Category: Conferences

Res Difficiles Conference 2020: videos now available

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

UMW BU

Joseph Romero (University of Mary Washington) and I co-organized the Classics conference: Res Difficiles. See the original CFP here: https://resdifficiles.com/cfp/. Due to due to COVID-19, the event took place in an entirely online format on May 15th 2020. If you missed the conference, or would like to revisit the proceedings, you can now watch the video recordings from the event on the conference website: https://resdifficiles.com/

Thank you again to all of the speakers and all of the attendees. Joe and I would like to do #resdiff again next year. So as you’re (re)watching the videos, think about what you’d like to see discussed and then send in an abstract 🙂

Tom Habinek, realism vs. the ‘glob’, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; tempora cum causis (11)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. Last weekend was the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. Since I was still back in the UK with my family over the New Year, I missed most of it, but I was there for the last day to take part in the panel commemorating Prof. Tom Habinek, who sadly died last year. Tom was my PhD advisor, and a major influence in the field of Roman Studies. The event was very poignant, but fitting. On Sunday evening I posted my part of the panel, which you can read here: “Tom Habinek on ‘generativity’.” 

Modern. In an essay originally published in 1971, “The Culture of Criticism”, Hayden White describes the frustrations of Ernst Gombrich, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Popper (respectively: art historian, philologist and literary critic, philosopher of science) with the avant-gardists as typified by, for example, the abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock. Each of these scholars held an attachment to realism; in some cases considering realism, in historiography and art alike, to be a means of resisting authoritarianism, with its power to overwrite the experience of reality by means of ideology. White (2010*: 105) writes that for these critics, historical, literary, or artistic realism, i.e. an attempt to represent reality as it actually is or was “results from the controlled interplay of human consciousness with a shifting social and natural milieu.” In the face of the fact that realism is supposed to reflect the human perception of reality, the avant-garde is taken by these critics to be a frustration of perception rather than a refinement of it. More than this, this break with tradition is a challenge to perception. White writes (2010: 107): 

“The surfaces of the external world, so laboriously charted over the last three thousand years, suddenly explode; perception loses its power as a restraint on imagination; the fictive sense dissolves — and modern man teeters on the verge of the abyss of subjective longing, which, Auerbach implies, must lead him finally to an enslavement once more by myth.”

(The fear of “myth” — figured as an antitype to so-called “rationality” in tandem with “realism” — has probably produced a number of negative results itself.) By the end of this essay, White (2010: 108-110) points to one of the real comforts of realism, one which lies in its hierarchical nature. Realistic art or narrative reflects a grammatically syntactical worldview, i.e. a mode of composition which privileges certain ideas over others, and arranges information around that privilege; whereas artefacts of the avant-garde might be interpreted as paratactical — presenting discrete elements “side-by side” (= παρά) in a “democracy of lateral coexistence” (2010: 109).

In Washington DC last weekend, I found myself face-to-face with Hans Hofmann’s Oceanic (1958) in the Hirshhorn Museum. I was really struck by the large heaps of paint in certain parts of the work, which I have now affectionately come to call “globs.” It feels appropriate!

Inspired by that visit, when I returned to Boston I wanted to go and look closely at more oil paintings in the MFA. Last night we got up close with some more excellent globs from Lee Krasner (Sunspots, 1963) and Joan Mitchell (Chamonix, c. 1962):

Digitization is vital, and I depend on it for my teaching and my scholarship, and I would never want digital resources to be taken away from me. But there is pretty much nothing like looking a glob straight in the eye, if you get the chance to. You can get a general sense of texture from a photograph. But the glob is just so noticeable IRL. Krasner applied oils straight from the tube onto the canvas for Sunspots, and you can tell. Looking at that painting tells the story of its making. As for Mitchell’s Chamonix, you can see the movement of her body in its wide, energetic strokes. Each is a record of embodiment, one which figurative, narrative, and supposedly veristic accounts tend to leave invisible. Back to Hayden White (2010: 110) one last time:

“The avant-garde insists on a transformation of social and cultural practice that will not end in the substitution of a new elite for an old one, a new protocol of domination for the earlier ones, nor the institution of new privileged positions for old ones — whether of privileged positions in space (as in the old perspectival painting and sculpture), of privileged moments in time (as one finds in the older narrative art of fiction and conventional historiography), of privileged places in society, in privileged areas in the consciousness (as in the conservative, that is to say, orthodox Freudian psychoanalytic theory), of privileged parts of the body (as the genitally organized sexual lore insists is ‘natural’), or of privileged positions in culture (on the basis of presumed superior ‘taste’) or in politics (on the basis of a presumed superior ‘wisdom’).”

