Digital Life and Democracy, A Case-Study: Exhibition Four of Our Ancient Group Material

Too General or Arcane? Didactic or Funny? Introducing The Digital Democratising Classics Library:

Maggenti: I think that the tension that emerges around AIDS is that it’s not a gay disease, right? But, in fact, there are a lot of gay men who have AIDS. So, in fact, it’s gay/lesbian people who are doing the work around it. And I think that needs to be recognized. Not to exclude anyone else, but to make the point that it hasn’t been an all-inclusive kind of movement. I’m not saying that there aren’t straight people doing the work. I’m not saying that. However, if I were in a black group as a white person, would I ask them to call it a multiracial group? I don’t think so, if I were the only white person. […]

Callen: As editor, I have to make a painful choice because I want the information to circulate as widely as possible: do I self-censor? Do I not let gay men write in graphic detail about safe sex and what’s going on in their lives sexually because I want all the rest of the information to get as widely distributed as possible?

Maggenti: Let’s look at it from the reader’s point of view. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the question of at what level people actually make decisions and what influences their decisions in life. And it’s almost never general information that affects them. It’s the authority of personal experience and the experience of people who are close to them or people that they see as influential in their own community. This is why so much of the transmission information that has been produced inside the gay community has tracked very well with what people are already doing or moving toward doing. But I think we have to take the next step and realize that information becomes either too general or arcane as it spins out into radically different contexts. At the same time, it’s a joke to say that gay men already know everything there is to know about safe sex. That’s just not correct

Grover: I think that the real problem comes when someone else is imposing their set of standard, detoxifying something. You know, when the Centers for Disease Control gave some money to get GMHC [Gay Men’s Health Crisis] to develop a second videotape (following Chance of a Lifetime) to try to impress upon gay men that safer sex is really fun and sexy, it was such an extraordinary sanitized production. […] In contrast, how many of you have seen Ojos Que No Ven, the fabulous tape made by the Latino AIDS Project of La Familial de la Raza in San Francisco? It’s a forty-seven minute tape in the form of a soap opera about all these people who live on one block in the Mission District in San Francisco. It contains an enormous number of different kinds of transmission stories. But it’s not didactic, and it’s very funny. It’ got a group of drag queens at one of the local Latino gay bars doing this kind of Carmen Miranda act, singing a song about transmission. It’s just a wonderful tape. […]

Callen: Maybe we should state right here what I take to be an assumption we all share: that this is no longer an example of that humorous American reputation for being puritanical or squeamish about matters of sex, but that the net result of these kinds of policies emanating from democracy is that people will die.

[…]

Maggenti: My work in the past year has been focused against the policies of the federal government, and directed more towards local politics. But the federal government still manages to set the tone, it is like the gestalt of the crisis for the whole nation.

– Maria Maggenti, Jan Zita Grover, Michael Callen and Group Material “Roundtable” in Democracy (AIDS and Democracyc : A Case Study section), pp. 246-7

Classics in the Modern World. A Democratic Turn? Edited by L. Hardwick and S. Harrison (OUP, 2013). This a collection of stimulating essays which “investigates the notion of a ‘democratic turn’, a perspective applied to the ways in which Greek and Roman ideas, texts, and images have been absorbed, reworked, and communicated in the wider world in the modern period and have attracted the interest of recent research.” Many essays consider the implicit value and connotations of the term “democracy” and its legitimising force. The authors show that some form of popular mass culture, which broaden the access to the Classics, can be manipulative and misleading. Against the idea of scholars as the “privileged knowers” of Classics, the book analyses some of the assumptions and prejudices underpinned by the discipline. – Rossana Zetti.

Classics in the Modern World. A Democratic Turn? Edited by Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison (OUP, 2013). Blurb:: ‘Classics in the Modern World brings together a collection of distinguished international contributors to discuss the features and implications of a ‘democratic turn’ in modern perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome. It examines how Greek and Roman material has been involved with issues of democracy, both in political culture and in the greater diffusion of classics in recent times outside the elite classes.  By looking at individual case studies from theatre, film, fiction, TV, radio, museums, and popular media, and through area studies that consider trends over time in particular societies, the volume explores the relationship between Greek and Roman ways of thinking and modern definitions of democratic practices and approaches, enabling a wider re-evaluation of the role of ancient Greece and Rome in the modern world.’ Me: I have chosen this book because it feels like the essential starting point for anyone who wants to think deeply and responsibly about what it might mean to ‘democratize’ Classics or use ancient Greek and Roman culture and thought to renew or re-imagine what democratic citizenship, politics and deliberation might be.  Many of the contributions are critical and cautious: ‘democracy’ is so often a rhetorical label and claim which masks what is deeply problematic and how much work needs to be done to divest ‘democracy’ of its neo-liberal and authoritarian appropriations. – Jon Hesk.

