Show me the Money! Classics, taste and the well-to-do middle class
In the futuristic dreams of the ad men of the twenties, there soon would be a world in which ads would provide a common idiom of expression; language and communication would take on the role of constant selling; and the ongoing discontent with things as they are would seek amelioration according to that idiom. Dream and reality became equated in the world of ideas generated by the marketplace. – Stuart Ewen “Consumption: A Partial Totality”in Group Material Democracy (Cultural Participation section) p. 233.
In an essay entitled Conversation about Classics, written in 1929, Brecht claimed that the Classics taught in German gymnasia “were cultivated as a literary nature reserve” and “German teaching in grammar schools emphasised the orgiastic nature of ownership”. Students were not allowed to “touch” the Classics, any change or variation was disapproved of. According to Brecht, the Classics were simply used as “ornament” and “in a culinary way”, on the law level of enjoyment of cooking or eating. With these provocative assertions, Brecht criticised the bourgeois drama and education, dominant in the nineteenth century, and denounced the respectability, mediocrity, and mere entertainment characteristic of this approach to the Classics which was, in Brecht’s own words, “the expression of a false, intellectually sterile, conservative reverence.” This kind of use of the Classics is not useful nor democratic, but is rather restricted to what Brecht calls the “decorative ornament” of the “intellectual furniture of the well-to-do middle class”. Has Classics moved beyond its role as the “intellectual furniture of the well-to-do-middle class”? Are Classics truly accessible to all? How can we make the subject more accessible and expand access to it? – Rossana Zetti.
*Dirk Uwe Hansen on “Knowing Greek/Showing Greek. How Do Contemporary German Poets Present their Audience with ‘Classical Content'”. Hansen discusses how, as Greek and Latin are no longer a requisite mark of an educated person, access to a classical education has become democratized in that it’s equally available to anyone (for free!) at his institution. As someone who only really reads German scholarship, I have to say that I’m really enjoying seeing contemporary German poetry, esp read by Hansen (a poet himself!). This is a much more enjoyable, joyful, beautiful experience of reading German than reading scholarship. Hansen talked about Sappho traümt eine zweite Fahrt ins Exil by Klaus Anders, Medusas Frisöt (Medusa’s Hairdresser! 
) by Silke Scheuermann, Pegasos Redux by Lydia Daher, gorgo and perseus (both from Gorgos Portfolio) by Katharina Schultens. Recommend taking a look! #CCC2018 – Amy Pistone
A very illustrious Classics professor once told me that “Homer is like salt”—we find it sprinkled on top of all the antiquity that followed. During this “Democratizing Classics” panel, I was reminded several times of this observation, as each speaker presented different historical and geographical points of contact with Classical Antiquity–for a sampling: Italy in the early 20th Century (Mobilising Pompeii in Italian Silent Cinema: femininity, the nation and the medium), Ireland around the Easter Rising (Democratising Classics in Twentieth-Century Ireland), and Washington DC, 2017 (Raising an Anasyrma Army: Baubo and the reception of ancient female activism). As a condiment, salt is both supplementary and essential—one doesn’t strictly *need* it, but it brings out the flavor, and without any at all, our food (cultural production) can be tasteless. For example, one doesn’t (in my opinion) strictly *need* to know Classical metrics to appreciate the beauty of an image like Tobias Roth’s “Verschieden Purpur,”
Vom Kirschenschneiden blieben die Finger blau/Vom Saft der Kirschen rötlich von gestern Nacht,/Und an den Fingerkuppen sitzt noch/Bläulich nach Wasser und einer Nacht aus/Dem Fleisch der Früchte unscharfe Malerei./Es gab den Abend blauen und roten Pur-/Pur, Färbungen, mag sein, und Kirschen.
…although the poet does intentionally and explicitly engage with Antiquity (http://www.readux.net/
*Reflecting on some fascinating talks today. Jon Hesk’s discussion of outreach with a theatre group demonstrated the meaningful ways in which young people can engage with antiquity and do something new with that knowledge. Meanwhile, Michael Simpson’s talk on macroeconomics, myth, and the Minotaur (Varoufakis) pondered the myth-making that goes on both within academic economics and its public dissemination and what the usefulness of these myths might be. #CCC2018 – Rhiannon Easterbrook
Opening the Door to Infinite Regression
Is space evaporating in front of our eyes? Is public space for the debate of democratic ideals disappearing? And if it is, then how do we go about inventing space’ – David Avalos “Roundtable” in Group Material Democracy (“Cultural Participation” section), p. 172.