* “The Culture of Criticism” (1971) is reprinted in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory (2010), edited by Robert Doran.

Internet.

Excerpt. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1987: 44: “I thought about myself and art: that I could catch the likeness of anything I could see — with patience and the best instruments and materials. I had, after all, been an able apprentice under the most meticulous illustrator of this century, Dan Gregory. But cameras could do what he had done and what I could do. And I knew that it was this same thought which had sent Impressionists and Cubists and the Dadaists and the Surrealists and so on in their quite successful efforts to make good pictures which cameras and people like Dan Gregory could not duplicate.” 

Daily Life. We spent New Year’s Eve walking along the shore at Troon. 

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Tom Habinek on “generativity” (SCS 2020)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

On 5th January 2020 I took part in a commemoration of Tom Habinek at the SCS organized by James Ker, Andrew Feldherr, and Enrica Sciarrino; with Basil Dufallo, Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, Scott Lepisto, and Enrica Sciarrino, and myself as panelists. With the generosity of Hector Reyes, we were able to read Tom’s (incomplete) book manuscript on the topic of personhood and authorship. Here’s the text of my contribution to the workshop, in case of interest. Enormous thanks to everyone involved and everyone who came to the panel.

It is my task today to speak on the concept of generativity as discussed in Tom’s manuscript. When I think of Tom’s work and the influence he had on students like me, it is, indeed, particularly his theorization of generativity which I feel to have been the most impactful. In earlier works, Tom’s interest in generativity manifested in his study of social generation via cultural production and reproduction, with a focus on how ritual acts instantiated Roman community. In a key passage of The World of Roman Song (2005, p129), Tom cited the work of the anthropologist, Paul Connerton, who, in How Societies Remember (1989, p62) discussed Thomas Mann’s understanding of the Freudian ego: 

“We are to envisage the ego, less sharply defined and less exclusive than we commonly conceive of it, as being so to speak ‘open behind’: open to the resources of myth which are to be understood as existing for the individual not just as a grid of categories, but as a set of possibilities which can become subjective, which can be lived consciously. In this archaising attitude the life of the individual is consciously lived as a ‘sacred repetition’, as the explicit reanimation of prototypes.”

The “explicit reanimation of prototypes” is how Tom understood Roman self-construction: the invocation of ancient exemplars; the continuous citation and reinscription of Roman ancestral memory; rituals which resubstantiated the dead in the bodies of the living. Roman literary and political history demonstrates clearly that the Romans were interested in how their culture generated and regenerated itself; how the present day related to the past and preserved a tensile balance between new iterations of Roman youth, and their ancestral blueprints. All we need think of is the late Republican Brutus contemplating his ancestor, the expeller of kings; or perhaps Cicero in the Pro Caelio raising the ancient, blind Appius Claudius from the dead to speak with Cicero’s own lips and chastize Cicero’s own enemies.

In his latest work Tom approached the question of Roman generativity from some new perspectives. In his search for an understanding of Roman personhood, he figured the Roman persona as an active process, not a passive state; I think that for Tom persona was not a noun, but a verb. “Personifying” is a practice — it is an action, it is alive. Starting from this position, Tom was able to see different kinds of ancient evidence not as discrete, disconnected elements of Roman intellectual systems, but rather mutually supportive organs of an organic, synthetic whole. Tom’s work instantiates a theorization of human culture which does not merely render literature, or law, or art objects into cynical, insensate records of elites and auteurs. His organic approach reveals that the ancient artefact is an expression and mirror of biological as well as cultural forms. To put it another way, without really knowing that they are doing so, humans make things which reflect their insides. Tom’s work makes you realize that when you read a Latin text, that text is actively trying to constitute you into a Roman reader — like a 3D printer with instructions to produce a piece of plastic in a specific way, the scientific, ethical, political scripts of the Roman text tries to make us.

