What is important is not an authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming of desiring machines, . . . everywhere.
Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution
My favorite performances of ancient Greek comedies straddle several decades. I saw a modern Greek troupe perform Aristophanes’ comedy the Acharnians in the open-air amphitheater in Epidaurus, in Greece, many years ago with my friends Froma and George Zeitlin. It was a summer evening, warm and a little breezy. The amphitheater has been celebrated for millennia because of its extraordinary acoustics; tour guides send the guided up to the highest ranks of stone seats, and then, at the center of the orchestra, the dancing floor, drop a pin. Tourists marvel at the sound. The night we saw the Acharnians, the chorus was dressed in wild and brilliant colors, leapt about in slapstick and kept the audience in stitches. There were lots of references to the contemporary and messy politics of Greece in that moment, and although I didn’t follow all of the modern Greek, or the jokes, I was caught up in a jubilant, mesmerizing participation in a crowd that loved the spectacle of dancing and singing and the mockery of the powerful.
Another favorite performance happened at the University of California at San Diego, where I teach. My beloved colleague William Fitzgerald invited the Aquila Theatre troupe, led by Peter Meineck, to present a version of Aristophanes’ Frogs. The central character of this play, which concerns Greek tragedy and tragedians, is the god Dionysos, who is ridiculed for much of the action. In the Aquila troupe’s presentation the god was dressed as an Elvis impersonator. In the closed space of a tiny theater, with a small group of actors making up the chorus of frogs as well as playing the other roles in the play, the performance in its own way produced hysterical laughter and delight. I remember anxiety, fearing that the students who attended might not get the Elvis thing, and the brilliantly evocative music of this display, but they were laughing as hard as I was.
This book calls for reading and watching ancient Greek comedy again, better, more. Resisting the seemingly inevitable and perennial appeal of Greek tragedy, I have wanted to set comedy alongside its companion and rival, and to consider its value to contemporary thinking on the politics of democracy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of the nuclear family of Oedipus the king and his daughter Antigone, or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, I call for ancient comedy, its laughter, its obscenity and freedom of speech, its wild swarming animal choruses and rebellious women, to inform another model, another genealogy of democracy. Comedy has its place, even in dark days. Old Comedy continued to be performed during the plague of Athens and the Peloponnesian War, in the later fifth century BCE. In what follows, I question the privileging of tragedy in the philosophical and political theoretical tradition, and using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, argue for adding to a long tradition of tragic thought the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy.
I also want to break Greek comedy out of the scholarly insularity of its study. Perhaps because of the obscenity and topicality of ancient comedy, it has in the humanities and social sciences been relatively isolated from the wider contemplation of Greek drama, and at times even by classicists themselves, trivialized or limited to a focus on historical references, individual “heroic” characters, diction, and the laborious explication of jokes. Women long did not read Greek, and the study of ancient Greek comedy and its rowdy, obscene language has often attracted an elite and gendered attention. Yet ancient Athenian comedy provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. The irrepressible energy of the comic swarm exceeds the categories of traditional analysis of the ancient city, its drama, its politics.
I have sought to make the genre accessible to contemporary readers, to coax it out of obscurity and a sometimes obscure subfield of classical studies, not a genre of ancient texts that often appeals to contemporary political theorists or culture critics. I address not only the sexual politics, the utopianism, and the political strategies concerning free speech in ancient comedy; I widen my attention to include not just Aristophanes, the best-known of ancient comic writers, but also the many other names associated with this dramatic tradition. And I locate the plays in their ritual, collective, political setting, alongside tragedy in the festivals honoring Dionysos and the city in which they were performed. Comedy opens up a line of flight that leads from the stage to the heterogeneous, lively city. I focus not so much on the characters of these plays, on their psychological, nuclear family struggles, but rather on the collective, the chorus, the wasps, birds, clouds, and rebellious women whose calls for change in the ancient city make this genre unique in classical Greek performance, and uniquely significant for democracy, ancient and contemporary.
Why go back to ancient comedy and its politics of the people? In part, because classics and ancient history are once again being dragged into the politics of the present. The group called “Identity Evropa” has used classicizing white sculpture to command, on American college campuses: “Protect your heritage,” “Our future belongs to us,” and to warn students of continuing “white genocide.” As Mark Potok, an official of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, noted, “Although you might think based on their [Identity Evropa’s] propaganda that they’re all about Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, in fact they’re merely a gussied-up version of the Klan.”1 The Bloc Identitaire, which originated on the Far Right in France, appropriates a symbol of the LGBTQX movement, using a yellow lambda as its symbol, because, they argue, it marked the shields of the Spartans who held the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian hordes, who were, it seems, bent on white genocide. Groups recruited to fight leftist demonstrations are being recruited into “Spartan” training camps and competitions to harden them for combat.
