Well, as you want be this year's paper, it's a great pleasure to welcome Professor Page Dubois. Professor Why does Distinguished Professor of Classics and powerful studies for over four decades now, she has been one of the leading voices in the study of Greek literature and culture, feminist theory and psychoanalysis and cultural studies. And one of the many publications centralised and Muslims, which deeply impressed me as a student. We said something about the longevity of Professor project. You should Cephalus and Muslims have hope that's tackled classical Greek discourses of cultural difference and cultural superiority well before it became fashionable to talk about invention of sewing the body, pioneering study of psychoanalysis and ancient representations of women. Polka is truth, published in 199110 years before, 91115 years before the great southwest burning, Chicago 1995. And exploration of software as a disruptive, and for that very reason, invigorating in modern debates about gender chosen saving plastic from conservatives and slates and others say from other objects. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Slaves and other objects. I know very well because it was compulsory reading for graduate students in my former institution, we had to select just one quote from Professor **** was publications, footpaths elected me. And the reason is simple, in these troubled and in many ways alarming times, speaks compellingly, authoritative to our relationship with the classical house. She tells me that she's copy writing a book on democracy and comedy. And very much to reading it. I understand that's our lecture tonight is on a related topic, is entitled The Politics of the swarm. Please join me in welcoming the 2009-10 face, an extra compressor. Thank you very much for that very generous introduction. Thank you all for being here. It's a great honor and a pleasure to be here. And I want to start by saying that we all, Rick, I have to give you a little swarm song. First says swarm sign. We all recognize, I hope that class, it is once again being dragged willy nilly into the politics of the present. The group called Identity EV rope, as they call themselves, uses white sculpture to command on college campuses, protect your heritage. Our future belongs to us and to warn students of continuing white genocide, the blocky don t tear, which originated on the far right in France, uses 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 where it seems Benton white genocide and Victor Davis, or VD Hanson, as I call him in his new bestseller. The Case for Trump, sees our president as a tragic hero. Quote, tragic heroes are often unstable loners. They are aloof by preference. Sophocles, Ajax silica Gui's soliloquy is about a rigged system. And this is quoting Hansen, and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments is Trump paean to the core, unquote. He sees us as admirable. The materials of classical studies haven't, have been increasingly deployed by the alt right white supremacists, champions and other racist to shore up their claims for a pure white Arianne and often Hellenic origin to western civilization. Classicists owe a debt to those who resist the appropriation of ancient history by the alt right and identity Terry, and movements. These are some of the images from the groups Anti-Semitism. This is the other Parthenon, the one in Nashville, Tennessee. Mark PO talk, an official of the Southern Poverty Law Center which monitors extremist groups noted quote, although you might think based on an identity, Europa's propaganda, that they're all about Plato and Aristotle and Socrates. In fact, they're merely a gussied up version of the clan. It's important for classicist to denounce this instrumentalization of the ancient world. Point out that ancient sculpture was not pure white. That the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the Mediterranean and beyond, included Asia and Africa, as well as Europe. That the societies of the classical age, we're not paradises of white freedom, but that they also oppressed huge slave populations, excluded women from political participation, and conducted ruthless imperial campaigns. Some white supremacists, Of course, these see these as the virtues of the classical past. We also need to increase the diversity and heterogeneity of the discipline of classical studies To include more people of color, scholars of all genders and ethnicities. And I would argue to situate the study of Greek and Roman antiquity within a global frame. Elsewhere, I've been an advocate for world history, for a study of antiquity all over the globe, which locates classical studies in the West within a wide array of civilizations before and after the year one of the common era. And I've learned a lot from you about this. I teach in freshman, sophomore sequence called the making of the modern world. Of course, concerning not just ancient Greece, Europe, and Asia, but also ancient Africa, the so-called near and Middle East, ancient India, ancient China, and Ancient Mesoamerica. I'm not an expert on all these regions, obviously, but comparative study of these others has greatly enriched my understanding of the specificity, even peculiarity not always admirable of ancient Greece and Rome. Some of this comes under the heading of Cuo of saving the classics from conservatives. An effort, as you pointed out that I made in my book, Trojan horses, which obviously failed. But I also think there is more to be found in the Ancient Greeks themselves than just a message about Ariane Euro-American superiority, the Greek Miracle, The wonders of Pyrenees, and his Democracy and the origins, or as our president would say, the oranges of the tragic individual as we oppose a descent into tyranny, dictatorship, and white supremacy. I 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 politics that is directly opposed to plutocracy or tyranny that is nourished by the anarchist strain of Marxism. The thinking of such ancestors as Rosa Luxemburg, with an emphasis on a relatively leaderless collective in politics. We can see in such contemporary movements as sunrise, march for our lives, black lives matter, and occupy. Both resistance to define 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, what some people call swarm politics. The Swarm is usually condemned along with the insects. The most remote perhaps from human kind of animate creatures, insects approach as menacingly covered with the exoskeletons that make them seem less vulnerable than fleshy mammalian bodies. They obey mysterious rules, often moving as a multibody single unit through space. A friend recounted to me with horror and anxiety, standing in the desert and seeing hordes of locusts crackling across his space for hours on end. Insects activity excites Marshall metaphors. They proceed in Army's armored marching in battalions, flying in formation, conquering, obliviously, trampling what lies before them. They seem often not to see, obey in audible commands to inhabit an alternate universe. The 21st century opera, the fly, based on two earlier dramatic versions, ones dying Vincent Price, you probably haven't seen that one. The other, directed by David Cronin, Berg, focuses on the distress and horror experienced by a human protagonist whose molecules have been fused with those of a fly, and who has gradually transformed before and appalled audience's eyes into an insect. Tiny in the black and white film emits on the operatic set. The creature can only sing helplessly help me, to