With this, or something like this, in his mind, Tom in this latest work proceeded to examine generativity in a number of different types of ancient evidence, ranging from the practices of Roman bride dowries to the emergence of birthday celebration as a theme in Latin love elegy. Underneath each artefact, Tom found a consistent preoccupation in the Roman attitude to cultural and biological reproduction which expressed a profound anxiety, one which can be conveyed in the form of a simple question. Will we continue to survive?

Romans expressing this anxiety in different ways figured reproduction, with its insistence upon a continuity of resources, as relating to survival in the long term. The fact that Roman bride dowries are reabsorbed into the natal family to allow women to marry again and to have children is, Tom suggests, an intentional defense mechanism against the failure to reproduce. As a result, generativity in Roman thought relates not only to explicit, biological reproduction (i.e. producing children), but making provision for a self-sustaining reabsorption of assets as part of a framework which allows such reproduction to take place. At its core, this legal provision expresses a care to conserve not just culture or biology but energy; like keeping a little something left in the storeroom in case of an unexpected hunger. Cast in this light, Roman conservatism, which is so frustratingly obvious and, frankly, obtuse sometimes (just think of Cato the Elder) seems to be not simply fanatical traditionalism, but indeed a form of conservationism.

It is an impulse to conserve that Tom saw in the Roman discourse around luxuria. The chastizing of luxuria is not simply, Tom suggests, a knee-jerk political reaction against perceived excesses and hedonism, but rather a criticism of “pointless growth” — i.e. the expenditure of energy which will not return, will not be reabsorbed and thereby conserved for future use. Tom notes that criticism of luxuria in Roman texts so often employ agricultural and botanical metaphors because luxuria was an metaphysical outgrowth which defied the boundaries of the carefully proportioned Catonian fields, designed and tended to produce year after year. Incidentally, Tom made a point to note that luxuriant excess — a squandering of resources, the refusal to regenerate, to conserve, to recycle — expressed itself in many different ways: the fact that furniture, fine art, construction, urban development, and non-reproductive sex were each as bad as each other speaks to the intersection of conservatism with conservationism in the Roman attitude; i.e. having fancy pedestal tables and sideboards (Livy 39.6) is just as bad as fucking your boyfriend because you should, good Roman, be conserving your attention and energies for generative activities. Here, Tom seems to have revealed a kind of biological essentialism in Roman thought which is not usually, I think, made explicit. Tom notes that while the elegists and other figures from the Roman counter-culture were “ambivalent” about such a formulation of luxuria, they nonetheless accepted its definition; that is, while they did not play by these rules, they accepted that these indeed were the rules. Even if you are walking away from Rome rather than towards it, you are still on the road to Rome.*

Tom translates the Latin luxuria as “pointless growth”, “withering growth”, “wild growth.” An agricultural, biological symptom of “bad” growth is itself a helpful tool to reveal the nature of “good” growth, and Tom realized that, in Roman thought, “good” growth often related to an inseparable dualism: life and death. An insistence that growth (that is “good” growth, not luxuria) is actually related to death appears, Tom says, in the Pro Marcello (23): Cicero’s exhortation of Caesar to propagate new growth includes the impossible wish that Caesar could bring the dead back to life, if only that were possible. Indeed, the relationship between the living and the dead at Rome was one of Tom’s deepest preoccupations; in the book proposal for the project, Tom had focused in on a passage from Rudolph Sohm which I believe was, for him, programmatic: “the heir is treated as though he were deceased…the deceased continues to live in the person of the heir” (1907, p504). Indeed, the idea that the dead live in the face, the name, and the actions of the living is one of the vital aspects of Roman generation, regeneration, generativity. Tom’s discussion of generativity in this manuscript reveals a living organism, a beating heart underneath the details of textuality. According to his understanding, the Romans formulated their generative function as a life pulse which conserved itself, returned to itself, and, being limited, precious, did not waste itself.

*Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969/1999, p151): “To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road.'”

Consciousness Raising: SCS Toronto 2017

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 4 Comments

The 2017 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies that took place from Jan. 5th-8th in Toronto had a common thread running through it: a growing interest among classicists to engage wider audiences through outreach, digital technologies, and social projects. But this desire to move beyond the traditional limits of classical research and pedagogy was also marked by internal anxieties regarding the field’s future, and what kind of role classicists should have in the current political climate. 

At “The Impact of Immigration on Classical Studies in North America”, the first speaker was supposed to be Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton), whose 2015 autobiography – Undocumented – describes his experiences as a Dominican living in the US without legal documentation who worked his way to a Classics degree from Princeton, and the subsequent life of a scholar. Ironically, Peralta wasn’t able to be in Toronto to give his paper — for immigration reasons. James Uden (Boston University), one of the panel’s organizers, stepped in to read out Peralta’s paper, noting that even under normal circumstances, reading someone else’s paper is a strange thing, but that this case felt stranger, given the intimate nature of its content.

In 2015, Peralta published a two-part piece in Eidolon entitled “Barbarians Inside the Gate” (part I, II), which discussed the ancient parallels to – and influences upon – the modern problem of immigration in the US. One of the recent cooptations cited by Peralta is Ted Cruz’s assimilation of himself to Cicero with Obama as his Catiline in the context of then POTUS’ proposed immigration reform, an incident that I first saw written about by Jesse Weiner in the Atlantic in 2014 (“Ted Cruz: Confused about Cicero“). By casting himself as a modern day Cicero, Cruz had unwittingly (?) made a threat of violence against the “Catilinarian” President. Peralta went on to describe the privileged positions of scholars – traveling for research and conferences without having to consider any threat to their immigration status, or being turned away at the border (obviously given poignance by his own absence). Citing this passage from C. Rowan Beye’s contribution to Compromising Traditions (1997) —

— Peralta argued that a problematic and artificial distinction was being made between privilege of academics (prized for their foreignness – if it was the right kind) on the one hand, and undocumented workers on the other. Poised on the edge – now – of the political threat to the undocumented in the US, including our own students, this categorization of “good immigrant”/”bad immigrant” enforces value judgements upon human beings, impeding their mobility, settlement, and health – both mental and physical. The second speaker of this panel, Ralph Hexter (UC Davis), described the shape of immigration in California, the state with the highest number of immigrants: 10 million, of whom many are now citizens or residents, but 25% are undocumented. In California, undocumented students who have graduated from high school have access to higher education, but no access to federal loans. Through the DREAM act, undocumented students would be able to find federal work study or student loans, and individual states could decide to provide financial aid to such students. But, as Hexter pointed out, the incoming POTUS used the repeal of the DREAM act as one of his campaign slogans; and now undocumented students everywhere are fearful for their future. Hexter noted that for many students, the question of immigration will be an enormously personal issue. Hexter moved on to demonstrate how discussions of canonical classical texts could accommodate discussions of these issues. Classicists use texts capable of plurality of perspective – “immigrant, host national, universal order”:

Hexter suggested the Aeneid as a text with which to explore the problem of immigration: refugees leave a destroyed city (Troy); family, central to the problem of immigration, is central to the epic; Turnus’ hostility can be read as a hostility to new migrants. Hexter even cast Virgil’s Evander as Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to Obama’s “well meaning but weak willed Latinus” – likening Dido to Angela Merkel, who left her border open to Syrian refugees. Hexter also invoked Luis Alfaro’s play – Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles – which combined the tragedy of the Ancient Greek Medea with the trauma of modern day Mexican immigration. The title “Mojada” is the Spanish slang equivalent to, and containing as much emotive force as, the English “wetback” – used to describe the undocumented who supposedly arrive in the US “wet” (mojado) because of crossing borders by water. During the Q&A section of Hexter’s talk, a member of the audience brought up Canadian playwright Olivier Kemeid’s L’Eneide, which explicitly brings out immigration as a central crisis of Aeneas’ tale.  

