Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History VI
What does ancient Greek comedy have to offer to politics in the present? I have suggested that its potential lies in its representations of women’s power, of parrhesia, or free speaking, which includes ridicule and mockery of the powerful, in the possibilities inherent in utopianism, often itself dismissed in the present day, and in the potential of the swarm, the collective, the commune, the anonymous group, exemplified in the ancient Athenian democracy by the chorus of comedy.1 I look in this epilogue at some of its reception over many centuries, and at ways in which the reading of ancient comedy can come together with the work of contemporary theorists and activists to enable a politics that goes beyond the tragic individual. The comic potential of the swarm finds its echoes in the swarm of recent performance, in the idea of autopoiesis, in the utopian concept of communal luxury, in the politics of Occupy and Black Lives Matter.
The dramas of ancient Athens have had a long afterlife, finding a voice even in nineteenth-century India. Phiroze Vasunia has brilliantly traced the engagement of British colonialism in India with the classical tradition in his now classic The Classics and Colonial India.2 His chapter “Aristophanes’ Wealth and Dalpatram’s Lakshmi” shows the reach of ancient comedy beyond the specific circumstances of classical Athens. Dalpatram Dahyabhai (1820–98) published a Gujarati translation of Aristophanes’ Wealth, with the assistance of Alexander Kinloch Forbes, in 1850. “By the late 1860s,” Dalpatram’s translation “had sold almost a thousand copies . . . , and it went into four editions” (279). Vasunia notes that “from the middle of the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, Aristophanes’ plays were edited, annotated, and translated, but seldom acted out on the live theatrical stage” (280). Dalpatram was “one of a number of reformers who were trying to modernize the social behaviour of Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century” (280), and he considered the translation and presentation of Wealth to be part of this mission.
Stephen Halliwell claims that Wealth “requires much less historical exegesis than any other surviving Aristophanic play.”3 In the ancient comedy, Chremylos, and his slave Cario, take home the character Wealth, Ploutos, a god, who is old and blind. The premise of the comedy is, and this is the basis of the utopianism projected there, that if Wealth regained his sight, he would “redistribute” the resources of the world, giving money to the good, not the bad. Chremylos and Cario restore his eyesight at the temple of Asclepius, god of healing, and try to set Wealth up on the Acropolis of Athens in order to protect the city’s treasury.
As Vasunia describes, in the Indian version of the play, set in a new context by Dalpatram and named for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, Dhirsinh and his servant Bhima take home the goddess, who has become old and blind. They bring back her sight in the temple of Dhanvantri (the physician of the gods) and try to install her in a temple. The play incorporates “several stock characters of Indian, and specifically Gujarati, folk theatre” (284), using the “language of modern social reform” (284). Dalpatram followed the Swaminarayan group, a reform movement. A narrator in this version of ancient comedy emphasizes Dalpatram’s moral message: “People must ‘not earn wealth through injustice, immorality, and slander.’” Vasunia notes jokes about caste, about the greed of Brahman priests, and about the infanticide of girls, and he shows that “the play attempts to work contrapuntally: it simultaneously campaigns for reform along modern lines and relies on a nostalgic and impossible vision of the simple village” (284). Dalpatram’s Lakshmi includes “popular language and humour” (286), “a version of the popular that was stylized, carefully demarcated, and often moralizing in its intent” (287). The Gujarati playwright avoided the local bhavai drama’s obscenity, for example. And, “in his version, Dalpatram takes out much of the flatulence, the sexual banter, and the scatological references of Aristophanes’ play” (287). He “sets aside the male-male lovers and redirects the sexual valence of the original” (288); Dalpatram uses the ethnic or religious distinctions of his own context to mark characters within the play: an old woman and her adulterous young lover are Muslims, not Hindu; a Muslim slave also speaks Hindi. In a sense, Dalpatram’s version of the ancient Athenian comedy maintains the Greek democratic recognition of cultural heterogeneity, with others marked as slaves or as linguistically defined strangers, even as he conceives of “the village in Lakshmi as a Hindu community” (289).
Alexander Kinloch Forbes’s Ras Mala (A Garland of Chronicles), a study of Gujarati culture and history, was translated into Gujarati in 1869 by another scholar, Ranchodbhai Udayaram (294). “In Ras Mala, Forbes himself had compared the lament of Gujarati women to the laments of Greek tragedy and had thereby demarcated them as alien and archaic,” according to Vasunia (295). “His [Dalpatram’s] knowledge of the Aristophanic play came from Forbes, who studied from 1840 to 1843 at Haileybury, the training college for civil servants of the East India Company” (296).
