Status Updates From The Realness of Things Past...

Full review in the next few days… in short, this was exceptional and caused a seismic shift in my own conception of ancient Athens. I need some time to consider Anderson’s broader claims regarding the need for an ontological turn in our historical methods, which I may be reticent to agree with. More soon!

‘[…] But if we are to write meaningful histories of that way of life, we cannot dismiss their common sense “justifications” of it as “bogus”, just because those justifications do not happen to align with our own uniquely modern presuppositions.’

‘Needless to say, this is not for a moment to suggest that Athenian and Greek attitudes towards gender relations were worthy of modern admiration. We today are personally free to disdain their entire way of life if we so wish. […]

‘[…] On the contrary, it positively invites us to conclude that “misogyny” must have been “an important theme in Greek culture,” that “Greek society” was essentially “patriarchal,” and that ancient Greece offers us yet another chapter in the “history of the subordination of women.” And in so doing, it inevitably prejudices the way we select and apprehend the “evidence” for gender relations in classical Athens.’

‘Our standard analytical template thus all but requires us to reengineer non-modern experience at the ontological level, forcing it to conform to a peculiarly modern way of being human. It offers us no meaningful way to accommodate the possibility that women, as politides, were actually full and active members of the polis. […]

‘For so long as we take it for granted that the Athenian polis was an essentially “political” entity, one where power radiated out from a central “democratic” control structure over other societal “fields”, Athenian women will always already appear to us to be “excluded” from power and thus “dominated” by men.’

‘[…] All too often in these accounts, it seems, historical nuances, complexities, and contingencies are obscured and occluded by a kind of modern metanarrative, one that insists on reducing all non-modern gender relations to a perpetually and inevitably one-sided power struggle, as “patriarchal” males devise ever more effective ways to assert their domination over their largely inert, mostly docile female victims.’

‘Taken together, such studies elp to enrich our sense of the valence of the term politis by delineating the possible contents of a female “membership” of the polis. But again, it appears that conventional wisdom has yet to fully digest the implications of such work and accommodate them within our standard accounts of life in “democratic Athens” and elsewhere in the Greek world. […]

It is novel that the postmodernist critique of conventional understandings of ancient Athens turns even feminist analyses of ancient Greece and the role of women at the time on their head. The thesis suggests that even the feminist histories of women in ancient Greece are marginalising the role of women in Athens.

‘Likewise, new world-constituting subjects, objects, relations, and processes will come to be realized in experience when new forms of a priori thought become materially implicated in life-sustaining practices, thereby allowing the contents of formerly heterodox worldviews to harden into the contents of worlds.’

It sounds like a long way of saying that history is dialectic.

‘In other words, ontological history offers the promise of a critique from a kind of historical elsewhere, one that invites us precisely to acknowledge our own radical alterity, to exoticise ourselves.’

The promise!

‘This study contends that all historical worlds, our own included, abide by their own locally contingent regimes of truth and realness, none of which possess any more universal force or purchase than any other. In so doing, it reflects the very possibility of any modern absolute truth standard against which a charge of relativism might conceivably be judged.’

The question is dodged, then, not answered convincingly.

‘Second, they will be altogether more philosophically robust, since they will now be securely signed with some of the most powerful currents in contemporary critical thought.’

This line reveals a mistake in the book in thinking that historical analysis (or any analysis) must align with critical theories. It therefore lends too great a prominence to critical theories.

‘All of the above attempts to question and/or reconfigure the philosophical foundations of modern western cultural knowledge are themselves of course western in origin, and as such these exercises in critical heterodoxy are inevitably shaped and conditioned to some extent by the very orthodoxies which they seek to depose.’