his human lover, who in the opera finally performs what is represented as euthanasia as a rope, as does the work of a shield. And Ben Bay in narrow politics makes clear the swarm can very well have a sinister, deadly face. He points to the development of what falling Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he calls war machines polymorphism. Diffuse swarms characterized by their capacity for Metamorphosis. Black helicopters surveying or descending on civilian populations. But the targets of these war machines, the multitude, can themselves be seen as swarms. Management can try to immobilize and spatially fix them, are paradoxically unleash them, force them to scatter and to resist in their Diaspora. Can we rehabilitate the notion of the swarm? Rescuing it from the formulations of such figures as Trump, who sees an immigrant invasion at our borders are David Cameron, former Prime Minister of the UK, who talked about swarms of refugees, of immigrants attacking the island of ******, attacking Europe in multitude. Michael Hart and Antonioni agree, embrace with they celebrate as a benign model of the swarm. Quote, recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem-solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model. The swarms that we see emerging in the new network, political organizations are composed of a multitude of different creative agents. When the multitude is finally able to rule itself, democracy becomes possible. In the latest version of their posts. To those Ian utopian imagining of the future assembly. Hard to agree. Again, emphasize the liberatory power of collective practices. The epigraph to the preface of assembly comes from NASA's air here, poetry equals insurrection. And they call for a new prints, not the artist formerly known as bot Machiavelli's analysis. Alluding to Machiavelli's analysis of the politics of the early modern period. Quote, a new prints indicates a path of freedom and equality. A path that poses the task of putting the Common in the hands of all, managed democratically by all. They say the prints by Prince, Of course, we do not mean an individual or even a party or a leadership council, but rather the political articulation that weaves together different forms of resistance and struggle for liberation in society. Today, this prints, they say, thus appears as a swarm, a multitude moving, incoherent formation and carrying implicitly a threat. Can the ambiguous nature of this one figures then in these theorists call for resistance and equality in the present. So can there be a Utopian dimension to the swarm? Can the notion of the swarm help theory to bridge the gap between the individual and the collective? Can the swarm productively trends, guess, transgress the boundary between human and animal, human and mineral, human and botanical. How did the practices of a chorus contribute to the representation of the swarm in order to bring the swarm, the assembly, and especially the comic chorus to the four. I call attention to the philosophical, political, theoretical emphasis in modernity and post-modernity on ancient Athenian tragedy. As someone who grew up in the environment of the soap called Paris school. The inspiring reorientation of classical studies, guided especially, especially by Jean-Pierre very non whom I saw here many years ago and including PRV done that. K Nicola hole, the late Marcel that yen and from his island two is drawn to the high art of Greek tragedy, along with others who found their anthropological, political, cultural contextualizing of ancient democracy and its rituals a liberating writing isn't think he's a liberating, liberating influence. Given an Anglo-Saxon emphasis on philology and a somewhat hermetic relationship to ancient Greek texts, which was how I was brought up. The privileging of Greek tragedy, though in contrast to comedy, is one of the central issues of my work in progress. That privileging goes beyond the discipline of classical studies to include a long history. Philosophical and political, theoretical, and even psychoanalytic meditation on what the ancient Greeks established in setting the terms of Western civilization. Tragedy not only articulates the feelings of individuals and contemporary culture, but Greek tragedy has also shaped the very ways in which we understand human existence in the West. As powerfully argued by Josh Billings and his work on German philosophy and Greek tragedy. Billings identifies, quote, a concept of the tragic that extended far beyond an aesthetic context, encompassing history, politics, religion, and ontology, unquote. The legacy of tragedy continues to preoccupy Those who think about the relationship between antiquity and the President. This friend of mine, I said I was coming to give a talk. And he pointed out to me that yesterday, Simon richly published a book called tragedy the Greeks and US. Tragedy is weighty, worthy of deep contemplation and in touch with what are seen as the eternal elements of the human condition. But the foregrounding, in my view of ancient tragedy in modernity may foreclose the possibilities offered to the President by comedy. Ancient comedy is deeply and dialectically intertwined with ancient tragedy. As from his island, mark Griffith and others have shown. Yet from the Renaissance to Hegel, to Freud, to lack all to Judith Butler, to Slavoj Zizek and Alibaba you. Greek tragedy predominates. And there is even a detachment of tragic personae, individuals from their situation within tragic theater. This, this may be a result of the endless accumulation, undeniable of tragic events and modernity in the present, but also of a growing emphasis on individual subjectivity, possessive individualism, and the erasure of any real sense of collective life. Even as social media create a web of interdependence to be exploited by transnational corporations. We are led always to focus on individual consumption and the amassing of wealth to achieve it. It seems to me that we need to think further about the potential of ancient choruses, pointed to again by Josh Billings and Felix BoolMin and Fiona Macintosh and others about collective voices in the performance of ancient drama so often overlooked in modernity. And also about what other resources a neglected Greek, common Ancient Greek comedy in particular, has to offer for thinking about politics in the present. Blame Aristotle, although it may have been absent from Anglo-Saxon debate concerning tragedy. Florence do polls I stood, who live on peer you oxidant contributes an idiosyncratic point of view to the arguments. I like this book. I appreciate it not only for its lurid title, Aristotle as blood-sucking, but also for the rage that seems to fuel its polemics. So unwelcome usually. In a polite Anglo-Saxon world. You, Paul's aim in this project is to deconstruct Aristotle's Poetics and his concepts. She is concerned about the present, about a rampant and diffuse Aristotelianism, especially bent on targeting the fable the muthos, arguing that everyone now believes theater to be the representation of a story, a History, and East, where she calls out the ethnocentrism of contemporary Western thought, pointing to the omnipresence in the European imaginary and the American of Sophocles revealing to humanity his Oedipal truth, the Antigone's and values of family. As Aristotle delivers his edX on the rules of mimesis and end up polemic against her contemporaries, those very classic, classicists who focused on Greek tragedy. She fumes against what has become an Aristotelian