Judgment on Trial: Ancient Myths and Modern Ideologies
The courtroom has always been a charged symbolic site; legal process and crime now dominate the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent. There televised trials and televised manhunts, encouraging the fantasy of “solving” crime by forcing individual criminals through the mangle of publicity. Politics and crime are strangely fused in American life. Our ideology insists on our underlying innocence commitment to social justice and “freedom,” noble intentions, and so on. We therefore have an unseemly predilection for the “bad apple in the barrel” theory: Nixon in the case of Vietnam, [Oliver] North and some other zealots in the matter of the contras. Because the palpable, systematic evils are always kept out of evidence, the political criminal is typically “brought to justice” on a set of trivial charges and acquitted for diminished responsibility. Like Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, North’s serious crimes are indictable offenses, being basically identical to the will of the state. – Gary Indiana “Blood Brothers” in Group Material Democracy (Politics and Election section), p. 141.
In the 1930s, Brecht wrote some sketches under the heading “Critique of Myths”, later collected under the title “Doubting the Myths”. In this collection, Brecht did not only doubt the “truth” of ancient myths, but he also called into question the ideological “myth” of the superiority of ancient Greece inculcated by the Nazis, who were promoting the supposedly racial closeness of the Germans to the Greeks. In calling into question the “plausibility” and “reliability” of canonical myths, traditionally assumed to be “true”, Brecht opposed the distorted readings imposed by the Nazis upon literary texts and their manipulation of myths and politics. If myths (both ancient and modern) are constantly open to revaluation and change, how can we make sense of them? In the face of the rising fascist movement, Brecht warned his audience about the dangers of manipulating art and believing dominant ideologies too readily. Through his works, he suggested a new, critical way of approaching ancient myths and modern ideologies – a way which, by “doubting” pre-established ideas and proposing new versions of myths, offered the tools necessary to engage critically with the past and the present. – Rossana Zetti.
Talking Heads and the Organized Minority
Golub: One thing we have to recognize is the contradictory nature of our democracy. We are an extremely hierarchical society; language, authority, and power differences are clearly both demarcated and obscured. Ironically, this means that if you want to challenge something, often the lines of power are obscured, but when they want to do something, then the lines are very clear about how they go ahead and do it.
Wright: That depends on where you are Pitirim Sorokin speaks about the “organized minority.” He gives the example of the United States Supreme Court, where five people can say what is proper for the entire country even if four others are in dissent. […]
Gonzalez-Torres: The Supreme Court is a really good example. Nine people get together and decide who you can love and who you can’t love. For me that is really obscure, I can never grasp why something like that goes on […] Who gave the power to those people to decide and who gave the power to museum people to put certain objects on the walls and not others?
Golub: Laws equal control and power. Judgment and decision making, despite “precedents,” are self-constituted, self-arrogated. In other words, I give myself the right to do this. Now, how can others accept the fact that I am in this position? I am granted this position, chosen, “elected,” or I force my way, in another form of election, that eventually becomes “precedent”. How do communities constitute themselves? Who claims prerogatives of decision making? Who gives museums privilege? Who gives curators authority? They give each other rights. I appoint you, you then appoint “X,” who then reaffirms my position.
– Leon Golub, Bruce Wright and Felix Gonzales-Torres “Roundtable?”, in Group Material Democracy (Politics and Election section), pp. 112-3.
*As student councils or debating clubs can tell us, face-to-face discussion is often more reasonable and useful than what you can achieve online. Debating together in an officially recognised body also reminds us of our common goals, over and above what divides us. But we cannot stop the rise of all the news, political activity and opinion-forming which takes place online; in other words, we should embrace and learn to utilise online tools effectively to filter out the bubbles and encourage a meaningful dialogue between diverse groups. – Jon Hesk
*Inspired by Plato’s views on education, [Allan] Bloom contends that the university in a democratic society must be a space where one can challenge the prevailing nostrums of democracy itself. By encouraging tendencies alien to democracy, higher education can balance students’ souls and strengthen their societies. Thus, according to Bloom, the university must encourage elitist philosophical contemplation anathema to the pragmatic leveling of American democracy. – Eric Adler
*At the beginning of AD 68, the emperor Nero returned to Rome after a tour of Greece that had lasted for a whole year and had been extremely successful. By then, he was not only the ruler of the Roman empire, he was a winner of the Olympic Games and of the “European Song Contest” rolled into one. Had Plato’s ideal republic been a res publica litterarum (republic of letters) rather than a state of philosophers, this would have been it: a poet on the mightiest throne in the world, the emperor of Rome trained and proven as an artist ( Von Albrecht (1994) 711). – Dirk Uwe Hansen.