Group Material asked: “How is culture made and who is it for?” Last week, the “Democratising Classics” panel played host to generous, thought-provoking, and insightful discussion on a wide range of topics, and it was a truly inspiring event to be part of. But it is important that this is just the starting point. We started in traditional academic fashion, via a panel that was part of a larger conference held at a privileged institution. Now we keep on asking questions. We work out practical ways of pushing for greater inclusion and participation within the constraints of institutions, economic models, political systems. To make the obvious connection with the photograph, we carry on working to open the door. How is classics made and who is it for? – Jenny Messenger
*Made it home from the #CCC2018 and I had a little time to process and think on the conference. The conference was such a wonderful, positive experience & I would highly recommend it to anyone who can attend. Such an open, supportive environment – huge kudos to all the organizers! Also, because the format of the conference is sort of unusual (each panel runs essentially the full length of the conference), our panel really got to know each other well. The senior scholars were so engaged with junior people in a way that doesn’t always happen at conferences. Idk if part of this was because our panel was about Democratising Classics @DemocratisingCl (so it drew a particularly democratically-minded group), but it was a great experience. @jennylmessenger and @rossana_zetti organized a really great panel! (dare I say, the BEST panel?). Positively loved being panel-mates with @RigantonaE , @margaretlday , @Heskers , @kroncolleen, @ProfEricAdler , Maria Wyke, Dirk Uwe Hansen, Michael Simpson, Isabelle Torrance, Magdalena Zira, and Elena Theodorakopoulos! Thank you all for everything! AND I got to irl meet Twitter-friends! @campbell798 and @TonyKeen46 and @iota_subscript! 100% a wonderful (though hectic) trip. – Amy Pistone
Classics reduced to something simpler, easier to digest
[T]he idea of finding a voice risks being trivialized or romanticized in the rhetoric of those who advocate a shallow feminist politic that privileges acts of speaking over the content of speech. Such rhetoric often turns the voices and beings of nonwhite women into commodity, spectacle. In a white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal state where the mechanisms of co-optation are so advanced, much that is potentially radical is undermined, turned into commodity, fashionable speech as in “black women writers are in right now”. Often the questions of who is listening and what is being heard are not answered. – bell hooks “”When I was a young solider for the revolution”: Coming to Voice” in Group Material Democracy (Cultural Participation section), p. 193.
Wikipedia (who writes that?) describes Juliana Huxtable’s 2015 performance There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed for Peforma 15 as follows:
The hour-long performance titled, There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art. It included poetry, audio and voice over, video elements, and live-music with fellow collaborators and explored the complicated relationship between the ephemeral nature of digital information and the drive for historical documentation on the internet. As described by the festival’s organizers, Huxtable’s performance considered “cyberspace as a twilight zone of precariousness and preservation, traversing closed servers, bounced URLs, and Google cache as human and digital characters”.[21]
At one point in her performance, which you can watch for yourselves by clicking on the screen grab above, Huxtable says:
I mean, everyone gets their citations from Wikipedia at this point, so. Miss Haverford gave up, I don’t understand why Miss Johnson wont. You find these teachers that really cling, like, to going to the library and getting the books, but we’re just gonna cut and paste whatever references are on the page anyway. Nobody has time for those corny books in the library. [Laughs] So they can charge me 10 cents a day when I leave them at home? They’re so heavy. They make my back sweat.
This part of dialogue seems to ventriloquize a privileged American high school student, such as Cher in Clueless, and this reference is picked up soon after in the performance as Huxtable lists a series of simplifying gestures that are made possible by a splintered vision of internet culture and its subjects (this is transcribed by us from the video, so there may be errors):
Cher’s Clueless electronic closet as an archive of an FIT wardrobe, retrospective.
Headdresses from Morocco, purchased while globetrotting for rare textiles, a reduction.
Aristophanic play reduced to something simpler, easier to digest.
Of elementary particles and simple bonds; vis a vis the reflection in the lightly mirrored surface of a hand held device.
Brush hair and turn to side, a profile in relief on ivory, nestled between the starched folds of a so-called vintage collar.
Avatars and saints use the remain (?), homages that linger in low resolution after the internet host server closes its doors.
Of course, those Classicists among us may jump to the reference to Aristophanes and either recognize the impulse to ‘simplify’ a Classic work (probably citing Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq) or, less likely, wonder if we can trace features of the great Athenian comic poet in this mysterious and exotic work of contemporary art by Huxtable. Yet within this dumbing down or dressing up of the core documents of our hallowed discipline, there is a stinging critique, neither of mass culture nor of high art appropriation, but of us Classicists.
