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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is the fourth and final preparatory post before we embark on the project “Our Ancient Group Material” with the participants of the “Democratising Classics” panel over the next four weekly posts. In many ways, these four preliminary posts, taken together, mirror the four posts to come in that they use the structure of Group […]
A component of the work of both Daniel G. Andújar and Martha Rosler discussed in our last two posts that seems to be missing from both Group Material’s Democracy and the call for papers in the panel “Democratising Classics”, is their use of humor to reveal the problems with democratic institutions, especially at the level […]
We have been mulling over the following sentence from the call for papers of the “Democratising Classics” panel: Who was and is tasked with the translation of ancient works, with teaching others about classical antiquity, and with shaping the future of the subject? While there is a great deal to unpack here, today we want […]
After a week’s break, following our wrapping up of ‘Minus Plato Return Reform Refresh’ and the first draft of our forthcoming book No Philosopher King: An Ancient Guide to Art and Life under Trump, we are now ready to dive into the next project. It is called Our Ancient Group Material and it comprises our […]