Looking to classical texts as a means to remediate modern social problems was a thread that connected the “Impact of Immigration” panel and the “New Outreach and Communications for Classics” panel. At the Outreach panel, Roberta Stewart (Dartmouth) spoke about her experiences talking through Homer with combat veterans in New Hampshire (which has an 8% vet population), a project funded with an NEH grant. “Talking through” is a better way to describe what she does than “teaching” – she stressed in her paper that the aim of the sessions was to facilitate discussion, rather than to use a hierarchical teaching model:

Outreach in this case, Stewart says, means giving texts an environment of relatability, where expertise is not required. In fact, when veterans use Homer to work through issues of war, homecoming, and trauma, it is they who are the experts. Stewart’s project makes veterans the authors and authorities in designing curriculum for veterans. It’s not exactly that “reaching out” in such a way removes the expertise of the classicist who is there to facilitate – what became clear over the arc of this SCS panel is that the public wants an “expert” to be in the room, to guide things, to lend some weight to proceedings. But working with a text in such a way allows the reader to find the meanings which are most resonant and – in this case – healing. In the current climate, changing what it means to be an “expert” is an important shift: expertise moves from the top-down to something more open.

Another strong point that came from this panel is the necessity for outreach to be pluralistic. There are a lot of different kinds of audiences to reach out to. The implication here is that the centre is the academy, which normally looks inward to itself and its own initiated members. From the Paideia Institute, we heard about several projects: Jason Pedicone presented on the Legion Project, which connects classicists working outside of academia – including tracking those who have PhDs in Classics but did not find scholarly positions; and Liz Butterworth on Aequora, teaching literacy to elementary and middle school students with Latin. Christopher Francese (@DCComm, Dickinson College) described a number of outreach projects he’s involved with: a Latin club for children from Kindergarten to Middle School; blogging; podcasting. Francese’s podcast is a series of 5-10 minute recordings on Latin metrics and poetic performativity.

The outreach panel, while describing ways to open up classics to wider audiences, also brought up some of its inherent tensions. As I was live tweeting Francese’s comments on podcasting, multiple podcasters on twitter spoke to me to say: We’re here, and we’re doing this work. In the days after the conference, I was discussing with these podcasters – Aven McMaster (@AvenSarah), Alison Innes (@InnesAlison), and Ryan Stitt (@greekhistorypod) – the issue of in-groups and out-groups. These podcasters know each other well, are well known by their own audiences, but not that well known by the “professional” arm of the discipline. During the outreach panel, one member of the audience – a high school Latin teacher – drew attention to the fact that there was a weak relationship between school teachers and classicists in universities. And, given the fact that declining enrollment in classics is a serious issue, the apparent lack of interest in the teachers – on the front lines of training future classicists – was part of this problem. After the conference it became clear to me that it wasn’t the case that classical resources weren’t available on the internet, but that lack of centrality meant that they were difficult to get to know about, unless you were already part of a certain group. An antidote to this problem will involve those who do have a wide audience, in real life and on the internet, engaging in some signal boosting – letting those within and outside of the academy know what kind of projects are out there. The SCS has started an effort to review digital projects; see, for example, their review of The Latin Library.

Digital classics was also well represented, thanks to the “Ancient MakerSpaces” workshop, run by Patrick Burns (@diyclassics, ISAW). This workshop attracted the majority of live tweeters (for obvious reasons), and so is well documented in the twitter record of 2017’s SCS. The success of this workshop came not only from the content of its presentations, but its format – which eschewed the traditional Q&A, opting instead for interactive demonstrations. The digital humanities presentations seemed to have a deep connection with pedagogy:

Thomas Beasley (Bucknell University), demonstrating the visualization of networks in the ancient mediterranean, noted that his tool could improve spatial literacy in undergraduates, who often find it difficult to come to terms with the geography of the mediterranean. In the outreach panel, Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond, University of Iowa) had talked about how maps are always useful in teaching contexts. Bond demonstrated that the spatial visualization had been a part of enhancing engagement since at least the 16th century, when Protestants used maps to illustrate the Bible, to great popularity. Digital tools also allow a larger degree of participation. Rodney Ast (University of Heidelberg) demonstrated how anyone could suggest editorial changes to papyri entries in the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri – during the course of his presentation, he edited a database entry for a Ptolemaic ostrakon to include the fact that it contains a quotation from the Odyssey:

