[PEN-L:2473] Re: Why I Can't Come to the Party

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just sent this to the wrong list. Apologies to anyone who gets two copies...

>>>>Brad De Long wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [Stuff claiming that he is greatly distressed at his
>>>> failure to win the 1998 Bad Writing Contest]
>>>>
>>>>P.S.: Anyone care to try to translate [Judith] Butler's
>>>>[1998 Bad Writing Contest] award-winning paragraph into
>>>>reasonably idiomatic English?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Doug Henwood wrote:
>>>
>>>Butler:
>>>
>>>> The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
>>>> to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
>>>> of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
>>>> convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
>>>> into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
>>>> Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
>>>> objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
>>>> of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
>>>> with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
>>>> power.
>>>
>>>Henwood:
>>>
>>>"An older view, associated with structuralism, which held that capital
>>>shaped social life in a unitary and timeless way, has given way to a new
>>>view of power, as something dispersed, changeable, and requiring constant
>>>reinforcement and reassertion."
>>>
>>
>>
>>Brad DeLong wrote:
>>
>>A reasonable try, but what did you do with [various words]? ...And then
>>there are the deeper problems with the paragraph: power
>>that is dispersed and contingent ain't hegemony, and
>>so forth...
>>
>>
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>Well that's the point here, it can be: if power is
>in our heads, if power forms our subjectivities, then
>it is dispersed in billions of us, in trillions of
>daily contacts. This obviously comes out of Foucault,
>who can be criticized for his excessively atomized
>view of power, but it's a useful contrast to all
>those classically Marxian views of power, which
>find the entire capitalist structure in every grain
>of sand. But we're probably boring all the dismal
>scientists to death...


But hegemony requires a hegemon. Power requires a source. A lot of
distinctions that were useful and important are being lost, and their loss
creates the potential for enormous confusion.

Let me try to save some distinctions about forms of subjection--different
kinds and degrees of being subject to power...

[with apologies to James Davidson, _Courtesans and Fishcakes_; Platon, _The
Drinking Party_; Thucydides, _The Peloponnesian War_]


Let us suppose that Agathon is giving a dinner party: about 20 people which
will be held in the Males' Room of his house. The food will be of the
best--seared tuna fresh-caught and landed at the Piraeus this afternoon,
octopus, boar-fish sauteed in oil and cheese, the new kind of olives called
"Kalamata," honey-cakes, dates (the large kind, called "Medjool"), and so
on. The wine will be of the best--properly-aged amphorae imported from the
two Ionian Islands that make the best wine, Lesbos and Chios. The company
will be of the best--Sokrates, of course (he somehow shows up at a lot of
fancy upper-class dinner parties for someone who places so much stress on
his freedom from sensual appetites), Aristophanes will be there trying out
jokes for his new play, Phaedrus, Alkibiades has promised to drop by (and
there is no one in Athens more handsome than he, fresh as he is from his
victories at the Olympic Games), a few aspiring playwrights and aspiring
philosophers, a few up-and-coming politicians. For entertainment there will
be professional musicians, and the flute-girls and courtesans, of course.

Agathon is giving a dinner party. But I cannot go. I cannot go because...

....I am chained to the wall in this underground barracks. 30 feet long, 6
feet wide, 5 feet high, in which I spend my time--with eleven of my fellow
slaves--from dinner until breakfast. When the work-day for my overseers
neared its end, they fed all twelve of us our spare meal, marched us down
the hill to this barracks, and chained us here to the wall to sleep. When
morning comes they will unchain us from the wall and chain us together,
feed us our spare breakfast, and then march us up the hill and into the
mine, where we will spend all day digging silver and dodging the blows of
our overseers' whips. The silver we dig is one of the foundations of
Athenian power: it buys wheat and oil from the lands of the Black Sea,
timber from Lebanon to build the Athenian triremes, and more slaves to
replace us in the silver mine when we die (and we do die: only half of us
twelve will be alive two years hence).

....I am a sharecropper, in debt to Nikias, bound to stay and work the land
here in North Attica, far from the City sacred to Athena the Grey-Eyed.
Even though I live only twenty miles away, I have never seen the temple of
Athena the Virgin ("Parthenos").

....I *must* go to Agathon's party. It is my job to go. I appear in the body
of world literature as the auletris, the flute-girl, on whom Alkibiades
leans as he enters and asks if the party will "welcome as a fellow-drinker
anyone already so terribly drunk." I will play my flute (probably not very
well). Then I will take off my clothes and go with one of the party-goers
out back and do it doggie-style. I could make more if I would ride him like
a pony, but I would rather not have to smell his wine-breath and see his
face so close.

....I have to go work at my job. My name is Phaedo. Since my native city was
sacked five years ago, I have been sold from master to master until now I
have wound up here in Athens. My master thinks that he can make best use of
me by hiring me out as a (male) prostitute in the Pottery District. So
during Agathon's Party I will be sitting in my little 6' by 6' cubicle,
waiting for customers. Nevertheless my master is not a bad master. He only
makes me work 12 hours out of 24, and he allows me to go where I please
within Athens (for I have given my word of honor as a gentleman not to try
to escape). And I have made friends here--Glaukon, Platon, Sokrates
himself--and their friendship and conversation helps me forget for a while
what my master commands me to do.