A Companion to Classical Receptions, eds. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray. I think a huge aspect of democratizing classics is engaging with modern culture and contemporary cultural production. This book isn’t perfect — there are some chapters that feel a little dated in their approach by now — but I love this book because it gives such a wide range of perspectives on classical reception. I’d thought about including fellow panelist Lorna Hardwick’s Reception Studies instead, but I really like how many angles and case studies this book provides. This is one of the first things I suggest students take a look at if they’re interested in reception, which is why I specifically included this, because it’s a great gateway into reception, and reception is a great tool for diversifying and democratizing classics! – Amy Pistone.

Teaching to Transgress:Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks. I think one of the most pressing places where democratization is/should be happening is in the classroom. This book has a lot to say about how teachers can teach better if they’re more self-actualized (something I don’t think we talk about enough), and how no education is politically neutral. The part of the book that I think is most relevant to Classics teachers is the chapter on Language (chapter 11) — I cannot recommend this chapter enough for anyone teaching languages (ancient or modern). The chapter is focuses on a quote from Adrienne Rich: “This is the oppressor’s languages yet I need it to talk to you.” That chapter in particular gets to the heart of issues of oppression and imperialism and what we can do as teachers to liberate and decolonialize our classrooms. – Amy Pistone.

Women & Power: Mary Beard is a household name in my family, and it’s not because I talk about her or recommend her books enough: It’s because she’s pushed the boundaries of what’s “acceptable” scholarship in our field and made antiquity accessible to anyone, regardless of educational background. I love that you can walk into any bookstore in America right now and buy this book. – Margaret Day.

African American Writers and Classical Tradition by William W. Cook and James Tatum. I think one of the fronts where we (at least in the US) need to really think about making classics more inclusive and egalitarian is in terms of race. This book is a wonderful introduction to the rich history of African American writers engaging with the classics despite the fact that classics has a long history of being used to exclude Black people. This is an important part of the history of our field and the more everyone knows about all of this history, the more we’ll be able to make a better field for everyone in the future. – Amy Pistone.

The township plays. Edited by A. Fugard and D. Walder (Oxford, 1993). This collection of plays includes Fugard’s The Island, a South African adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. This version offers a fresh start and approach to the study and use of Classics in a modern, post-colonial context. It is a pro-democratic and political version set in an anonymous prison which, as the title suggests, recalls the notorious maximum security prison of Robben Island. It was inspired by a reading of the play by Nelson Mandela, who was himself prisoner for twenty-seven years on Robben Island. The play premiered in 1973 at The Space, a theatre in Cape Town from which Robben Island could be seen, and it was then published in 1993. By offering a political version of Sophocles’ Antigone, used as vehicle of liberation and assertion of political freedom, Fugard challenged the association of Classics with elitist and superior cultures and showed that the Classics can speak directly to us, everywhere. – Rossana Zetti.

Alice Oswald’s Memorial (Faber & Faber, 2012) and Christopher Logue’s War Music (Faber & Faber, 2001) – Still the most exciting versions of the Iliad I have ever encountered, these are daring, original poems in their own right that show the benefits of being bold with ancient texts. – Jenny Messenger.

The Percy Jackson Series: Each year, more and more of my students were introduced to mythology—and Classics—through this series. We should all be sending thank you notes to Rick Riordan, but lately, I’ve been a little worried: In the ever changing landscape of YA/children’s literature, what’s the next Percy Jackson for our field? – Margret Day.

In a letter to Atticus (Att. 4. 8. 2), Cicero expresses his delight at the installation of some new bookshelves in an oddly convoluted and high-flown fashion:

postea uero, quam Tyrannio mihi libros disposuit, mens addita uidetur meis aedibus. qua quidem in re mirifica opera Dionysi et Menophili tui fuit. nihil uenustius quam illa tua pegmata, postquam mi sillybae libros inlustrarunt.

Now that Tyrannio has set up (disposuit) my books for me, a mind seems to have been added to my house. Your Dionysius and Menophilus were fantastic on that job. There is nothing more beautiful (uenustius) than the bookshelves (pegmata) you sent me, once the labels (sittybae) illuminated the books for me.