credo. Quote, Greek theatre is reduced to tragedy. We have the benefit of other work, including the important essay of Simon Gold Hill and Froman cyclin and Jack Winkler has nothing to do with Dionysus on the context of the festivals of Athens that sets dramatic performances in their social and political and ritual contexts. But much of what duple complains of in the Aristotelian presentation of drama remains pertinent. Aristotle, the reader, sites the tragedies of the fifth century BCE in the fourth century BC. And his historical situation may force him to think about dramatic practices as intellectual practices. With the result, according to duple, that he represents tragedy as a closed discourse, coherent and structured following and narrative. The muthos, which is the kernel, unquote, focusing on the praxis, on the action of the drama, Aristotle is oblivious to a ritual definition of the chorus, nor does he consider the orchestra, the dancing floor in the middle of that performance space in ancient Greek theaters. Because in her view, he never even thinks about spaciality in this context. He turns the chorus into another character persona edge, like the others played by a single actor. Then reducing the core Us to the chorus leader, the chorus leader to a persona, persona in that action. The Praxis, the mythos of the play you pull calls this a mutilated theatre. She has a brother dramatic view by like it bequeath to the Roman, the Greek world and taken up by those who followed so that the texts of dramatic performances ripped from their Athenian roots, provide if the theoretical basis for modernity. Desacralized, disenchanted, D, ritualized, and Blake. Based on plot, characters and text, Hegel and Freud and lack on Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek and many others fall into what you Paul calls the trap. Drama becomes something read its pleasures of a cognitive sort. Modern theoreticians and philosophers rely on it's textual nature and on plot and character alone to ground their interpretations. Especially when speculating about the self, the family, the individual, and the state in our world. So marked by tragedy, it may be perverse, It may seem perverse to turn to ancient Greek comedy has so many novelists, filmmakers, dramatist, and political theorists mind Sophocles and his tragic characters, and they have a lot. In this book I'm working on about how everyone talks about and taken, including Korean filmmakers. Old boy, has anybody seen that? Which is about incest and father daughter arrows? Of course, we have lost the part of Aristotle's poetics that considers comedy. Although Richard Django has controversially attempted to restore it from fragments. But tragedy survives, and Antigone's, it seems, is everywhere. Donald Trump is said by Hansen to be Antigone as well as ajax. Don't buy it. I had to buy it from a second, second hand copy so he wouldn't get any money. Comedy and the collectives of ancient theatrical choruses do not have the same interests for those steeped in the classical tradition. Invents, invested in philosophy, in the politics of the present. For this reason that I dwell on the possibilities Comedy can offer to cultural debates. In particular, what it reveals about party Zia, the freedom to say everything, the coexistence of species about utopianism and collectivity, and the power of the swarm in democracy. In his valuable work on animal choruses, Kenneth Roth well discuss the brief window during which Athenian comic playwrights return to the use of brilliant, brilliantly costumed animals in their dramas. This followed an earlier period, 510 to 480 BCE, when animals had appeared in the courses of comedy, a practice that inexplicit, inexplicably became less common until the final third of the fifth century, in the four twenties and four tens, when the comic writers returned to them. Although the reasons for the revival or unclear, Roswell points out that the sophists and the pre-Socratics, proto philosophers of the fifth century had made analogies between the lives of human beings and those of the animals. And that the comic writers may have been responding to their Anthropologies extent or fragment. Comedies include a chorus of bees to with ants as their chorus. Two with wasps, Aristophanes play and another by magnates. Although the evidence for this is somewhat uncertain, there seems to have been a comedy down loss by fair across tes CA, called Mere make anthropoid, the ENT men, which may have told the story of the flooding of the Earth at the time of duckling and pyrene and the re-creation of Zeus, but of humankind by those who turned ant into human beings. Mark Payne's work on intimacy and porosity of human beings. Connections with their animosity, the animal malady of other animals, and with the so-called natural world The universe of plants and stones. Materiality in general connects with the work of new materialists such as Jane Bennett and male Chen, to allow a new look, especially at the creatures of Aristophanes, swarms wasps and frogs and birds, and clouds resembling women, and sometimes even women themselves. My thinking about ancient comedy has led me to believe that if we let go of the emphasis on plot, on mythos and its resolution in drama, on linear narrative and the characters, the persona, the so-called heroes of comedy read. Otherwise, comedy opens up differently for me. This means reading for the chorus, bringing it to the foreground times, finding two different comedies at odds with one another, rather than the tidy resolutions of those who seek to find all reasoned, all coming together and the denouement of these plays, I discover a more ragged, uneven surface contestation between chorus and plot characters or the utopian elements of the bird's life. For example, in the aristophanes birds, the pastoral avian airy imagination, its own temporality, its own rhythms, not foreclosed by the assumption of tyranny by the human hero, pests a thyristor. The play's end, I read for the suturing of differences, the irresolvable messiness, the birds with their different bodies, their capacity to fly, making them a kind another Guinness tribe or swarm. Pierre mash Ray pointed to the sort of unevenness that characterizes my reading of the theatrical works. A true analysis, he says, confronts the silences that denials, and the resistance in the object. In an afterword published in 2006, long after the first appearance of a theory of literary production, author added, quote, what do text reflect? Certainly not a supposedly bear reality, but rather the contradictory ensemble of its representations and ensemble, which can be aptly designated by the concept of ideology. The veritable object of literature is ideology in its material form. That is to say, as a contradictory multiplicity of discursive and fictional complexes which render ideology in broken, lack conic, de-centered form. Literature decomposes its object and implicitly or explicitly exposes the internal fissures which simultaneously share and drive forward the motion of its transformation. He continues. Literature is itself, though in various degrees revolutionary insofar as it reveals an actively contributes to certain fracture lines which run deep into historical reality and into the forums in which that reality is lived, imagined, and represented. Unquote. So looking for such fracture lines seems such a model seems more adequate to the unevenness, the incommensurability of elements of ancient dramatic texts and the performances we can hardly, guests at the