....I will go because it is a good business move for me to go. Well, it is
not a business move, exactly. It's sort of hard to explain. I am Phryne.
When it became known that I was going to bathe in the ocean a crowd
gathered, and 1000 Athenians watched me come out of the sea dressed only in
my wet tunic. Praxitales--the leading sculptor of our age--was so taken
with how I looked that he used me as a model for his statue of Kytheran
Aphrodite. Perhaps you have seen it? More likely you have seen a picture in
the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for which Praxiteles' statue served as a
model: it's called "The Birth of Venus," and was painted by Sandro
Botticelli. I will go to the party. I will flirt, gossip, and exchange
witty sayings with the guests. Many of the men there have already given me
presents, *large* and *valuable* presents. If they have brought more to
give me--if they are handsome enough--if they are witty enough--then
perhaps after the party I will go with one of them to his house. But
perhaps not.

....I could go. I am Agathon's wife. I could go to the party, and listen to
Aristophanes read scenes-in-progress, and watch Sokrates tie some
slightly-drunk politician who wants to defend the conventional wisdom up in
so many verbal knots. Nothing bad would happen to me if I went. Agathon
would not divorce me, or beat me (as husbands have the right to do). But I
would lose much status were I--an upper-class Athenian woman, a married
wife--to enter the Males' Room in which the party is taking place. My
husband Agathon would lose much status too. And he is a good man. So I will
not go (although I will listen with my ear to the wall during, and eat the
leftover tuna after, the party).

....I could never get invited to Agathon's dinner party. I am an honest
citizen of Athens, a skilled metalworker. But I'm not rich. And to go to
fancy dinner parties with seared tuna, you have to give fancy dinner
parties with seared tuna. My money goes to keep my family comfortable and
to provide proper dowries for my daughters. Not that Athens is a bad place
to live, you understand. When business is slack I can go down to the
Piraeus and sign on as a rower in the navy. No citizen of Athens need be
poor, at least not as long as the silver keeps flowing out from the mines
under Flowerhill and the tribute keeps coming in from the empire. No one
tells me what to do. And when I have time I go to the Assembly, listen to
the speakers, vote on peace or war, and when we feel like it we exercise
our people-power--our demo[s]-cracy--and tax Agathon, Alkibiades, and
company to pay for our public festivals, our strong long walls, and our
triremes.

....I am Gylippus, envoy from Sparta to this decadent licentious city of
fish-eating demogogues. The Archidamnian War between Athens and Sparta is
over. But the peace was not a real peace--now we have a Cold War, in which
the Athenians stir up the Argives to try to erode Spartan hegemony in the
Peloponnesus while we encourage the rich and the good in Ionia to stage
coups to unseat their pre-Athenian "people-power" regimes. We Spartans
don't like decadent, Athenian-style dinner parties. When we eat, we eat to
fuel our bodies. When we drink, we drink to get drunk: big cups, strong
wine. When we f***, we f***. But now is the time to conspire. And later
will be the time to kill.

....I can't go. I had an invitation from Agathon--he wants to come to my
next dinner party and I, Nikias, am richer than him. I would dearly love to
go. But the Assembly meets tomorrow, and I have to speak. It is becoming
clearer and clearer that the Archidamnian War was but the first page of a
bigger struggle, and that the peace was just a truce in this larger
Peloponnesian War. We Athenians need to plan to strengthen our empire and
our forces for when the Spartans next attack. Some think that we should
draw our allies in Sikilia closer to us--make them part of our empire,
assist them in their struggles against Carthage and against the Tyrant of
Syrakusa. I need to speak on this tomorrow, and I first need to decide
whether such a Sikilian Expedition is good for our city. So I have to work
tonight: decide what I am going to say to the sovereign Assembly tomorrow,
and then outline my speech.


Now let us assume that anyone truly free would go to Agathon's dinner
party. No matter what your ends--no matter what your deep desires are--good
food, great wine, sex, female companionship and laughter, amusement, music,
conversation, philosophy--they are to be found in Agathon's house, in the
Males' Room.

Thus anyone who doesn't go to Agathon's house is under some form of
subjection, is oppressed, is subjected by some form of power that keeps
them from the party. "Hegemony" is exercised upon them--albeit not in
"homologous ways." Instead, the "power relations" to which all those who
don't go to Agathon's party (and the auletris and Phryne who do) are
subject are marked by "repetition, convergence and rearticulation" and are
"bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
power." There is a sense in which Gylippus--who doesn't go to the party
because it isn't a Spartan Thing--is as subject to power as the mine-slave
who doesn't go to the party because he is chained to the wall in the dark.

But there is also a sense in which these two experiences are not the same.
Gylippus may be subjected in the sense that the reasons he doesn't go to
the party were imposed on him from outside by the same forces that made him
a subject (in the meaning of someone who does deeds and experiences
events). The chains that hold the mine-slave to his barracks were also
imposed on him from outside. But the--may I use the word
"subjective"--experiences of Gylippus and the mine-slave are very different.

So I don't think we get much insight into the different ways (and the
different degrees to which) the people who don't go to Agathon's are
unfree, are subject to power, if we look inside Judith Butler's _The
Psychic Life of Power_. The mine-slave chained to the wall, the farmworker
bound to his shack by chains of debt, the (female) whore chained by sexism
and poverty, the (male) slave-whore chained by his capture, the courtesan
chained by sexism, the wife chained by a different source of sexism, the
Athenian citizen not of the hoplite class chained by his lack of wealth,
the Spartan general chained by his spartan upbringing, the Athenian
politician chained by his sense of duty to the democracy--what is really
gained by calling all of these people's unfreedom by the same name? How do
we gain insight into what is really going on by playing word games that
blur distinctions between the subject [of a king], the subject [of a
sentence], and the subject [in the sense of one who acts and experiences]?


Brad DeLong