In his discussion of this passage in his book Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance, Brian Krostenko highlights the conflation of philosophical and erotic language that Cicero uses to describe something as seemingly mundane as new bookshelves, focusing on the term uenust(us) as used to denote the attractiveness or beauty that stems from an ordered arrangement. Krostenko notes how the dis- of the verb dispōnō ’emphasizes the assignation of parts to their places to form an orderly whole’, comparing the term dissignatio used by Cicero elsewhere of Tyrranio’s arrangement of his books (Att. 4. 4a. 1) to its use in theatrical contexts, whereby the person who assigned seats in the theater was called an assignator. As for the odd phrase of the ordered books adding ‘a mind (mens)’ to Cicero’s house, Krostenko follows previous scholars who read a reference to Anaxagoras’ concept of nous or principle of order.

Krostenko’s analysis, however, does not extend to Cicero’s use of Greek terms for the bookshelves themselves (pegmata) and their leather labels (sillybae), even though at least the first of these terms seems to be Greekish slang that supports his argument. The word comes from the Greek verb πήγνυμι, which means “to fasten together” and by using it, Cicero is conflating the process of ordering the books with the construction of the bookshelf. Furthermore, in praising the handiwork of Atticus’ two Greek slaves who carry out the work by using a Greek term, the Roman Cicero is also hinting at the pivotal role of Greek philosophical wisdom housed within the bookshelves.

This conflation of Greekness in both slave-labor and intellectual prestige is a timely reminder of how so much of what survives for us of ancient Greco-Roman cultures hold traces of commodified and oppressed human bodies.

The books in what we have called The Digital Democratising Classics Library, chosen and sent to us, along with commentary by several of the panelists at the recent “Democratising Classics” panel, are also part of this legacy of prestige and oppression. No matter how much classicists strive to write back to ancient writers, to recover narratives of liberation and enlightenment, they cannot escape the fact that violence, misogyny, racist and slavery were basic conditions for their production by elite white males like Cicero, basking in the glory of his new bookshelves. Much the same could be said of the democratic ideal, as grounded in ancient Athens. Is it really a responsible model of 21st century democratic society?

At the same time, however, there is another story here. The means by which this library has been formed and the personal testimonies attached to it, gives a different take on the marriage of intellectual and aesthetic quality produced from alienating conditions of human labor. In producing this virtual library,and posting it on a blog, we are doing a service to the discipline of Classics and making it more accessible and open. A panel of fully-fledged Classicists have taken the time to give you (yes, you!) an annotated reading list – no fees, no loans, you can just head to your local library and read them for free. But how many of these books would you find there? And, once you realize that you really want to read a book that you cannot borrow for free, how many of you would head to Amazon and buy a copy there? (Many of the images of our virtual library have used Amazon as their source – although clicking the image will not take you there). As Amazon workers tell their stories of horrific working conditions in warehouses and strike to try to improve them, here we are freely making use of their labor to make Jeff Bezos richer and richer.

These two stories of The Digital Democratising Classics Library – originating our of both ancient and contemporary oppression – brings us to “AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study”, the fourth and final exhibition of Group Material’s Democracy project. Rather than singling out any artwork in particular, we want to point out a basic division at the heart of the exhibition, as referred to by Avrom Finkelstein, a member of the Silence = Death Project and Gran Fury, at the town meeting:

I am in the awkward position of being one [ie an artist] who identifies himself as an activist, one who happens to have created what I would consider guerilla information, that is, the postering that we  in Gran Fury have been doing. I’ve been approached by people in the media, in the art world, in the galleries, on the lecture circuits to discuss art and activism, and I have a lot of questions about the show being called “AIDS and Democracy.” It really should have been “Art and AIDS” or “Art and Democracy.” Why was it so personalized and so codified? I think we have to ask ourselves such basic questions if we really want to call ourselves cultural activists in this crisis.

Yet to be fair to Group Material, they purposefully blurred the line between art and activism in the exhibition. While there were artworks on the walls (like a Daniel Buren’s stripped painting), they also included in its central space a long table with educational material about AIDS, as well as two monitors screening of eleven videos created by both artists and activists about the crisis.