The material of classical studies has been deployed by these alt-right, white supremacist, and other racist groups to shore up their claims for a pure, white, Aryan, and often Hellenic origin to Western civilization. It’s important for classicists to denounce this instrumentalization of the ancient world.2 To point out that ancient sculpture was not pure white. That the ancient Greek and Roman world, the Mediterranean and beyond, included Asia and Africa as well as Europe. That the societies of the classical age were not paradises of white freedom, and that they oppressed huge slave populations, excluded women from political participation, and conducted ruthless imperial campaigns. The diversity and heterogeneity of the discipline of classics, focused on ancient Greece and Rome, are finally being expanded to include more people of color, of all genders and ethnicities, and more needs to be done in this regard to dismantle the edifice of classics-as-origin-of-white-supremacy-and-the-pure-fount-of-Western civilization. Scholars begin to situate the study of Greek and Roman antiquity within a global frame. Elsewhere, I’ve argued for world history, for a study of antiquity all over the globe, locating classical studies in the West within a wide array of civilizations before and after the year one of the Common Era.3 At the University of California at San Diego I teach in a general education sequence called the “Making of the Modern World,” touching on not just ancient “Greece,” which in fact includes parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but also the so-called Near East—Mesopotamia, ancient African Egypt, and the Levant—as well as ancient India, ancient China, and ancient Mesoamerica. I’m not an expert on all these regions, but the study of other societies contemporary with that of ancient Athens has greatly enriched my understanding of the specificity, even peculiarity, not always admirable by comparison, of the traditional objects of classical studies, ancient Greece and Rome.
But I also believe there is more to the ancient Greeks themselves than just a mistaken message about Euro-American superiority, the whiteness of Western civilization, the “Greek miracle,” the wonders of the statesman and leader Pericles and what is seen as “his” democracy. One of the concerns that frames what I discuss in this book, as the world resists a descent in the present into human-made climate disaster, tyranny, dictatorship, and white supremacy, is the desire not to abandon hope for something different. In the face of growing tendencies to abuse history, I join with others to revive a strain of resistance that is directly opposed to monarchy, or tyranny, that is nourished by the anarchist strain of Marxism, the thinking of such ancestors as Rosa Luxembourg, with an emphasis on a relatively leaderless collective in politics. I owe much to a tradition that goes back to ancient atomist theory, to Democritus and Leucippus, to Epicurus and Lucretius, to Spinoza and his readers in modernity, Marx, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Jane Bennett and Mel Chen and Judith Butler. And to the authors of the collection called Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times.4 We can see, in such contemporary movements as the Yellow Umbrellas, the Sunrise Movement, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, resistance to defined leadership, to named figures who stand for the group as a whole, and by contrast, the cultivation of habits of collective decision-making and equality that could look back to ancient democracy and the wild anarchy of its choruses.
Why comedy? As someone who found inspiration, politics, and a respite from disengaged empiricism in the so-called Paris school, the reorientation of classical studies guided especially by Jean-Pierre Vernant, and including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nicole Loraux, and Marcel Detienne, I was drawn to the high art of Greek tragedy along with others who found their anthropological, political, and cultural contextualizing of ancient democracy and its rituals, writings, and thinking a liberating influence, given an Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic emphasis on philology and a somewhat hermetic relationship to ancient Greek society. But the privileging of Greek tragedy, in contrast to comedy, is one of the central issues of this present work; that emphasis goes beyond the discipline of classical studies to include a long history of philosophical and political theoretical and even psychoanalytic meditation on what the ancient Greeks and their tragedies established, their reception contributing to setting the terms of Western civilization.