*As the limitations of the Eurozone, qua currency union, have been revealed in the economic distress of Greece, and in the political stand-off between ‘the Troika’ (EC, IMF, ECB) and the Greek government in 2015, Greek myth has been widely deployed as a common currency for representing these crises. The locus classicus of this exchange has been Yanis Varoufakis’s book The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy. Yet Varoufakis’s book goes far beyond the political crisis between the European currency union and the Greek government in 2015, and the overall economic crisis in Greece, to develop an historical argument about the genesis of the global financial crisis of 2008. – Michael Simpson.
*I think that sometimes just allowing people to see [Classical drama] as plays is a good enough reason [to perform them]. Its not why I do them. I think I do them because I think they often can convey an important message, which is what I want to say with them. And that’s not necessarily everybody’s view of them. But that is what I think drama is. For me there is no purpose in saying, well, we’re just going to do a Sophocles play, because its a great play. Its a great play because its still radiating a message, or something you want to say, or there’s a performance in there or some wonderful poetry, or there’s something about it that means it has reason to live and breath. Of course any new staging of a Greek play is a new play. Right, so, the more I’ve learned about ancient drama I think the more radical I’ve got with it. And that doesn’t always sit well with Classicists, because Classicists, some Classicists, not all Classicists, can be quite conservative about ancient drama. – Peter Meineck.
Men I Have Liked
[F]eminists are realizing, to their intense disappointment, that men who look unfavorably on such familiar human rights violations as slavery, internment, and torture do not necessarily have qualms about coercive pregnancy and childbearing. […] Many men, of course, are quite clearheaded on the subject [of abortion], and some 100,000 of them (by my estimation) joined the megamarch for abortion rights in Washington on April 9 [1988]. But there is a sizable and well-placed minority that is quite brave in confronting outbreaks of cruelty as they occur wolrdwide, but which, when hit with the subject reproductive rights, grows testy, withdrawn, or preoccupied. My guess is that the problem stems from the primal male fears of what might be called the unfriendly vagina: a specter which includes not only the vagina dentata of ancient male fantasy, but any female interior which failts to nurture every squirt of sperm that comes its way. – Barbara Ehrenreich “Men I Have Liked”, in Group Material Democracy (Politics and Election section), p. 137.
On January 22, 2017, warm, handmade hats graced the heads of nearly half-a-million people gathered in D.C., but they were no ordinary hats: they were Pussyhats. With two extra tufts of wool knitted on the crown of each cap, the Pussyhats took back the word “pussy” from the locker room and turned it, literally and physically, into a symbol of power and solidarity. Founded in response to Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women’s genitalia during the 2016 election, The Pussyhat Project offered a creative way to send a message to America’s new president and support marchers across the world. – Margaret Day.
Classics for All? Selling the Package
In an email to us, following our discussion of her work Watchwords of the Eighties, Martha Rosler wrote:
I read your blog, and appreciated its lines of thought, and of course was very interested in your re-presentation of the work that Group Material and I did at Dia those two decades ago (almost)—and, maybe even more so, Watchwords of the 80s.
She proceeded to quote a section of our post:
So, for participants in the panel “Democratising Classics”, where do you place your own contemporary work as classicists (and any claims to the democratization of your discipline) in relation to Rosler’s ongoing projects? (You can start by reading her statement for Watchwords of the Eighties below and thinking about your own current work). At the same time, to Martha Rosler, we ask how would she update or change the statement to reflect the present conditions under Trump?
And then Rosler asks us the following question:
I wonder how people answered this. [N]ot sure how I would.
As of yet we don’t have an answer to send for Rosler, although the two panelists who contributed to today’s post/”exhibition” – Rossana Zetti and Margaret Day – seem to us to be ideal starting points.
When Rosler asks (in her statement that accompanied the Watchwords of the Eighties project):
You white collar, professional, and business people constituting most of our audience, reconsider your allegiances! Are you satisfied to accept the new watchwords
QUALITY (= elite, expensive, conservative cultural products) and
ELEGANCE (= unblushing ostentation for the limousine class)
over your own more humane values, such as tolerance and compassion, or a just and dignified life?
Our two Classicists answer, first by following Brecht in calling for our ‘doubting’ of myths (rather than consuming them as ‘conservative cultural products’), both ancient and modern (Zetti) and, secondly, by focusing on the symbol of the Pussyhat as a physical symbol of protest and solidarity (‘more humane values’) for women under Trump (Day). Both artist and Classicists are attuned the authoritarian and patriarchal myth-construction that are central to electoral politics in democracies, ancient and modern. To make our point more clearly, let us look back to an earlier work by Rosler which offers a cunning commentary on the conflation of corporate ideology with misogyny, as focused on women’s bodies, and see where it fits in with the Group Material exhibition “Politics and Election”.