comic playwright cannot intend all that he wishes, cannot control all that is present, even in the sadly limited version of comedy that we receive from the tradition. The roughness of the plays, the fracturing, the way in which the chorus may be in contradiction with the characters working through play of their own, imagining, a utopia relations of their own that fly off, evading the control of the characters and the plot. All these elements strongly affect my readings. The chorus might be said to have minds of their own fueled by the democratic leveling ideology of equality in the ancient city. Their story might not be gently and easily and seamlessly integrated into the plot of the whole. The chorus has its own liveliness, establishing another vector, a line of flight, as dealers and Guattari call it, in 1000 plateaus. Especially since some of the comic choruses are constituted as animal, insect, bird, female, or cloud swarms. These seem only reluctantly at times to be harnessed and deployed as willing and obedient agents of the general intention of the plot and the so-called comic heroes. So I think we should be looking at a more ragged, discontinuous refer, comic object, one that allows for contradictory and disproportionate elements not necessarily reconcilable with one another, perhaps even working against one another with resistance to incorporation. Aristophanes among the insect swarms chose the wasps. See these remarks by the chorus. Equipped with extra singers. Singers, they urge the comic here. Wish character feel a clown to join them. They swarm around encouraging him to defy his son. And as he appears, finally threaten with their waspish ways. And this is one of the things I value about this warm they. Can you tell me, why are we waiting to launch the wrath we feel when anyone vexes Ernest out now, out now with that sharp temperate Stinger that we used to punish and brace, brace that sharpness is Jeffrey Henderson's translation. And later he said, They say, looking at us from all sides, you'll find that in our character and lifestyle, where in all respects, most like wasps, first, no creature is more sharp tempered than we are when irritated or more can tinker is then again, we engineer everything just like wasps, we gather in swarms. S moves as if into nests. Some of us judging in the our cones court before the 11 summon, the O'day on packed in tight against the walls like this, hunch toward the ground and barely moving like grubs in their cells, unquote. This is a vivid picture, both of the insect jurors and of the physical situation of the law courts of the Athenian polis. These wasps are cranky, hyper phallic. They gather in swarms, and they are rowdy collective whose leader often speaks in the first-person plural as the voice of the swarming hole. For kristen Ross, arterial ham bows representation of the swarming lice in the poem Jeunesse resists the debasement of the worker's body into a thing on the marketplace. He renders instead a swarm, the more than human that transformed you utopian body of infinite sensation and libidinal possibility as figure for the perfected community, for associative or collective life. The erratic Lu ****, erotic aggression of the anonymous, collectivity of Aristophanes, comic insects similarly resistor, becoming things that fit into the neat schemes of a hierarchies world. Obedient creatures like the stinkiness B's drones who feed their master or mistress. And they were often unclear about which it was. But in later Greek representations, the wild insect chorus threatening to break out to sting, to dance best Healy, and behave with erotic abandon is eventually read, territorialized. Its collective intelligence managed and repressed. Wild democratic wasps turned into a hive of orderly, socialized hierarchical B's. Aristophanes can represent their minuss, their greed and unmanaged ability for a few decades. But in the fourth century, the radical democracy, although always capable of regression into a stinging swarm, has been largely domesticated. The merit of the earlier visions of collective life without differentiation or private propensities lies in their swarming vitality, the intensity of their attention to their collective aims, and their unwillingness to be swayed or diverted from their chosen paths. In the beginnings in the democratic ROC city, one could happily resemble an insect. All avian creatures are welcome to the utopia of Cloud Cuckoo Land. The chorus sings. And if you happened to be a runaway slave with a branded forehead with us, you'll be called a dabbled Franklin. If you happen to be no less a Phrygian than spin throws up there. You'll be a pigeon. A film owns breed. If you're a slave and a carrion like XIST days join us and generate some four feathers. The chorus of bird suggests that slaves The descendants of slaves could participate in the new city. We can either conclude that such a policy was hilarious because of its very impossibility, deeply insulting to those named and, or that Aristophanes was provocatively floating a challenge to the institution of slavery. Mark Paine's discussion of the birds illuminates the role of imagination and natural wonder in the utopian fantasies of Aristophanes, he leaks the birds to other old Comedies, now lost plays like quote like play, plays like goats, wild animals, and fish. Would you like to see a play called Finish? And it's weird. They stage hetero, told him know how he knows this. But they stage hetero Tolkien encounters between human beings and other animals in which these animals voice their own understanding of their lives and the ways in which they had been hijacked by the human culture that makes use of them for food and labor, unquote. The birds expression of delight in their own life establishes an alternate reality. The Birds of birds are not merely ciphers for human behavior. They are present as birds in the earlier parts of the play with their own forms of social organization. And this vision of Zoological sociality continues to encompass and interrogate the humans society that takes center stage at the end pace, a thyristor near cannibal stands apart. But the chorus suggest new possibilities sparked by the encounter between and among species. Perhaps the radical nature of these imaginings has been neglected with scholarly focus on the civic politics of Aristophanes as author, his satire of leading politicians and such matters. The web of references, the moving singing bodies on stage, the address to the crowd, invocation of gods, and assault on individuals. All of this makes up protean, responsive, adaptable intervention into the politics and social relations and of the city. And a model for a system that tests and moves forward in part in response to that, except reception of it's suggestive, ironic, contradictory impulses by the audience and by the judges. The city's festivals they sing. The chorus sings from my vibrant throat. I pour forth sacred strains of song for Pan and holy dance tunes for the mountain mother, toh toh toh toh, toh, toh, toh, toh toh thinks. So this is interesting. John gird has written about some of these animal noises in Aristophanes, interesting in terms of noise and sound and song. So Kanner reading of this comedy that gives equal or more weight, the chorus than to the characters alter our perception if we see the chorus, not a supplementary Not as an additive but as an alternative. Another way of communicating collectively, democratically, then all that happens at the end of the play constitutes not a continuous