Here is Vasunia’s translation of the song that ends the comedy:
The wasp is flying in the celebration hall,
The drum-beats are rolling
In the procession of Lakshmi.
(286)
Vasunia concludes, concerning this reconceptualization of ancient comedy: “What is notable . . . is the transformation of the conservative Aristophanes in a colonial context” (297), the context “shaped by mercantile and political elites” (298).
Although Dalpatram was fluent in neither English nor Greek, he “understood the singular authority given to the ancient Athenians by modern Europeans” (299). What is most telling here is that Dalpatram chose not Greek tragedy, perhaps a more elite genre in the modern European context, but rather comedy, and in particular Aristophanes’ Wealth, with its potential for mockery, condemnation, attacks on the powerful, and an implicitly utopian call for redistribution of worldly goods, none of which emerges from Greek tragedy.4 As in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “minority discourse,” using the work of Franz Kafka as an example, Dalpatram rewrites the ancient Greek play in the language of the hegemonic British, while decentering it. “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language,” according to Deleuze and Guattari.5 And they add: “The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value.”6 Dalpatram turns ancient Greek comedy into English, in his own way.
Modern Greek audiences saw performances of Aristophanic comedy, as noted earlier, but perhaps the most politically pointed examples of comedies presented in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were those featuring female characters. Even though these roles were played by male actors in ancient Athens, actors who specialized in female characters and were appreciated for their skills in transvestism, the presence of strong characters in the comedy Lysistrata, especially, have spoken to feminist theater producers and antiwar activists in modernity. In the US and the UK, in particular at the time of the Iraq War, there were several notable performances of this play.7 Strangely enough, although the ancient comedy Lysistrata contained a wide range of political references, to alliance between Spartans and Athenians, to the power of the priestess of Athena in the city of Athens, to various forms of radical politics, it has become known almost exclusively as an antiwar play in the present.
In Sex and War on the American Stage (2014), Emily Klein traces the many performances of Lysistrata in the United States from 1930 to 2012.8 Ranging from the Federal Theater’s 1936 Negro Repertory production of the play to those of the international Lysistrata Project organized in protest of the Iraq War in 2003, she recounts the complexities of American theater’s engagement with the issues of feminism and pacifism as presented in this comedy. Klein concludes: “The old Lysistratas under investigation suggest that during the Depression, American audiences were curious to recall a resplendent Greek empire on the verge of ruination. During the Cold War, we became more invested in reflections of an untamed Western frontier. And in the 1970s, idealized feminine figures from the 1940s, 1950s and 1980s became the subjects of a production that sought to articulate new approaches to gender and sexuality.”9 Klein predicts “a rich futurity” for Lysistrata.10
One of the promising and intriguing topics of Old Comedy, besides its celebration of strong women, both central characters and members of the chorus, its calls for parrhesia, and for utopia, is its representation of commune-ism, of communalism. Some of these plays, among them Wealth and the Ecclesiazusae, and including the Birds, seem to give the lie to the deeply embedded idea in classical scholarship that Aristophanes was a right-wing conservative. Even if we acknowledge that he presents impossibilities, worlds upside down, and that these are exposed as impossible in the course of the plays, we can also see them as representing tentative explorations of impossibilities, in the sense of Niklas Luhmann’s description of such practices.
In Social Systems, Luhmann presented his notion of autopoiesis, the manner in which a “system” continually produces itself, always in motion, always defining itself in relation to a past and present, toward a horizon of possibility. Such a model for understanding an entity like Athenian democracy illuminates the many ways in which experimentation with possibilities occurs constantly as systems make and remake themselves in time. Luhmann defined “meaning” in an idiosyncratic way, as “the hypothesis of the closure of self-referential system formations.”11 Meaning is “a processing according to differences,” and “the auto-agility of meaning occurrences is autopoiesis par excellence.”12 That is, a system constantly creates meaning through its mobility, orienting itself to differences, and selecting from among an established set of these. In this structural analysis of systems, there is no stasis: “The difference between meaning and world is formed for this process of the continual self-determination of meaning as the difference between order and perturbation, between information and noise.”13 Although Luhmann here relied on the model of an apparently closed system, his work casts light on the antisystematic, often incoherent, amorphous, and open-ended thing that is ancient comedy. And his observations are intriguing in relation to Sean Gurd’s recent discussion in Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece, of the role ancient Greek song played in creating dissonance, an interface between social order and disorder: “Greek auditory artworks clear an unsettling space for the vibrations that we call ‘sound’ but that are, at base, one front along which human bodies interface passionately with the world.”14 The choruses of Old Comedy make song, make order/disorder that inhabits the speculative boundary between animacies, the human and the not-human, and between reality and the imaginable.