In a review of Huxtable’s performance for Vice (citing an earlier interview of the artist in The Guardian – although the reference seems to be mistaken, as far as we can tell) James McMaster picks up on the way references are used in the work:
Such one-off references flowed quickly by in Huxtable’s speech, making the performance at times difficult to follow and the citations easy to lose. Still, that seems part of the point: to overload what Huxtable called in the same Guardian interview “the older, whiter versions of ‘the man’ past” with fast and feminist fiction.
This fast and feminist fiction, here and elsewhere in Huxtable’s work, is charged and loaded with non-conforming gender identity, club culture, sci-fi utopia, internet history and, close to home for Classicists, the singling out the European white-washing of ancient African cultures. In short, Huxtable may cite Aristophanes, but that doesn’t mean that the playwright or us Classicists are invited to the party.
This is a reversal of the ideas of cultural participation on display at the third Group Material exhibition as part of their Democracy project. Focused on mass media and consumerism s problems for democratic engagement, Group Material changed the setting to a series of picnic tables (in contrast to the classroom of the first exhibition), with a line of a variety of cheap packaged snacks along each wall.
Central to the exhibition and the artists’ vision of consumerism and mass media, was a TV showing George Romero’s iconic horror movie Night of the Living Dead.
The terrifying movement of zombie bodies through the bastions of Western capitalist culture (malls, supermarkets) was juxtaposed with visions of the impact of the commodification of gendered and racialized bodies as well in the work of Cindy Sherman and Carrie Mae Weems, both of which you can make out on the wall behind the TV.
If in 1988, it was television that was deemed responsible for the location and construction of mass media that was narrowing the diversity of cultural participation, while at the same time as deconstructing the subject and placing the female and black body to the forefront, today it is the internet. While the former could be argued as one-way, Huxtable’s account of internet history (which includes a hilarious unanswered letter to Geo (referencing Yahoo’s defunct GeoCities) pleading for her texts and other data back!), demonstrates (somewhat akin with Jarett Kobek’s novel I Hate the Internet) how the medium’s democratic and idealistic origins turned into closed-access, corporate, surveillance capitalism.
To be directly self-referential for a moment, is our realization that the present project, our series of posts/”exhibitions” as part of the “Democratizing Classics” panel, has been a failure down to an old fashioned resistance to take Classics online, even when, the online forum is informed, engaged, interactive and paying attention? Or is it that the discipline of Classics is too bound up with the “the older, whiter versions of ‘the man’ past” in the present to allow the participation of diverse populations? Admittedly, there is something pretty clunky and old school about our project. Our exhibition is made from using tools like Paint, screen grabs etc. Our communication with the panelists is simplistic and direct (via emails sent requesting statements and images.) This time we asked for replies to a simple questionnaire and still there were no responses.
1. Tell us about your experience of the panel – how did your paper go? How was it received? What were the main areas of agreement & discussion overall?
2. Did you participate beyond your own paper? If so, did you feel like your ideas & your voice were heard?
3. Do you think that the panelists offered a representative cross-section of the discipline of Classics? If so, explain how & if not, comment on how such representation could be changed.
4. What, if anything, would you have changed about the panel? (e.g. different panelists, different format etc).
5. What do you feel is the most pressing issue in the discipline of Classics right now? Did it come up during the panel?
At the same time, we have been following the panel on Twitter, which thanks to the engaged contributions of a few panelists, has been keeping us up to speed, in real-time, as to what was said in the papers. This remote tracking of the panle make us wonder: at what point does Minus Plato (@minusplato) become a troll? We used to have it all, holding forth to a room of anxious white faces about Latin puns and now we are reduced to a retweet. By going online, have we lost our role within the limited field of cultural participation in Classics? If the real-time participants at the conference can use Twitter to report on the event, but not answer our questionnaire, what does that say about the limits of cultural participation in the discipline of Classics?
In short, as Huxtable and Group Material show us, whether for high art or scholarly intellectualism, we are all reduced, in some way, to the level of consumer by the mass media, becoming like the character Cher in Clueless.The question remains, however, while artists seem to know this, are Classicists just carrying on regardless, limiting their vision, resisting diversity, and stubbornly remaining the refuge of “the older, whiter versions of ‘the man’ past”?
Caveat: contributions marked with an asterisk (*) were not submitted directly by the respective panelists, but were cut and pasted from their Twitter accounts, with screen grabs of the images used.