One answer comes from “Political Advertisement II (1952/1988)”, a video by Muntadas and Marshall Reese which was included in the 1988 exhibition “Politics and Election” – the second part of Group Material’s Democracy project – and displayed prominently on a tall white pedestal at the center of the gallery space at Dia, (Apologies for the poor image):
Comprising a selection of campaign ads for the US presidential election dating back to 1952, Muntadas and Reese’s work (which they first made for the 1984 election and have updated regularly since, with the 9th version incorporating ads for the 2016 election) included an ad for the Dukakis campaign called The Packaging of George Bush that showed a group of three advertising execs trying to come up with an campaign to support Bush on the environment
Adman #1: Jeez, look at these poll numbers, people are really worried about the environment.
Adman #2: Well, do a commercial of him standing on a beautiful beach.
Adman #3: Give me a break! After seven and a half years of our boys taking apart the Environmental Protection Agency, James Watt, Bush personally got him to ease up on corporate polluters. That is on the record and now we’re gonna say…
Adman #2: He’s gonna say he loves the environment. He’s gonna make it clean and wonderful.
Adman #3: He’ll say that?
[laughter]
Following this ad in Muntadas and Reese’s selection is a Bush commercial packaging the future president as a reliable, all-American family man, inter-cutting scenes from his career with scenes from a picnic:
The packaging of the candidate for consumption by the electorate, which, of course works equally well for the “postmodern” and self-aware Dukakis ad, as much as for the saccharin Bush home-movie, is alluded to elsewhere in the Group Material exhibition, from the giant American flag occupying one wall to the left and hanging on the back wall you can just make out one part of John Armleder’s 346, a multiple of three-piece Brooks Brothers wool suits with garment bag, in reference to to the iconic store’s location on Madison Avenue and its role in the myth of the American male’s gentility and suave style. (As Mary McCarthy wrote in her 1941 short story ‘The Man in the Brooks Brothers’ Shirt’: This man now – surely he came from that heavenly world, that divine place at the center of things where choice is unlimited).
But all is not smooth sailing for the corporate packaging of the (male) democratic ideal, as you may be able to just make out, in the bottom right corner of the photograph one of three of Christy Rupp’s Rubble Rats:
For all its packaging, dubious claims to democratic ideals are outed by the appearance of this creature, as elsewhere in Rupp’s work, figured to attack real estate expansion and gentrification. Continuing this theme of the dirty underbelly of democracy and elections is expanded to its patriarchal foundations in the chilling and prickly work of Mike Glier called Fancy Men’s Clubs, comprising a looped hanging of kitchen utensils modified into weapons as a not-too-subtle reference to domestic abuse, as much as to the limited representation of women in politics.
It is this gendered violence that comes full circle back to Rosler’s Damp Meat and the confluence between Rossana Zetti’s and Margaret Day’s contributions to this post/”exhibition”. In politics, and in elections in particular, both ancient and modern, there is a general continuity in the ideology of patriarchy that sees the individual white male as the central image for democratic stability and political authority. At the same time, when that same individual white male is identified as the problem, as the disruptive demagogue, then it is the system of democracy that is seen to be in crisis and the pressure is placed on women and others to fight for it. To translate this onto the discipline of Classics, all we need to do is look at the way the panelists of ‘Democratising Classics” have engaged with our project to date, ahead of the conference (which takes place later this week). Of the 18 panelists, only women have either participated in these first two posts/”exhibition” (6) or have contacted us about their participation in future posts (2). For whatever reason, the men in the panel have not (yet) engaged with us (5). At the same time, when the in-person panel takes place in St. Andrews this week, are we to imagine that the same balance of participation will hold? Or, can we predict that, the usual dominance of the male voice and position in academic as much as political debate (whether in ancient Athens or today) will hold firm? Of course, there are many other factors to take into consideration (age, academic rank etc) when understanding the differences between participation in Our Ancient Group Material and “Democratising Classics”. We understand, people are busy, its the summer, the World Cup is on etc. But raising these issues, with Rosler and Group Material, is, we believe, precisely what the organizers want us to do when they asked us in their original call for papers to:
push all Classicists, not just Classical Reception scholars, to question the assumptions and biases that underpin their discipline.
[Caveat: Entries accompanied by an asterisk (*) were not sent by the panelist but were selected by us, as curators of this post/”exhibition”. The quotations were, however, written or spoken statements by the designated authors taken from published writings, conference abstracts, blogs or interviews, with the sources given as links to the authors’ names – MP]