Questions of digitization and information technology were present in other areas of the conference as well. This year’s Presidential Panel – “Communicating Classical Scholarship” – included presentations from Sebastian Heath (@sebhth, NYU) on digital publishing through ISAW; Fiona MacIntosh (Oxford University) on the APGRD‘s (@APGRD) ebooks of the Medea and the Agamemnon, in which archival footage of performance reception are embedded in the books’ “pages”; and Erich Schmidt (University of California Press) on the future of scholarly publishing, including discussion of how expensive it is to print monographs. This panel betrayed some of the tension and anxiety felt by classicists regarding their digital futures, but also regarding their print past. When comments were made by panelists suggesting the general preference of scholars for print books, there were scatterings of applause from the audience. Essentially, we are not of one mind when it comes to digital humanities, or the future of how scholarship is disseminated – and that includes the role of social media. We’re not on the same page, either, on whether or not these new trends have value, or whether they can be counted among a scholar’s contributions to the field. This much is made clear by the fact that the SCS has a statement asking that classics departments take digital and technological projects into consideration when they consider a candidate’s value:

A final project to draw attention to is the new Classics and Social Justice group organized by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Amit Shilo (UC Santa Barbara), Roberta Stewart, and Nancy Rabinowitz. This group is bringing together scholars and teachers who want to use their classical expertise to help address current social problems: many of the attendees of the first meetings have already done work of this kind, whether has meant reading Homer with veterans, bringing classics into prisons, or addressing the issue of immigration. The evening meeting on Jan 7 was broadcast on Facebook live, and the resulting video can be watched here. The existence of this group demonstrates a growing trend among classicists to integrate the intellectual part of their lives with action and advocacy, and to bring their intellectual energies into spaces outside the limits of the traditional classroom. Among the aims of this new group is to draw attention to the fact that many scholars have already been doing this kind of work some time – invisibly – and to bring together those with similar ideas, to be a resource to one another and to others.

 

What it’s like to live tweet the SCS (San Francisco 2016)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment
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At the 2016 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies that took place from Jan. 6th-9th in San Francisco, CA, I live tweeted the panels which I observed. You can see the “storified” versions of these tweets here. For those of you who are unfamiliar with storify, it is a means of isolating and reordering specific tweets in order to see their cohesiveness and meaningful narrative. Read on for my thoughts on the experience of live tweeting the SCS.

Brooke Holmes, one of the scholars involved in the “Postclassicisms“ project centred around Princeton, speaking in the SCS panel “Response and Responsibility”, said something along the following lines:

I tweeted this in a paraphrase that was intended to be representative, timely. And this itself is appropriate given that part of the purpose of “Postclassicisms” is to meditate about time, timeliness, response, and reception. What is at stake in the point represented by this tweet is, I think, the question of how to view our own involvement in the material which we study. In the face of objectivity and subjectivity – what role does our rejection or embrace of our own identities have to play in our jobs as scholars? How does our observation and critical response to the past shape our knowledge of it?

In the first Fragments session (affectionately named #fragfest by the panel’s moderator, Ayelet Lushkov, @Dr_AHL), Catherine Steel remarked on this very issue in the ancient world: when it comes to the extant snippets of Roman Republican orators, our sources seem not to be quoting from the text of the orations but from intermediaries; what at first glance seems to be a representation of a speech by a Roman orator turns out to be (or likely be) an excerpt from a historiographical text which dramatized the speech act.