By including this material in the exhibition (as well as the roundtables and town meetings in the project as a whole), Group Material were engaged with the problem of what constitutes open and accessible material? And, perhaps most importantly, where art and aesthetics figure in political activism? Before continuing this line of thought, let’s return briefly to Cicero’s beautiful bookshelves. Our above account of Cicero’s bookshelves come from a post we write on September 25th last year about Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet, who work together as the collective les gens d’Uterpan, and whose work we encountered at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. Called Library, 2017-, this work, housed in the Torwache , the 19th century building in Kassel enveloped in an installation by Ibrahim Mahama, was part of the artists’ ongoing and multifaceted project Procedure of the New Principle of Research and Creation
, 2014–.. Here is how they describe Library in the wall-text:

What struck us about this description, when read in terms of Cicero’s letter to Atticus on his own bookshelves, was not only how the artists had incorporated the differences in place and language into the construction of the two shelves (if you look at photographs of the work online, you can see overlaps between the French and German shelves), but also how they brought the museum guards into the process of a visitor accessing the library. Furthermore, the final sentence about the use of Library as a bibliographical resource for dancers when they are required to perform the artists’ work creates a significant triangulation between the artists, the audience and the performers. At the same time, if we imagine a performer in Kassel asking a museum guard to access a book from Library, we experience a unique dialogue between two underrepresented figures within the institutional system for the production of art. Of course, visitors to exhibitions may interact with museum guards, but what does it mean for dancers and performers to do so, especially as a direct extension of their work on behalf of artists and choreographers? In terms of Cicero’s letter, we could ask, what does it mean for two Greek slaves to enact ideas of rational order in the bookshelf construction and labeling of a Roman’s library of Greek philosophical works? And what is there to say about the bookshelves themselves? Where does the ordered beauty of their bodies fit into this exchange? Now they are no longer there in Kassel (just as the “Democratising Classics” panel is over), a visitor could easily bypass the books themselves and visit the online catalogue (of the French and German shelves. But what remains of the bodies of the performer and guard when we engage with this virtual library online? And what about the artists and their labor in creating it? As for the Greek slaves’ bodies in Cicero’s letters, or the worker in the Amazon warehouse, there must be traces, like a ghostly hand on a scan from GoogleBooks.

So, to get, finally, to our point. The benefits of the internet, as a site for intellectual debate and productive dialogue, in general and within the discipline of Classics, may seem to be vitally democratic. Yet, as we have seen over the last few posts of this project, there is an insidiously un-democratic side to the internet and specifically a process of alienation that comes from us having digital lives. In the second and third exhibitions, in addition to including statements and images from panelists who sent them to us directly, we also included texts and images taken from panelists’ work as available online, their university head-shots ad well as their social media accounts. What we wanted to do here was to show the double-edged sword of inviting an online entity – a blogger – to participate in an academic conference. First of all, while we get to disguise ourselves (we’ are not a ‘we’ at all, but a persona, an avatar, a fictional character invented by one Richard Fletcher, who up until this last spring was an Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, but who has since left the field), we also got to ‘curate’ the contributions to the posts/exhibitions, like Cicero ordering his books on his (beautiful) bookshelves. This role generated a response by one of the panelists, who sent us an email about our appropriation of panelists’ images and words without their contributing them. Here is how we replied:

We’re glad you pointed out the problem with us co-opting non-contributing panelists from around the web. This was purposeful provocation & you are the first person to call us out in it. We didn’t do this just to generate content, but to articulate a fundamental concern with what you acutely dub “the hazard of having a digital life”. (A comparable problem arises in our engagement with artists & our appropriation of images of their work or their written statements or interviews on our blog). As Classicists we may all celebrate online platforms for our work, but are they really more democratic? As you are well aware, there is nothing democratic about Minus Plato! What about Eidolon? It is more transparent, sure, but is it as democratic as it could be? What needs to be done to democratize Classics is more than taking an exclusive academic format online (whether a journal or a conference). Would you consider the topic of digital life as a case study at the heart of a crisis in democracy, for Classics as elsewhere?

Yet perhaps the most outrageous aspect of our project has not been the (mis)appropriation of the work of the Classicist panelists, but that of the artists, not only Group Material, but the four contemporary artists we have engaged with (Daniel G. Andújar, Martha Rosler, Juliana Huxtable and les gens d’Uterpan. While we have shared our posts/exhibitions with these artists (either via emails or on social media), what say did they have in being part of our work? As for Group Material, sure, our project is an homage to their iconic exhibition at Dia, but what would they make of the transformation of one of the most terrible crises in recent history (the AIDS crisis), which not only took the lives of their friends (their book is dedicated to Bill Olander who died of AIDS in 1989), but which formed the impetus for their whole engagement with the topic of democracy in the first place (as made clear by David Deitcher’s essay ‘Social Aesthetics’ in the book), into the present post about a Classics library? Surely, this is the place for outrage, not the use of screenshots of a Classicist’s Twitter feed!