and inevitable denouement with their activities, but rather a rupture. The birds are volatile. They change their mind as a group, fearing comply in equal measure, but they're sustained. Obedience to a tyrant seems unlikely. The hero is winged, but he is not a bird. The chorus, again, this is just an example of their song. Happy the race of feathered birds who in the winter need where no winter cloaks. Klein asks, This is the word that Mario tallow uses in his analysis of analysis of the wasp. Nor in summary, stifling heat, do the long rays roast us. For I dwell among the flora in the lap of flowery meadows or the sun. Crazy cicada with voice divine in the noonday heat, in tones, his keen song. And I winter and hollow caverns in spring, we graze on Myrtle berries and the fruits of the graces garden. So the song moves from an objective perspective on the few line the kind of birds to an us, to an I to a we all existing in this world of communal plenty. The very composition of this comic course, it's variety, eternal cyclical quality of avian life following the scene seasons lends them a different temporality from the linear plot of the birds. The resolution of the linear plot is one kind of ending, but the world of the birds goes on. We'll go on Bird by Bird. We could see this as a jamming of message, the disruption of authorship and character which makes this and other Utopian comedies are rough and unfamiliar, sort of object for readers, and are spectators accustomed to theater? Descended from the Aristotle of the poetics. The revulsion or distaste felt by some readers for the anonymity of these swarms are symptoms. I think of a fetishization perhaps of individualism, of the comforting opposition between the individual and the state. The delight in such swarms by others be, speaks a stubborn, stubborn confidence in the communal intentions of the masses and should be included in the present day. Gaze at ancient drama alongside the omnipresent tragic individual. And I lamp, I'd use new version of Plato's Republic we were talking about at lunch. His Socrates argues, quote, private property must be abolished. None of the members of our political community would own his own lodgings, let alone a workshop or a storehouse. Everything will be collectivized in the introduction to this new repo, New Republic, new Plato's Republic. Can Reinhardt reminds the reader that quote, for bad you, Plato is the first warrior in the eternal battle. A philosophy against sophistry of truth, against opinion, and the progenitor of the living idea of communism. Before Plato, there was Aristophanes. The most stunning example of communist utopia comes in the clays Yahtzee psi with its abolition of private property, common store of possessions, provision for all from that common store, communal dining halls, sexual pleasure for all. Although, as is often the case here, slaves remain slaves exempted from this utopian scheme. The play ends with an invitation to the fees. The comic interlude with the old women is over and the festivities begin. Blap eros practice agarose. Husband relishes the prospect of sex with one of the girls. So perhaps we are meant to assume that he has paid his dues with the older women instead of the chorus. The chorus leader speaks to the judges, asking them to remember the smart parts of the play and the funny parts, and to judge the choruses rightly. The chorus chime in dancing and describe the menu with the longest word ever. A fabulous dish, a description of the feast fit for a hungry population, limpets, insufficient stark sake, shark steak and dog fish and mallets, and odd fish with savory pickle sauce, and thrushes with blackbirds and various pigeons and rooster's. And Penn roasted wag tells him marks and nice chunks of hair marinated in mulled wine and olive. It drizzled with honey and silicium and vinegar, oil and ****** galore, unquote, a feast worthy of the land, of the cooking of the land of cocaine. You are the big rock candy Mountain. And the chorus after launching this word, picture of paradise, dances off the scene. Hooray as to victory. Hooray, hooray. They are victorious. They had changed the city. They have not surrendered, not gone back on their reforms. And although there was a rough spot when the men resist to the new sexual regulations. The play ends ecstatically with this celebration of a new communist utopia ruled by its women. I am reminded again of Christian Ross her recent book, communal luxury, which defines the Paris communes. Aim. Quote, 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. The editors of the Utopia reader conclude with some words about Occupy. They offer no statements or manifestos, but rather identify the formation of utopian spaces governed by Utopian rules of procedure. They note the horizontal. These are all occupy, this is Black Lives Matter. Occupy in Asia. Occupy everywhere. The horizontal method of assembly, organization based on consensus, and a variety of hand gestures to allow participants to communicate nonverbally in when they call you a terrorist, a Black Lives Matter memoir. Patrice con colors and Usha been daily discuss the politics of the movement they helped to found. Patrice con colors begins with a message to a friend who had said, I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter. She recounts the suffering and struggles in her life, public and private, since that day. And she describes the accomplishments of this collective quote, 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 people to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just. She says this is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit. But we have more than 20 chapters across the US and Canada and the UK, all autonomous but all connected and coordinated. We have centered and amplify 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, unquote. This is a remarkable lists of achievements bringing to mind the definition that Jacques Ross here gives of politics. The making audible and visible of those quote, who have no part. All these efforts, in my view stand and a genealogical line with some ancient Athenian comedy. And it's choruses which put onstage, for the city and its citizens the contradictory and sometimes you Tolkien drives of human societies exhibiting freedom of speech, the capacity to mock and ridicule and satirize its leaders. As well as a fascination with other species, other kinds. An intense, often angry attachment to democracy, a willingness to confront tyranny and unloved business. Joyous comic pleasure in celebration of the collective ancient Greek comedy offers a complement to a politics derived from a tragic perspective, focused on the Sovereign, on the individual. His Homer, Tia, and the sufferings of the nuclear family on death and fate. Aristophanes is seen by some as a conservative, but much of what he seems at times to seek to conserve is pleasure, free speech, utopian imagining, and democracy. And a study of the ancient Greek world is to be not merely the attempt to see antiquity clearly, to correct the desert delusions and lies of contemporary white supremacists than what if we find communalism, Communism there. Thank you. Thank you very much. Interesting. So we'll draw the questions. Toes off. I guess I have a question about I have a question about wake the discipline and a question about what does it mean that it's still interesting to me and it's top rate is, is the idea that lake these tests are useful for partial strategic readings and that don't need to be monolithic or