I am greatly indebted to scholars who disregarded the implicit call to concentrate on the high art of tragedy, and whose work has been so important to my understanding of the interconnectedness of tragedy and comedy in ancient Athens. If one of the reasons for the preference for tragedy in the wider world, beyond classics per se, was the obscenity and inaccessibility and topicality of ancient Greek comedy, we all owe much to the classical scholar Jeffrey Henderson, who opened up the vocabulary of the comic poet Aristophanes, amplifying a lexicon that had long been censored in dictionaries and in commentaries on ancient authors who used “obscenity,” that is, in English, diction that belongs “offstage.” Comedy had been for centuries the province of male scholars who did not share their secrets with the uninitiated. Other scholars’ work has inspired my engagement with ancient Athenian choruses, and the performances of Old Comedy. Mark Payne’s work on the intimacy and porosity of human beings’ connections with their animality, the animality of other animals, and with the so-called natural world, the universe of plants, and stones, and materiality in general, has been a revelation to me, connecting with the work of new materialists such as Jane Bennett and Mel Chen to allow a new look especially at the creatures of Old Comedy’s creation—wasps and frogs and birds and clouds.5
As before, in this book I find myself straddling the world of high theory and that of classical studies. I have always wanted to avoid the presentism of high theory, its gaze at contemporary events or texts, its exclusive engagement with the present and the recent past, which seem to me to disregard the phenomena that have led to our present, that shape the questions we ask ourselves now. And I have continued to be fascinated by classical antiquity, especially the world of the ancient Greeks, and to see the impact of their institutions and thinking on our current-day institutions and thinking, even as we understand better how the whole globe has been implicated in the histories we study. So, as before, I find myself between two traditions, that of theory, and that of classical studies, which have very different academic protocols and imperatives, neither of which I feel I can adhere to effortlessly. I am never enough of a classicist, never enough of a theorist. But I would like to continue to insist on my right to refuse antiquarianism, the attempt to reconstruct some authentic ancient world, without acknowledging our perspective from the present, and also to refuse a theoretical stance that ignores the past, or that sees it purely as a construct of the present, denying its historicity, its material existence and specificity, its particularities.
And further, as preliminary: as I have given lectures about this project in the past few years, wanting to look again at ancient comic choruses and how they might inform the politics of the present, I have encountered two forms of objection. One finds it disturbing to look at the choruses of comedy without delineating their subordinate place in the plots of comedy, on the plays as integral literary entities, and on the intentions of the author as a conscious, strategic writer. I find it quite easy to lift the choruses to some degree from their literary situation in texts and to consider them as exemplary of collectivity and mass action. But such a strategy does violate some people’s notion of the proper study of literature, of the author and the integral text. I take note of this objection, and argue against it in what follows.
And others have objected that seeing the potential in collective action, in the anarchy of leaderless and utopian protest, denies the inevitability of mob violence. I argue in what follows that while swarms are often demonized, they cannot be reduced to inevitably ferocious mobs.6 Why should all protest be supposed to descend into chaos and destruction, into a mindless absorption in a many-headed hydra of unconscious, id-driven monstrosity?7 I have been protesting and marching since I was a teenager, against everything from racism to the Vietnam War to police brutality and guns and bad presidents for decades, for peace and gun control and women’s rights and social justice, and have never felt that in the process I had lost my reason. Rather, there was usually a sense of community and solidarity. The fear of being erased as an individual in these circumstances seems misplaced. A distinction really must be made, as we have seen in recent years, between armed protest groups bent on destruction, on racism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and the erection of tyranny; and protest groups, usually nonviolent, committed to racial equality, social justice, the redistribution of wealth, and democracy. Black Lives Matter, for example, the collective organization that has led marches in the US, and stimulated massive protests against racism around the world, planned internal measures for combatting violence and maintaining peaceful presence in demonstrations and marches, and largely succeeded. The liberal internalized fear of crowds’ descending into chaos may inhibit righteous protest. As Frederick Douglass wrote, at times one needs to counter force with force.
I should add too a sort of recantation: once upon a time I found a rich reservoir of the regrettable details of the everyday life of the ancient Athenians in the lines of Old Comedy, evidence of misogyny and enslavement. These features of everyday life are still there. But I also now see possibilities in the comic choruses—for utopian imagining, for free speaking against potential tyrants, for luxury and the enjoyment of food and sex, for the freedoms of animal existence, for women’s desire, and democratic impulses toward equality and communalism. If tragedy is set in mythical palaces, with kings and queens and remote gods, comedy is saturated with the city on the stage and outside, porous and open, the whole city—dogs and dung beetles, wine, farts, insects, dildos, sausages, slaves, coins, pots and pans, cheese, shoemakers, aphrodisiacs—everyday life in all its intensity.