position between those on the cultural right who claim that black literature can have no canon, no masterpieces, and those on the cultural left who wonder why anyone wants to establish the existence of a canon, any canon, in the first place.
Illustrating Gates’ essay in the Democracy book is a reproduction of a pamphlet, which the accompanying caption tells us was anonymously distributed in many New York City high schools.
On encountering this appropriated portrait of a young Malcolm X, with his autobiographical statement about freedom, we were reminded of the beginning of Barbara Graziosi’s essay “Close Encounters with the Ancient Poets” in the volume Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists and Biography (edited by Johanna Hanink and Richard Fletcher). Turning to a passage from Malcolm X’s autobiography in which, writing from prison, in ‘telling the white man about himself’, he turns to the ancient Greek poet Homer, transposing his blindness onto the Middle Passage of the slave’s life-narrative, As such, Graziosi argues that:
Malcolm X insists on a close correspondence between his own life and that of the ancient poet.
How does this insistence translate into the educational context, wherein the model of Malcolm X becomes a way to understand Homer, even if his reading of the Iliad and Odyssey are more personal than professional?
Before illustrating Gates’ essay, the anonymous leaflet was displayed in the original exhibition Group Material ‘Education and Democracy’, placed just beneath Question Mark(s) by Meryl Meisler and the Drop Ins of Roland Hays Intermediary School (you can just make it out in the photo below):
As you can see from this installation view, the space was occupied by school desks, while the walls were painted with blackboard paint, which not only acted as the ground for the artworks and other objects displayed (e.g. the American flag), but also were a site for intervention, as they were drawn on by the students who participated in the exhibition in counterpoint to the blackboard works of Joseph Beuys, also included in the exhibition. Adrian Piper, an artists whose work was part of the “Education and Democracy” exhibition, would later use the frame of the blackboard for her work Everything #21, 2010-13, shown at the Venice Biennale.
Writing the phrase borrowed from the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (“Once you have taken everything away from a man, he is no longer in your power. He is free.”), Piper mimics the school child punishment of writing lines to demonstrate a tension between a negative understanding of freedom and education as a form of punishment (most likely with a nod to John Baldessari’s infamous 1971 performance I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art). Piper”s work reminds us that for classical education, as for any form of pedagogy, there is a fine line between emancipation and oppression. As Classicists, it is worth continually asking ourselves, along with the legendary educationalist Paulo Freire, whose conversation with Ira Schor is also included in the Group Material Democracy book and ends the ‘Education and Democracy’ section: “In favor of whom am I educating?”.