where are you going to reconcile all the elements? I mean, that sort of sounded like what you were, that kind of a literary career that your memory. And what's interesting about that is, is that a kind of battles against the idea that the classical pedagogy not this is really the best of the best staff is whatever maintenance now foundational for liberal arts or, or, or something like that, that implicitly or explicitly hierarchy knowledge. All Annie or you start here, clearly there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I actually am critical of the idea of lots of things about this pedagogy. Among them, the idea that Western civilization rules, you know, that it's better than anything else. I mean, that just seems totally implausible and indefensible and racist. Yeah. But also definitions of Ancient Greek and Roman civilization that seemed to see it as European and white. But also, I think because we tend to think of these things that we teach as lists of authors. Which is so wrong, it seems to me ridiculous law. It's ie, talking about an author of a movie or something. You know, these were these very collective enterprises, rituals, not literary works, not, I mean, it just seems to me in, inappropriate and it would seem to me we could just as easily talk about the history of the idea of communism, for example, and teach a course on that or atheism, look at it. Slicing it entirely differently seems to be classics, is really retro in holding on to author lists, for example, or having people define their project in terms of some author. I mean, I think that's a danger in this work too. And I keep trying to think of these plays, not as, it's not a book about Aristophanes for me, it's a book about the old, some of the old comedies that we still have. But that, so I don't know if that answers your question, but I'm like the, like the idea that you could teach, teach excite empire, where you talked about the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire together. Or talk about the edges of what we think of as a canonical Greek enclosed hermetic world, which just is unsustainable for me at this point. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, Johanas talks about neighbors to, you know, the world that we think of as the Greek and Roman world. But there are certainly lots of other places where if we talk about cosmogony is, for example, we were talking earlier about Mesoamerican cosmogony is we need to compare, talk about edges, talking about Africa, you know, it just, I think we really need to re-conceptualize the way we do our research, our scholarship, and our teaching. So what was your other question? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Wow. I have a question about the mistake was though they context is so good, we have to simplify two factions. Well, I'm saying, oh, the weeks will be so harasses this. Great. And then we have a few class this saying the Greeks were braces but we don't live, right? These physicians saying to me, I mean, strength one is pretty well aligned, the other one is rebounding. Cuz then if you're, passes an essay that widespread than Yankees will buy you a tension. It has alignment with what I'm given positionally loves me. Then why do you think you, they like you go and you look for something that is useful for the project that we want, say down, here we go, then go for it. Show me from yeah, great question was and he says, Well, I don't think so. I mean, yeah. Well okay. Well, I don't think that necessarily they are conscious of having interior logical connection to the swarm and to the birds. I'm providing it. And I think all readings are interested and we can't. It's like trying to make a map of the territory. You can make a map that's the size of the territory, or you decide what you put on the map. And for me, this is more interesting than Donald Trump resembling Ajax. And I don't, I think that's okay. You know, I mean, I don't know. I didn't totally understand what you mean by a line, but I don't, I'm not troubled by being seen as choosing from this vast array of material that's ours that we know more or less about. What I find not only interesting me to me, but also a pharmacon. You know, something that will cure something I see as very wrong in the present. You know, like either talking about another truth that's being left out or, you know, a history that has been neglected, which I think is the case with Greek comedy. I don't know if that's true here, but I think that in part, you know, not pop culture, but in sort of the intellectual history of the West in the last 300 years. We think of ourselves as devoted to the object to Greek tragedy. Since we sort of started out talking about reclaiming the classics, surface battlegrounds, quantity, the classroom. And I would hope that a room full of intelligent people, most people would agree are, you know, maybe through the sympathize with what he would say. But I'm just wondering, in your classroom experiences, have students generally been very receptive to this type of way of doing it. And what sort of strategies that you use that might be iframe from a more traditional class. It's education Well, I don't actually, I I teach Greek and I teach things in Greek, but I also teach a lot of comparative courses and freshman and sophomore classes like the one I mentioned here, where I teach, you know, the Greeks, but I teach them as African and as Asian, as well as European. And I teach Israel Palestine, I teach ancient India, Mesoamerica, china. So one of the things that happens in my classrooms, which are very ethnically heterogeneous because I teach in Southern California where a lot of people are first-generation university students, often from immigrant families, and they really like to hear about the world. So there's another college at my university that has the courts in Western civilization. I think those students are being cheated actually, because they are not seeing what they need to see in the world that we inhabit now. So when I say that to the cloud, my class on the first day, they all laugh and applaud because they're in the cool class and other people are learning about, only about Sophocles, No. So I think the world is much more, you know, hybrid and full of people from everywhere. And so I don't, I don't like these white supremacists. They're not in my class. And I'm glad to say maybe they dropped because they think I'm going to talk about things they don't want to hear about. It had then a soul introspective questions I'll try to compress. So 11 issue that came to mind as I was processing your thought was how much of the operation of the swarming of recovering, promoting a story about potentialities. One is comparable, couldn't hold gesture or as intended and imagine always as a form of resistance to a hegemonic position. All of it this way, because it would seem to me that you've modeled so two different pathways and they, they may be operationalized, fall at the same time, or they may not be. So on the one hand, the tactics of the Swarm would emerge and be predicated on the idea that you need the insect collect. Five And this fight, it would take place in the face of these regime and the architecture of the one that you named and the ones that might otherwise the branch to the other pathway would be to hold. Or the model that you've recovered as us as a mechanism for imagining aids. Hope you that very much want to comment or that you see as potentially coming into being of this warm eyes. In fact, operationalize this fact, this