Yet, and we will end here, is there not perhaps a connection? If for a moment we take the issue of digital life (and death) as a contemporary crisis – for our world, our democracy, our discipline, then doesn’t this make us all somehow closer to Cicero’s slaves, the Amazon worker, the guard and performers of les gens d’Uterpan’ Library? We too are alienated from the fruits of our labor the minute we post on Facebook, share with Instagram or Tweet on Twitter. Consider the opening rant at the blurb of Iphigenia Baal’s recent book DEATH + facebook (published by Jarett Kobek’s We Heard You Like Books press):

No one wants to end up #rip with 45 likes — your death traded as someone else’s fleeting social capital, your last inane status update being the one that defines you for all time, your Friends’ competitive grieving, and misery tourists perusing your profile… but that is probably what will happen, as Facebook has become the channel for broadcasting news of the newly deceased, with the number of memorialized accounts soon to eclipse accounts of the living. Mark Zuckerberg is a merchant of death! Whether it’s the demise of another geriatric celebrity, or your best friend from college, taking a pill and jumping off a roof, nothing makes your News Feed blow up like someone’s death. Then there’s the rush to post long, dolorous status updates mourning their passing, tag the deceased in lo-res photos, and share their favorite songs as YouTube links. Facebook claims the dead as its own, commodifying misery and fitting it seamlessly into its usual agenda: stalking your online shopping habits, advertising clothes, confusing politics, and wondering why you haven’t had a baby yet.

This is the scope of issues what we wanted to raise by initiating the project Our Ancient Group Material. Not only how, as Classicists, we are complicit with the oppression of lives within the limited democracies of antiquity in studying and teaching the intellectual delights of elite white men, but also, we continue to isolate our discipline from bigger issues in contemporary life and its expression in provocative and challenging art, if we stick to an academically critical rather than artistically creative mode of classical reception. Then we will find ourselves and our discipline complicit with the oppression of lives with the limited democracies of the present! This happens when we fail to register the precarity of our digital lives, beyond the fact that our discipline welcomes blogging, online scholarship or social media engagement and activism by up-and-coming scholars but never as a replacement to the traditional fruits of academic labor (the monograph, peer-reviewed journal article). Even Classicists who have been inspiring voices on online platforms like EIDOLON or who write popular blogs, would be hard-pressed to privilege that work above their core scholarly work. Here the institution of the field of Classics (e.g. university presses, university administrators etc) control the means of production by telling us what counts.

So, our final, Parthian shot, is to ask, along with the members of Group Material’s ‘Roundtable’ on AIDS and Democracy, do we want to follow the insufficient and problematic information given to us by our democratic government or other institutions? Or do we want to come together as activists and educators, to work to save ourselves from the crisis of contemporary digital life, as part of our shaky democracies and other institutions? Here we, Minus Plato, as a platform and an avatar, we side with the artists, keeping our toe-hold in Classics, and follow Zach Blas’ “contra-internet” manifesto, which we read in Omar Kholeif’s recent book Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age (a great starting point for Classicists and anyone else who wants to understand our contemporary moment):

• Critique the internet as a neoliberal structural model
• Acknowledge its classicism
• Refuse its standardization
• Find ways to radicalize it
• Consult alternatives
• Imagine that there is a space beyond the internet.

Appendix – Questionnaire & Responses for & by Panelists of ‘Democratising Classics”

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?