One of the things which became clear to me early on is that my tweets were motivated by a desire to document, record what was happening. By doing this I implicated myself in the project of the SCS. Part of my desire to document was encouraged by the fact that my tweets were read by those who were not at the meeting, and who were very glad to have a window into its proceedings. At the Presidential Panel on Thursday night (“The Spring from the Year”: Contingent Faculty and the Future of Classics), several of the speakers mentioned the fact that contingent personnel often can’t afford to come to the annual meeting, which is actually one of the both ironies and strengths of speaking on the topic in front of an audience of tenured faculty. To these we can add the scholars living and working all around the world, who have an interest and stake in the classical community, but who don’t have a compelling reason to spend time and money on international travel. At any rate, I received an incredibly positive response on twitter from the absent participants, especially from the UK. In the “Cicero across Genres” panel, Francesco Ginelli discussed Cicero’s application of rhetorical theory as epistolary theory, citing Fam. 2.4: the purpose of a letter is to update someone who is spatially or chronologically distant – someone you haven’t seen or heard from for a long time and/or someone far away. In fact this passage returns to one of the issues at stake in the “Postclassicisms” panel – the idea that antiquity is a guest among us (Phiroze Vasunia), that we are in a dialogic relationship with our material.

Users of twitter engaged with me as well as each other over the content I was representing. This is exactly the power of twitter when it is used well – it is a real time, invisible annotation; a meta-armature which exists all around the physicality of the meeting, but one that is widely accessible. The annotating and enriching function of twitter becomes clear in the following cases: while Brooke Holmes was speaking, she invoked and meditated upon Donna Haraway‘s 1988 article, Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective – while I was tweeting her talk, I also found and tweeted a link to the article. In the panel on Herculaneum, Richard Janko, speaking ex tempore during the question and answer session following his (excellent, truly) talk on his methods of papyrological editing, referred to the story of Verginius Rufus, who fell and broke his hip when he dropped a papyrus book roll and it began to unravel on the ground (and as we heard in that talk, extant papyrus rolls are long – 15m, 23m, 28m). I quickly found that the source for this anecdote is Pliny (Ep. 2.1.5), and tweeted it. When my colleague, Tom Sapsford, gave his paper on cinaedi at the Roman dance panel, demonstrating that cinaedi aren’t just bogey men but represent a real professional category, I tweeted the link to his 2015 Eugesta article on the topic, which is accessible to everyone. And one of my followers let me know that they were reading the article as I was live tweeting Tom’s talk.

In many ways the problem of twitter reflects the themes of fragments and genre treated in certain panels at this year’s SCS. Prof. Sander Goldberg during #fragfest discussed the issue of fragment contextualization. (This is of great importance to me in my work on Cicero’s quotations of Latin verse.) Consider the following “fragment” from Ennius’ Annales (Skutsch 154-155):

Septingenti sunt, paulo plus aut minus, anni
Augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est

Some scholars, Goldberg said, refer to the speaker of these lines as Camillus, connecting the verses to Camillus’ famous speech in Livy 5.51-4. But, Goldberg says, the attribution of these lines to Camillus was conjecturally made by Skutsch (1985:314), and if we’re really honest with ourselves we have to say that the speaker of the lines is Varro, since it is Varro alone – as the cover text – who quotes the lines (RR 3.1.2f.). I could add to this that Varro describes the verses as having been written by Ennius (Ennius docet scribens) – he’s not at that moment imagining Ennius’ words to reflect a historico-fictive speech act by a legendary Roman. In the ancient world we find that writers are not always interested in referring to their source clearly – quite often this seems to come from the fact that they are more interested in the gnomic, universal quality of the statement, rather than engaging in what we might call “responsible” citational practices. Casual (i.e. non-scholarly) users of twitter very often tweet gnomic maxims or “pretty pictures” without giving attributions for (and perhaps knowing) their origin; they are interested in an interesting snippet, and in passing it along. A scholarly user of twitter really ought to be held to a higher standard.

The issue is that the things which I tweeted during the SCS aren’t my work or intellectual property, but my investment in the questions at stake means that between the point where I hear the arguments made and the point where I relay them to the internet, there has been some kind of intervention on my part. Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond), who has crowdsourced and made available a wonderful set of guidelines for tweeting scholarly conferences, notes that a tweeter has to be willing to remove or delete content if the original author is uncomfortable.