assay these two As house and how it does the same sort of spaces, but perhaps not because one will be a sort of provisional commitments. And there are instantiations in the teaching. We do evolution, which I love. I'm curious to know why it seems to me that there temporarily different that you do the one to get to the other. It's like tactics and strategy to Grom shin kind of way of thinking about what do we do right now and what are we doing it for? And so I think you've beautifully described the two different moments of that process, but they don't seem contradictory to me. They seem like two moments in a progress. Soarocean use that word but oppress us. But thank you. I should clarify that. I think my question is so kind of forming in my mind's eye looking at the cross. But it's a little bit about the imagination to Asian conjugating. They brought up the course, but also so the Asians that thinking of the swarm oper, operationalize. And that's, I'm wondering that because you talked about a kind of utopian fantasies of comedy and especially this course. But I'm wondering what it means that in the examples you gave the course be conceptualizes Like post humans, animal right is not always the right. Not only the women who may be seen as host to wind up in the, in the smart yes, warm metaphor. I did not do that. Again, I'm just wondering whether there is a kind of eco reading to the hack here that is there something, is it is a utopian or is it's based on something else that's earthly, right? And whether that kind of dwelling in the earthly, it's just as important as imagining these things being utopian. I see this utopia. Or instead of saying the loss because the language that you brought out from the wall sprays. Hopefully comparisons that are like, wow, like these angled at that particular positionality is happening from that magic autism. And when, when that means for this kind of broader power S1, Yeah, well, I do think it has a sort of ecological dimension in the sense that we are animals. These might be totemic animals that we understand to be related to us, which seems to me to be about protecting the earth and all that. But I think also, I don't know if you've read this book by melt Chen, which is really interesting about it's called anima sees. And it's about the porosity of the human body and of the natural world and the sort of impossibility really of drawing lines were awful chemicals and minerals. And we take drugs and, you know, it's about a kind of spectrum of difference rather than an absolute humanism, which seems to have led us in a very bad direction. So that's one of the reasons why I see the imagining of human beings as a swarm is not necessarily a negative thing. In part because I think that the threat that Kristen Ross talks about should be there. You know, that I mean, I I've been in I was on the march and I marched all my life and we don't break things. But I think the power of a big group of people is in part a threat about change. And that, that's a necessary element. So that's another reason why I find the swarming most aspect of this to be not necessarily a negative thing? I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. From which fervently now, yes. Which is very associational thinking about when we think about, as you think about it. And the notion of aggressive worldwide we're rather than crowd is a vital, okay. Collective. Yeah. Well, as I just said, I think that, you know, I'm not really a pacifist, I guess. And I think that it's okay. Swarms, the idea of the swarm has an implicit threat. And as I said at the beginning, I want that to be there. I don't think it's this is a term that's used to talk about, you know, there are these like there's this medical site that you can go to and you have some really where disease and no one knows what it is. And you have these weird symptoms, you can put it in and there are people who just answer and sometimes they figure it out. And you can go to your doctor a million times and you're you're shaking your head, mailing times that he doesn't know and he looks in his books and he can't figure it out. And so this is the virtue of a huge set of information. You know, that and many, many people contributing sometimes to solving a problem doesn't have to be. Insects stinging you. Although maybe that's a good thing. So my second English or you read about it, you can make it like everyone. There were cases where it sounds like you know, how many culminated with the sudden and everybody version we think is interesting as to the messages are very much capable. I'm Joe, but SHE air selfies and read him into jail for y for one thing, I don't, I've critical, I have a whole chapter basically against the idea of authorship. For one thing, I mean, and I think I take seriously the contexts in which these plays are produced. And I'm, I'm just not that interested in the linear plot, the resolution, the name Aristophanes, and his contradictory ideas about X, Y, and Z. You know, I mean, I think other people have interested readings also. It's just there's a kind of canonical understanding of Aristophanes, which I think doesn't take into account what I've been talking about here, which is this kind of free flight of chorus or the utopianism of pracs agora, for example. How is that conservative now, you know, and so I know, I know you do, you're really good at it, but I'm not, I don't, I'm not applied person. That's all. So here they're interested away or use it in. I'm interested in when I use that. I mean, we're all reading or stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I have an argument about that. I don't know if I explained it, but it's in the book, you know, and I think that as I said, I think there are moments in these courses that interrupt the plot. Well, yeah, but what, why is that a greater truth about the play that way about Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, well there, but it's inspired sunshine. There are these young women, that wonderful woman in Sweden who's like 12 years old or something and is ****** off about guns. And, you know, I think there is a lot of afterlife after these most, I don't think it's like the Paris Commune. This is what Kristen Ross's book is about. It may have ended, but there is a huge legacy. And I just think we haven't gotten to the end. Oh, yes. So haha it's typical? Yes. Okay. So far. So I'm not I don't accept that. Yeah. Okay. I'm just denying your premise, but uh-huh. Yeah, fine. Unless things unless they crashed down. What you find in mind is that you are teaching authors. Actually, I personally would love people more for his formula. So classes that are grown old, citations directors, and that'll be good. Some insight. Sorry. So a lot of work horses relationship. So well, there is a lot of work on courses. Not as much about comic choruses though actually, why is that? But there are a lot of plays. A very soft news. Why does, I mean, why would everyone talk about the Buckeye are Sophocles and not talk about Aristophanes. Course. I mean, I don't agree with you that I'm dichotomizing either. And I don't agree with you about the receipt because I go to people and I talk to people in classics graduate programs and they say, what are your exams? I say, What do you exams Authors list of authors that so people study and I teach authors. You know, I taught the Liz Estrada and Greek last quarter, but yeah, but I don't think that undermines when I'm saying, which is that I think we need to compare and think horizontally rather than just