• • • I very much enjoyed the atmosphere of the panel and the synergy that was immediately created between panellists and participants. My paper was well received and provoked a broader discussion in which many members of the audience participated and added comments or ideas. The questions gave me some good hints for my own research and raised various issues from different angles and perspectives. We discussed in particular Brecht’s revisioning of Classical themes and the Classical angle which informs his approach. Some questions pinpointed the relevance of Brecht’s work today and the importance of his innovative and critical approach in paving the way to later adaptations and authors who engaged with classical material. I was also able to discuss my paper informally in the breaks between papers.
    • My paper went very well, and I think it was pretty well received. The questions were mostly clarification/general interest questions, though one panelist disagreed with my argument that performance art is not an effective form of protest. We mostly discussed issues of intersectionality and race and how to tackle the misogynistic slant of our ancient sources.
    • I really loved the discussion that took place after my paper. I’m thinking a lot about issues of language instruction and how to make it more inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic. Getting feedback from a room full of people who were all interested in similar issues was a wonderful experience.
    • My experience of the panel was extremely positive.  The papers, whether from senior academics, early career academics, creative practitioners and/or  Classicist postgraduates and postcos, were all of a very high standard and addressed a wide range of important material and vital questions.  My own paper was only 25 minutes long but the bulk of it was devoted to sharing my experience of working with a local community youth theatre group. The project consisted of talking to the the group about the context and content of Greek tragedy and helping them to devise their own original play.  The idea here was to produce something inspired by Greek tragic forms and themes, but not circumscribed or dictated by them.  And it was key to the project’s success that these young actors call the shots in terms of what they wanted to know about and what they wanted to create.  I attach the play’s programme to give you more of an idea of what the project was about (this was circulated at the panel).  [In lieu of the programme itself, we have taken screenshots of it to illustrate the panel questionnaire responses. For more information, here is a link to a review, here. – MP]. The play they produced was called Hamartia: this is Aristotle’s word for a tragic mistake, error of judgement or character flaw, but the play itself was an eco-political morality play which mixed many different mytho-religious traditions, textures and influences: it wasn’t  a simple  pastiche of Greek tragedy.  For more on the value of the project for thinking about classical drama as an engine for democratic culture and theatre which is genuinely ‘of the community’ see this blog post: https://research.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2018/06/07/community-theatre-the-example-of-classical-athens/. I also talked about the challenges to widening interest and participation in classical subjects in state high schools in Scotland, alongside the need to overcome those challenges if we are to prevent the subject from becoming (even more) the preserve of a very privileged few in this part of the world.    See this project , which includes Scotland:  http://aceclassics.org.uk/. The panel participants had some great ideas about showing how both the innovative and progressive aspects of ancient societies and cultures  and  their ‘blind spots’ and exclusions are a valuable means of getting young people to think about what their own cultures are doing well at or badly in relation to participation, voice, inclusion, tolerance and citizen agency (etc.). Finally, I discussed the recent successes of citizen juries and citizen assemblies across the globe as a means of breaking down filter bubbles and bypassing electoral and party-political paralysis on certain (big) political questions. These assemblies recall the priciples of ancient Athenian democratic culture through their faith in bodies of citizen deliberators selected by lot rather than election (the Greeks largely thought of elections as ‘oligrarchic’, although the Athenians did have some elective offices).  For more on this, see, for example: https://www.citizensassembly.ie/en https://www.involve.org.uk/  (especially the recent UK citizens’ assembly on social care) https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/rhetoric/elections-how-the-greeks-and-romans-did-them-and-why-lots-can-be-better-than-votes/ https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/rhetoric/how-some-athenian-style-democracy-might-save-our-future/ https://blog.oup.com/2016/03/sortition-ancient-greece-democracy/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/benjamin-ramm-paul-cartledge/democracy-the-brexit-vote. Big themes:  many of the papers on 19th-21st century art forms showed how classical references and texts could often be used in politically progressive and inclusive ways.  But there was also a lot material on the ways in which classical art and literature are cited to further elitist aims or to lend prestige and legitimacy to forms of commodification, objectification, oppression and exclusion.  Many of the papers were disclosing the ways in which the redeployment of classical narratives and culture have served to reinscribe ancient forms of prejudice and to legitimize their modern inflections.  These are urgent and non-trivial concerns given the way in which neo-Fascists in the US and Europe are using lies about the ancient Greek and Roman culture and history to authorize their bogus ‘historical’ accounts of western ‘civilization’ and its origins.  Even more factually-based and nuanced appeals to classical history and ancient culture are fraught.   What was refreshing about the panel was its lack of complacency, simplification or self-congratulation.  We are interested in (e.g.) popular, feminist, non-white, non-elite uses of ancient material in art, politics and pedagogy or in widening access to studying ancient texts and material culture (and their receptions).  But Classics’ past and current investments in discourses and ideologies of superiority, taste, hierarchy, coercion and exclusion are not easily surmounted by our mere commitments and interests.  To me, though, we are better off trying to change things and we must combat the racist, homphobic, transphobic and sexist liars who are on the march. If we have too many ‘worries’ about championing classical learning and reception-based classics, the forces of reaction and fascism will gain a lot of ground.
    • My paper went well, I think. The discussion was more of a common exploration than a question of agreement and disagreement. And very constructive.
      

