Sphinx

Scene: The Secret Headquarters. A group of heavy-set, anonymous-looking men in suits, wearing mirrored sunglasses indoors, are seated around a table. Editorial Board member 1: So what did we learn? Editorial Board member 2: I don’t know, sir. Editorial Board member 1: I don’t f***** know either. I guess we learned not to do it again. Editorial Board member 2: No, sir. Editorial Member 1: I’m f***** if I know what we did. Editorial Board member 2: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.

Okay, that’s just gratuitous snark, and I like Burn Before Reading. The thing about the Peter Singer Does Apuleius affair is that there are many different things that different people ought to consider not doing again, of varying degrees of wider interest. I continue to be flabbergasted by the overweening arrogance of Singer’s “Now, I do not believe you wanted to do that, did you, Lucius?” approach. I mean, I’m very familiar with readings of Thucydides that claim to have identified what his real message or intention was, and generally these do involve ignoring large sections of the book to concentrate on episodes that suit the thesis (e.g.: International Relations Realism focuses on the debate at Sparta before the war, the Mytilene Debate and Melian Dialogue, and maybe the Sicilian Debate). But no one has actually claimed that this is what Thucydides really meant and produced a heavily edited version to loud fanfare and lots of publicity.

Key lesson #1: past people were not stupider than you. Classical antiquity invented ‘the novel’ as a genre, and the fact that their novels don’t wholly correspond to a (very conservative) modern conception of what a novel should look like isn’t evidence that they invented it wrong. Of course you can rework the material into new forms, maybe more relevant/accessible for new contexts – but you need to be conscious all the time of what you’re losing in stripping out the strangeness and alienating elements, and the risk of producing something basically boring that simply confirms your own smug preconceptions. This holds true for modern readings of Thucydides that try to make him fit into the mould of a conventional historian or political theorist – to be celebrated for having anticipated our way of seeing the world – at the expense of ignoring or explaining away a lot of the things that make him fascinating and thought-provoking, and out of step with mainstream assumptions.

These musings were prompted this morning by reading an article about a fascinating new documentary, All Light, Everywhere. The film is concerned with the recording of images, in surveillance and evidence-gathering and documentation, and the way that their apparent objectivity is a dangerous illusion; even without altering the image itself, its meaning can be distorted or manipulated transformed by framing or de-/re-contextualisation. To take the scary example of police body-cam footage, supposedly a great protection for our civil liberties:

Little things exert a significant influence over how these auto-generated visuals convey perspective; shooting from the sternum instead of at eye-level makes a suspect seem taller and more imposing, and the fish-eye lens creates the illusion that they’re closer than they appear while rendering their movements choppy and more severe. We learn that the cameras’ technical sophistication is intentionally limited to replicate the officer’s imperfect sense of sight rather than capture all visual information possible, placing a theoretical jury in a position of empathy for the difficulties of the job.

What interested me is the account of how the director, Theo Anthony, is conscious of his own complicity in the manipulation of images to convey one message rather than another, and seeks to educate his viewers in the sort of visual critical literacy needed to navigate this world.

Anthony exhorts his viewer to consider in all circumstances what they are and aren’t seeing, an imperative to “unpack, deflate and disassemble” that he extends to his own work. Beyond the clearer gaps in the film – during a body-cam demo at the local precinct, he’s made to stop rolling as the instructor plays an illustrative clip of the equipment in use – he exposes his own cinematic seams by including multiple takes of subjects getting spontaneous behavior “right”, or dropping in a special-effects shot and then showing the strings making it go.

And, predictably, I think: Thucydides. The concern with truth, and its manipulation, and what happens when it is disregarded or abused or just stops working properly, but also the self-awareness and deliberate highlighting of how his account of this is being presented. The issue of the speeches is a very familiar one: the historians’ attempt at rescuing them as some sort of objective record, the IR theorists’ attempt at reading them as straightforward summaries of Thucydides’ own views, anything to make them less rhetorical and literary and disconcerting. But we need to ask, not just what T is actually doing or attempting to do in the speeches, but what he’s doing in telling his readers about what he’s doing in the speeches: is this just an attempted explanation (as if he’s conscious of the standards to which modern historians will attempt to hold him), or is it actually the sort of directorial piece to camera that would alert us to be on our guard if we saw it in a contemporary documentary? Is he being Rob Reiner, or Marty DiBergi?

Yes, this is in essence just a slightly sillier version of W.R. Connor’s brilliant ‘Postmodern Thucydides’ article, and, yes, it’s easy to see it as form of projection, turning Thucydides into a fifth-century Chris Morris or Adam Curtis because I find that more interesting than seeing him as a sub-par Donald Kagan. I don’t have a problem with that: meaning is realised at the point of reception, yadda yadda. The point is not to read T. as a clever manipulator of narrative construction and perspective and voice as a basis for praising modern documentary makers; it’s to develop a sense of what he’s doing to see if we can actually learn from it – given that the question of truth and its manipulation remains a pressing issue.

To be fair to Peter Singer, I imagine this is what he thinks he’s doing: recovering one possible version of Apuleius because it relates to an important contemporary issue. But his reading doesn’t tell us anything new about that issue, beyond the (contestable) claim that Apuleius anticipated his concerns, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about Apuleius; it diminishes the work (and not just by throwing out most of it), reducing it to a single disputed meaning – see Spencer McDaniel’s blog post for more detailed discussion. It’s pat, seamless, inert. Whereas this reading of Thucydides is about discerning an extra layer, without claiming that the work isn’t actually an account of the Peloponnesian War at all. It pushes us to see the cracks and seams in the text, as a prompt to see the cracks and seams in the world.