The good news here is that I am a scholar and I know my responsibilities when it comes to proper citation. And yet I don’t, and can’t, tweet everything that I hear, and I also don’t care equally about all arguments or even talks, so certain things won’t be passed on by me. This is where the tweeter exerts control – we hear the whole (although we may not always understand the whole), but we tweet only snippets. We have a certain power of censorship, in the sense which we read in Gumbrecht’s the Powers of Philology (2003:14):

…we presuppose, for any fragment deserving of this name, a violent intervention that has caused the difference between the text (or more generally, the form) intended by the author and the text that has come down to us. Such violence may come from an intention that conflicts with the author’s intention and has at its disposal, in addition, superior power to impose itself. It is obvious that this second case of fragmentation includes and illustrates what we call “censorship.” We take fragmentation through censorship to imply, first, that the censor is clearly aware of what he wants to eliminate and, second, that he usually wants the censored text not to appear fragmented. This means that it may turn out to be particularly difficult to identify such a text as a fragment, but also that, once the censor and his intentions are identified, we have a particularly rich orientation for our task of imagining the complete text.

(By the way, this Gumbrecht citation comes from me, not from any talk I heard at the SCS.) There’s also a question of expertise – I feel pretty comfortable with Cicero and with fragments, but when I was at the Herculaneum panel, I found that Virginia Campbell (@campbell798), who took over the twitter feed for the Herculaneum Graffiti Project (@HercGraffProj), did a far better job than me, precisely because of her expertise. Incidentally – the Ancient Graffiti Project is incredible: they have created a topographical search engine, where you can search for graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii by specific location:

Although twitter has potential for widening the audience of academic work, there is still something kind of insular about its use at the SCS. The hashtag #aiascs is probably inscrutable to the majority of the twitterverse, and of course as academics generally and classicists particularly we have our own language in which we talk about our ideas, which is a fellowship of knowledge for us, but can be particularly frustrating to a broader audience. As I was checking in with the other panels on the #aiascs hashtag whose topics are not as well known to me personally, I felt myself alienated sometimes – cf. this impressive slide regarding sieges in Thucydides via Hamish Cameron (@peregrinekiwi):

I’m sure I also did my fair share of alienating. Many noted that Cicero was well represented at this year’s meeting – one might even say, overrepresented. You might find this a shock coming from me, a Ciceronian, but although I enjoyed most of the Cicero papers I heard – and was particularly happy at the “Cicero across Genres panel” (organized by Isabel Köster, @iota_subscript, and Caroline Bishop), I can sympathize with this reaction. When Cicero dominated the #aiascs hashtag, there was some annoyance at this (although I think this is founded in the current fashion of Cicero-bashing which I don’t endorse):

It is satisfying to be in a room where you are not the only one tweeting – there’s a sense of camaraderie to it, and also a sense of curiosity as you try to figure out who the other tweeter is, e.g. when Vanessa Rose Phin (@wordfey) and I both wrongly thought that the other was a person sitting between us who was looking down into her lap a lot. This level of participation is one that helps cut across the isolation that can be felt at the SCS. The well known twitter powerhouse, Patrick Burns (@diyclassics), spotted me at the WCC/LCC opening night party and introduced himself, and our paths continued to cross throughout the meeting. A colleague who observed Patrick and me sitting next to each other, each furiously live tweeting the presidential panel, remarked that it was like being in the journalist room at the White House. I found myself being able to talk to a wider range of people because of this digital engagement, including Joseph Howley (@hashtagoras), another twitter powerhouse, and Virginia Campbell (@campbell798) at the end of the Herculaneum panel.

Essentially, I found live tweeting the SCS satisfying. I myself was engaged with the content on a level that I hadn’t experienced at the meeting in previous years, and my social interactions were greatly enriched in a number of ways. My way in to live tweeting was actually eased by the increased interest which the august society itself has in the use of social media – a stance evinced by the fact that the hashtag #aiascs was on our name tags. The final aspect to this which I’ll remark upon is the usefulness of twitter in letting the presenting participants of the SCS know that their effort is appreciated: voices from twitter expressing interest in the topic at hand means that there is an audience out there, an audience that is willing to listen, to appreciate, and to speak back.