2. Did you participate beyond your own paper? If so, did you feel like your ideas & your voice were heard?

• • • • I participated for the entirety of the panel — I had planned to potentially check out some other panels, but our panel was so consistently engaging and the papers and discussion was so good, I never left! The quality of discussion after all the papers (and over meals and things) was really wonderful. I was really struck by how inclusive the conversation felt and how engaged the more senior members of the panel were with the more junior people.
      • Yes: I went to all 18 papers, asked questions and hung out with my fellow panellists in the breaks and two of the three evenings.  I am a British, white, middle class, middle-aged, heterosexual, cis-gendered male Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor.  So I was structurally well placed to have my ideas and voice heard!  I did my very best not to dominate discussion and to give a good, supportive ear to everyone else participating. 
      • The Q&A sessions were always engaging and thought-provoking. I had the feeling that they could have continued forever! And they did in the numerous coffee breaks and evenings, in which young researchers and established scholars had the possibility to discuss and gather together beyond the formal setting of the panel. I felt “included” and able to express my ideas and participate in the discussion.
      • I attended most of the panel, though I did step out to attend the pop culture panel a couple times. I didn’t really ask questions, mostly because many of the papers went over and when they didn’t, the senior scholars dominated the discussion. It’s intimidating to raise your hand first in a room full of your peers, and that’s something I’m still working on.
      • I did participate in all of the sessions and I think we all had our voices heard in a very democratic way.
        

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.

• • • I am afraid not. In my experience, the average classicist is not as exciting, thought provoking and above all interested in the opinions and work of others than the participants of our panel were.
    • Yes, in the sense that Classics is a discipline of privilege. It’s hard to qualify diversity outside of what you can immediately see (like skin color/race), but I imagine we all come from pretty similar backgrounds. As a discipline, we really need to recruit and support scholars from diverse backgrounds. The cost alone of attending a conference like the CCC keeps the panelists more-or-less the same. This is probably true of most conferences. There’s not a lot of funding/scholarships to go around, and only those who have access to sufficient funds already can participate in the reimbursement model of university grants. It was just pretty expensive to attend.
    • Yes and no. I loved that we had people from all different stages of their careers and people from different countries, which was really great. We also had people from permanent and temporary positions, as well as graduate students. Finally, there were people from different departments (not just classics, but people from other related departments with interdisciplinary interest) and people who work on all different aspects of classics and classical reception, which made for very rich conversations. The only place where the panel wasn’t entirely representative was that there weren’t any people of color represented on the panel, but other than racial/ethnic representation, I think it was a very representative cross-section of the field.
    • Eighteen speakers from different parts of the UK, the USA, Germany and Denmark were brought together in order to deliberate on and exchange views on the concept of “democratising Classics”. I thought that there was a good balance between different subject areas, with papers ranging from drama, film, philosophy, education, street art, poetry, fashion, economics, and feminism – amongst other. Although extremely diverse and interdisciplinary, some themes recurred throughout the three-days long panel, such as social equality, outreach and inclusion, mobilisation and participation, and, overall, “how to engage with and make the Classics more accessible” in our contemporary world.
    • The panel was notable for its breadth of ‘area studies’: e.g.: we had a fascinating talk from a theatre director about her innovative and edgy production of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis right in front of the wall separating the Greek and Turkish sectors of the Cypriot city of Nicosia – a green zone production taking place during peace talks between the two side and which which required special permission from the UN and Greek-Cypriot authorities; a talk on how German contemporary poets use the form of ancient Greek lyric odes; a talk on the ancient and modern cross-cultural practice of female anasyrma  (women exposing their genitalia as a form of protest or as a means of shaming men into action); a talk on modern street artists’ use of classical myth and culture to make statements via large murals.  The 19th and 20th centuries were a distinct focus:  the Belgian thinker and novelist Suzanne Lillar, Bertolt Brecht’s important re-versioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, the commodification of the classical in musical comedies, the role of translation and reinterpretation of Greek tragedy before, during and since the Easter Uprising and the Irish Civil War, the shifting symbolism and demotic reclamation of Pompeii and Vesuvius in early Italian cinema. The panel  was well-represented in terms of age and gender: lots more women panellists  than men, thank goodness, although I don’t know if anyone identified as non-binary or any other non-cis-gendered categories.  We were less representative in terms of BAME participants.  We had a good international mix although noone from Africa, South America or the Far East gave a paper.   A talk from a scholar or practitioner working on, or within, Islamic traditions would have been good.  An area study located in the Middle East would have been interesting too.  I have no idea how diverse we were when it came to the question of sexuality.  But sexuality and gender came up in talks and discussion a lot.