Objections have been raised to the notion of autopoiesis, especially with regard to current thinking about the distinction between the Anthropocene as descriptive of our current global or planetary calamities, and what Donna Haraway has called the Chthulucene. She prefers the term “sympoiesis,” “making with,” to signify interdependence and co-creation: “Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer ‘world game,’ earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.”15 Although these debates are generated in ecological circles, especially in relation to the Gaia hypothesis, they have some relevance for thinking about literary texts. Is an ancient comedy “autopoietic,” or sympoietic? Haraway clarifies: “As long as autopoiesis does not mean self-sufficient self-making, autopoiesis and sympoiesis, foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of systemic complexity, are in generative friction, or generative enfolding, rather than opposition.”16 If we open the text to lines of flight, to include audience, city, countryside, environment, other animals, birds, wasps, clouds, frogs, how does our understanding of ancient comedy alter?
Taking Luhmann’s insights lightly, with sympathy for the immense effort involving in translating his work into comprehensible English, absent the pleasure principle, and accepting too that autopoiesis is unfurled and extended in sympoiesis, we might see comic speculation as a process, as the creation of disturbances, as a system making meaning for itself by constant motion and selection, extending beyond the autocracy of the author, the genre, the festival, the city itself, the history of ancient comedy, the boundaries established by classical literary studies. The limit between human and animal is one such site. Take slavery as another instance: the plays accept slavery as an institution without question, they promulgate communism, which would seem to include all persons in communal sharing, but exclude slaves, but then at another moment include a freed slave, the tattooed francolin, in the paradise of Cloudcuckooland. Rather than seeing all these instances of speculation as contradicting one another, catching the author Aristophanes in contradiction and failure to state his political views clearly, we could interpret these moves as part of the autopoiesis-sympoiesis of comedy and its relation to the Athenian democracy, proposing differences such as slave and free, sometimes accepting this distinction, sometimes moving through, perhaps abandoning the disturbance, the disorder, the noise that would be implicit in the call to abolish slavery.17
Can we not interpret some of Old Comedy’s representations of collectives, swarms of animals, birds, insects, clouds, and women, as speculative fictions about changing the world of the ancient Athenian democracy? And these might affect our own desires for the future as, to cite Fredric Jameson again, “the past will itself become an active agent in the process . . . as a radically different life form which rises up to call our own form of life into question and to pass judgment on us, and through us, on the social formation in which we exist.”18
Note that the communalist speculative fictions of Old Comedy are not impeded by the hierarchical class divisions we find in Plato’s utopian scheme. Perhaps we need to detoxify the notion of communalism, of what Kristin Ross has called “communal luxury.”19 In her tracing of the legacy of the aspirations of the Paris Commune of 1871, Ross describes what she calls its “centrifugal effects” (2). Acknowledging the failure of the Commune in the nineteenth century, she nonetheless follows the subsequent dissemination of its goals and ambitions well into the twentieth and even twenty-first. She notes how the present shaped the account she gives of these processes, that is, “the concerns that dominate today’s political agenda—the problem of how to refashion an internationalist conjuncture, the future of education, labor, and the status of art, the commune-form and its relationship to ecological theory and practice” (2). Reading the impact of the Paris Commune’s utopian demands and ideals on those who came after, such as Karl Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris, Ross shows how the brief moment of the Paris Commune lives on in theory and practice.
The Commune itself has been seen as conforming to the rules of tragedy laid out by Aristotle: unity of place, of time, of action. That is, the rebellion of the communards falls into expectations of genre, limited to a local event, compressed in its duration, with terrible numbers of deaths. These are among the elements of “the tragic” that have colored modernity’s sense of resistance as limited, brief, doomed to failure, without consequences. And she insists: “Thinking of the Paris Commune in terms of the classic unities of tragedy risked isolating it from its conceptual and political after-lives” (122). This is a particularly telling observation, given the emphasis on the tragic individual that I’ve pointed to in the philosophical and political theoretical tradition’s appropriations and interpretations of classical antiquity. If we see only the tragic, only tragedy, only the tragic individual, especially as handed down in modernity, a partial, limited, interested version of tragedy, then what remains is mourning, melancholy, and isolation in a private, subjective world of loss.