focus on what we attribute a kind of authorship, a subjectivity, an internal life. All of these things to ancient authors, which it seems to me very anachronistic. You maybe I don't know Well, for example, Mario Tylor, who was very smart and interesting, has written a book about the wasps, published like a year ago, which is about a kind of psychoanalytic argument really about Aristophanes desire to wrap the public of the day, most of Athens, in a cloak. Why are you shaking your head? Okay, well, it's fine, but it's not what I want to do. That's all I'm saying. And I think that I find that kind of attribution of intention and subjectivity to be a kind of projection from a modern idea of selfhood. And I'm more interested in trying to understand how these texts would work in a different kind of historical context. So sorry, absorptive of Georgia. Go to your local laws. It actually shifts as loss across the causes very, very, you know, all the places, but maybe not so easy to do the same job in terms of joy, she enjoyed those joints as well. I don't think that's true. I mean, I just, I'm teaching this course on women warriors. So I started out by talking about a non Na. You know, there's joy in our attempts to Inanna and in the images of her. She's scary too. But there, there are both of those aspects. And I just don't, I think we, we need to see other things besides this trajectory of sorrow. Not that there isn't sorrow in the world, but that Barbara, Yeah, so feathers, Oh good. Constitutes my book stage. Simple way is to say, oh, here as I learned experiences You often only around all of these in greater, then eventually you get an animal. And the questions is whether that makes a difference to you that these creatures in the course means the gas, yes, they would have needed making. And also that we were in competition with other potential animals, and that these costumes were around the city of Athens. Whether or not you suddenly have a granny preparing, happy that say, do we have from these fragments of the bowels around this course? Yeah, no, that's wonderful. Yeah, I love what you said. I salute you and I I don't, you know, there isn't a lot of information in the birds. They talk, they name all the different PR. So I mean, I think of it as this sort of Las Vegas kind of thing where there are different, you know, bird customs for every member that yeah. Well, people, yeah, they don't know if that's really you picture of a chorus. There's lot of argument about that, but I love that idea of people. Yeah, it's like Carnival where people like in Rio where people work on their costumes? Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. I just I was reading this book called cannibal metaphysics. I don't know if you know this book, it's such a great book. And he talks about how people in the Amazonian basin think about their relationship, all the other animals in the Amazonian River Basin. And I, that I want that spirit to come into what I'm talking about. I think it's really powerful. So when you put on your Bird costume, I mean, who knows what they were feeling? But that's a point of interrogation. Oh, yeah. So these are two things that I'm trying to formulate. And in some ways I think Barbara's question help me see where I'm asking. One of the moments in your talk that I can't kind of get out of my head and I keep thinking about is the description. I think it was the chorus in the Lost as joyous less de Balin. And I thought a that is exactly like a lot of New York Times criticisms of a Trump rally. And I thought that is something that you could take rate to a Trump rally and it would be an applause line. And that gets me a little bit to Dan else question about the stability of the some of the oppositions that, that, that you, you talked about. So, so interestingly in your argument, but it also gets me in terms of a Barbara's question. And that has to do with can you see a swarm if you're in it? It's striking that in that description you gave of the birds course, where they each name each other. That's in a sense, you could say a kind of tragic motion of making themselves. Yeah, I'm an individual. I have a story. This is me. It fragments the swarm in a funny way. So what I'm wondering is whether part of the abnormality of the chorus has to do with this kind of half recognizability. In other words, if storm swarm, storms, swarms only exist in a kind of dialectic. If you can only see a swarm from ins, seeing a swarm from outside makes you go inside, and sometimes insight makes you go outside. Do the costumes potentially work in the same cognitive way? Well, there are several things there. I'm, first of all, I do think, I mean, it's like saying, talking about capitalism. I think this is really a mistaken word and it's really disregard. You know, Shangtang move has written this book that left populism. I think if there's white supremacists, nativists, xenophobia and to call them, and then anything else that is a collective organization, populists to make a real vocabulary error. You know, I mean, I think a, a group that is anti racist, anti plutocracy in favor of equality of the kind that John Ross here talks about is very different from a group springing, screaming lock her. Okay? And I don't so I think we need to verify that I, I support guess and I have been in swarms myself for decades. You know, I, I don't, I don't find that a problematic term, a group that is moving with an aim. And I don't, I, I felt myself to be inside a sword. It's very, I was at the march for our lives, for example, which was relief. There were a lot of people with signs that said things like, guns are not school supplies. And it felt really good. And I didn't need to be an individual in that moment. I just felt that was really exhilarating to be part of something that was massively critical of a terrible thing that had happened? I don't know if that answers your question. Can I jump in to submit your question? You can think like maybe concretely about late thumbing their whole made just for organic when history and optics, right? And making their own thing. And this will help to pry apart when i agree, is the created false homology that people assert between on left moving revolutionary movement in fascism. And that has to do with like the relationship between collective action and agency. And I think a very like, kinda like actually a misleading idea that being part of a collective movement, It's not the same thing as having agency within. I can think about it like a, you know, an actual concrete strategies of Occupy, namely things like that, might check, which involved lots of ways of taking into account multiple ways that the time to think about it, which a lot of people doing one thing, namely walking in front of a place to make sure that nobody stops Emily Cross with it. And with that, you know, people get like way, use that, list them out of poverty by thought. And that is, you know, like what are you doing there really are either walking or your Chanting, repeating a chant, or you're following in the chant. And these are things that people trade-off on. But you know, that, that is a kind of for, that's organized, expressive about collective agency. And so the fact that one is doing something in concert, you know, it, it doesn't mean that you are not acting by way of pursuing a quantity. I bought it. That is a kind of a false equation. Mmm, thank you. Yeah. And I'm really tired of sitting in front of Rachel Maddow and thinking, This is so depressing and hopeless. So swarm on. Thank you.