4. What, if anything, would you have changed about the panel? (e.g. different panelists, different format etc).

• • • I would have liked to have more time for discussion and questions at the end of each paper. Because the Celtic Conference offers so many panels and papers at the same time, the schedule is extremely busy. I wished there was less time pressure and more time to think and develop the issues raised by each paper in a final discussion.
    • Nothing — I really loved the panel a lot. I can’t think of anything I would change. The organizers did a fantastic
    • I would have liked more discussion. I think one of the lecture slots could have been given over to just discussion of the panel as a whole. A round table about various issues facing the field would have been cool too. It’s hard to cover these things during coffee/dinner given that not everyone can sit with each other, it’s loud, etc.
    • Not much.  Ideally, we would have had more time for discussion.  Because the speaker did not make it in person,  an important paper about African-American rap versions of Greek tragedy perhaps didn’t get enough consideration.  See above for more traditions and places we could have heard from. (But the organizers could only go by what they received back from their call for papers!) I would have liked to have had more time devoted to ancient and modern political systems, thought and practice.  There was a lot of material on drama and performance: fine by me – but other genres, media and ‘democratic’ forms are also important.
    • I think it was perfect as it was.
      

5. What do you feel is the most pressing issue in the discipline of Classics right now? Did it come up during the panel?

• • • • The fact that Classics is just not taught in most schools anymore and that knowing the languages is still a barrier to entry in the field. It did come up a little bit in discussion, in Dirk’s and Jon’s talks, and it was the focus of Amy’s talk, but I feel like it’s still hard for Classicists to truly understand the situation we’re in. In the States, there are just huge areas of the country where you can’t even seen a performance of Euripides, let alone learn Latin or Greek. One panelist in particular sort of dismissed scholars like Mary Beard who give into the “historicist” approach to Antiquity that popular Classics demands (the kind of books that sell well on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble), but I think it’s these scholars and writers who are doing a tremendous amount of work for our discipline—we can’t keep dismissing them for “giving in” to the demands of hoi polloi. Someone may never get to learn Latin formally, or seen a Greek play, or even read Anne Carson—but they may be able to check out Daisy Dunn’s Catullus’ Bedspread from their local library or listen to a Great Courses lecture series or download the Greek History Podcast. This is how loads of people are introduced to the world of antiquity, even if it’s not the world we, as classicists with specialized degrees, work in.
      • I feel the issue of how to bring classics to a broader public and to show how Greek and Latin literature can help to understand our contemporary world better to be of great importance; and that’s what our panel was about.
      • I think the future of the field in a changing higher education landscape is the biggest issue facing the field right now. That includes issues of popularity and enrollment in classes as well as changing the climate of the field as a whole to be more welcoming to people from a wider range of backgrounds (instead of a place that’s primarily welcoming to elite white people). I think we did talk about these issues during the panel and with panelists outside the panel.
      • I think one of the most pressing issues in Classics (at least in the UK) is the question of learning ancient languages (a subject eloquently raised by Amy Pistone, in the context of the United States). I’m thinking of students who first learn Latin or Ancient Greek at university, but also those who feel insecure in general about their language proficiency, yet who have few opportunities to talk about it and to address it. This, I think, is a crucial source of inequality and uncertainty not only for undergraduate students but for postgraduates and early-career researchers on the job market—especially given the prominence of Latin and Greek language teaching in job descriptions. Though knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek is undoubtedly a good thing for all scholars of antiquity, I think a more open dialogue about differing levels of language proficiency and how more senior scholars go about gaining/maintaining expertise in ancient languages, as well as inclusive (and non-judgemental) reading and discussion groups is necessary to avoid discouraging students who begin the languages at a later date, especially when they might be surrounded by those who seem to be miles ahead.
      • For me it is about making sure a wider section of society (in terms of class, gender, race, faith/culture, sexual orientation) feel included and attracted towards studying classical culture, ideas, politics and reception and/or learning about them in order to work with them creatively, politically and intellectually.  This issue came up all the time.  But also urgent is what Classics should do to respond to fundamental threats to democracy (whether our current attenuated versions of democracy or better ones), human rights and dignity represented by Trump and the European populist Right.  We do this by being open about the ways in which Classics has been used for reactionary purposes. But we also need to celebrate and advertise Classics’ potential to contribute to positive transformations in education, culture and politics.
      • For me the most pressing issue is about enabling access, disseminating the Classics and opening them to different audiences. This relates not only to the need of making the field more inclusive but also to the necessity of uprooting all the conservative voices regarding race and class associated to the Classics for too long. These issues surfaced throughout the three-days long panel. Papers explored different ways of adapting the original messages and engage with them – through modern media, film, drama, art, but also philosophical and feminist discourses.