But in our contemplation of ancient Athenian drama, there is also a remainder of comedy, of pleasure, of community. Ross detects in the afterlives of the Paris Commune a persistent commitment to what she calls “communal luxury”: “Communal luxury countered any notion of the sharing of misery with a distinctly different kind of world: one where everyone, instead, would have his or her share of the best” (65). This ideal, utopian and still profoundly radical, can be traced backward, not just to the nineteenth century, with its struggles for workers’ rights and control of their own labor and production, but further back, to the slave revolts of ancient history, and to the utopianism of ancient comedy.20
Conservative opinion today generally dismisses the possibility of a more anarchist, open, parrhesiast communalism that would incorporate some of the aspects of ancient Athenian democracy. But groups like the militants of Occupy, on Wall Street and in the US, as well as in Asia, and groups like Black Lives Matter, which have inspired massive international groups to demonstrate against repression and racism, have striven to avoid the pitfalls of collective action that depends too much on charismatic leadership, on hierarchies and what Jacques Rancière might call “policing.” Instead, they have sought to make decisions collectively, to resist allowing traditionally privileged sectors of their movements to dominate.21
Chantal Mouffe, in For a Left Populism, argues against the Left’s surrender to centrism, which Mouffe sees as having enabled the nativist, nationalist, often racist populism of contemporary right-wing movements in the UK, Europe, and US. Rather than giving up on “populism,” she urges: “By acknowledging the crucial role played by the democratic discourse in the political imaginary of our societies, and by establishing, around democracy as the hegemonic signifier, a chain of equivalence among the manifold struggles against subordination, a left populist strategy resonates with the aspirations of many people.”22
Some modes of resistance, of politics in this sense in the present, echo the ancient metaphor of the swarm, insist on the anonymity of the collective, or labor to avoid past errors of elevating individuals to positions of absolute power in attempting to ameliorate the world. In When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele discuss the politics of the movement they helped to found.23 Khan-Cullors begins with a message to a friend, Alicia Garza, who had said: “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.”24 She responds with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter (180). Khan-Cullors recounts the suffering and struggles in her life, public and private, since that time. And she describes the accomplishments of this collective:
Since Black Lives Matter was born in 2013 we have done some incredible work. We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just. This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit. But we have more than 20 chapters across the United States, in Canada and the UK, all autonomous but all connected and coordinated. We have centered and amplified the voices of those not only made most vulnerable but most unheard, even as they are on the front lines at every hour and in every space: Black women—all Black women. (249)
These accomplishments now include the rallying of massive international protests against racist murder and police brutality against people of color. This is a remarkable set of achievements, realizing Rancière’s “politics,” the making audible, and visible, of those “who have no part.”25 And as Angela Davis insists in her foreword to Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s memoir, the comrades in the Movement for Black Lives “call for an inclusiveness that does not sacrifice particularity” (xiv).
In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten present a related agenda, an exhilarating set of premises that urge “black study” and “fugitive planning,” and undermine many of the pieties of the university, of “governance,” of policy, of incarceration: “We plan. We plan to stay, to stick and move. We plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition, here, in that other, undercommon place, as that other, undercommon thing, that we preserve by inhabiting. Policy can’t see it, policy can’t read it, but it’s intelligible if you got a plan.”26 This is a utopianism that refuses to call itself to order, to present bureaucratic solutions to problems generated by the state, that urges “hacking concepts and squatting terms as a way to help us do something.”27 A toybox, not a toolbox.
Although dystopic fictions may predominate in the present, especially in so-called speculative fiction, there is still room for a comic undermining of the status quo and for the imagining of better ways of life that include luxury for all. Such aspects of democracy, its emphasis on equality and particularity, as we look back to the multicostumed chorus of birds, can be overshadowed by currents of political theory that emphasize the vote, the homogeneity of the citizen body, its potential to be hijacked by charismatic demagogues who become tyrants, or totalitarian dictators. But I insist here on this other quality of the ancient democracy, in deliberations on sovereignty and political bodies, that private life, the multifarious differences among democratic citizens, are not the target of a democratic communalism.
Present-day politics might benefit from attention to ancient Athenian comedy, which put on stage the contradictory and sometimes utopian drives of human community, and forms part of a long genealogy of resistance to inequality. Rather than an emphasis on the tragic state of the world, and the tragic individual stranded in its midst, comedy offers another paradigm for thinking about politics. Exhibiting female agency, freedom of speech, the capacity to mock and ridicule and insult corrupt leaders, as well as an intense attachment to democracy, and an erotic, joyous, comic, utopian pleasure in celebration of the collective, ancient Old Comedy provides a contrast to the alternative, a politics derived from a tragic perspective.28 The choruses of Old Comedy, made up of swarms of dancing, singing citizens of the democracy, dressed as wasps, clouds, birds, frogs, letters, cities, or even women, present an alternative to endless meditations on Antigone and Oedipus, on the tragic individual in the tragic nuclear family. These choruses embody a libidinal, often ecstatic, pastoral commitment to equality, to communal festivity, bodily pleasures of food and drink and eros, and finally a redistribution of wealth that benefits all, including those who have had no part.