Here's the launch post for the Gale-Jarratt-Glenn Exchange. I'm glad that Daniella raised the question of the rhetoric of this exchange, so we should take into consideration not only WHAT these scholars say to each other but HOW they say it. See also Jeremy's comment about HOW scholars work on recovery.
I wanted to point more directly to the approach Jarratt and Ong are taking to the feminist project of recovering Aspasia. On page 10, right before the heading, they write that "Aspasia" is a "rich site for interpretive work." In such a framing, it matters little whether we get the details of who Aspasia was and what she said and did down right. What we can say without a shadow of doubt is that she elicited discourse, that unlike most women of the era, she elicited commentary, just as the sophists elicited commentary by Plato--a lot--placed in the mouth of Socrates. (If scholars for years read Plato's dismissal of sophist practice as some kind of "truth"--e.g., the Sophists were bad for culture--they now read Plato's attention to them as evidence of something culturally strong at work.)
So--the interpretive question then becomes, what kind of discourse did Aspasia elicit? There would be many answers to this question--and we should include the visual images cited by Glenn and Jarratt-Ong as part of that elicited discourse. Why do people feel moved to foreground the sexual aspects of her personhood? Then and now? Jarratt-Ong's "reading" (the autochthony part) of a selected piece of this discourse centers on the differences between the two versions of the Funeral Orations and is in fact a reading of Plato's rhetoric, not Aspasia's. The question was this: Why did Plato insert Aspasia into this dialogue? Why is she for Plato a "site of discourse?" J-O's reading: not to give her credit for composition arts but to place an argument about citizenship/foreignness and Athenian birthrights in the mouth of a birther (woman) and what more credible woman than Aspasia. The feminist argument embedded here would then be what?
5 comments:
I'll make more than just this first response, but I wanted to response to why I think the sexual aspect of Aspasia is foregrounded; I think this is still true.
(Not blind) Aggression was, in as far as we have been able to read so far, a valued quality in rhetors. I have trouble, from my own experience, believing that anyone running a space where arguers go to meet can get by without being aggressive.
I think we can all agree that the Athenian woman we are called to commemorate in the autochthonic speech fragment is a passive woman, not in that she had children, but rather in that she was expected not to have a direct hand in the political life that would affect her fortunes (if nothing else, than by sending her sons off to war.)
Don't get ahead of me, people.
In highly sexually polarized societies (to a great degree, that's us, people), individuals who cannot or will not conform to those polarizations force the people that confront them to form an amalgam of those roles to compensate for their oddity. (Unless they are quite skilled at self-examination, their acceptance of gender will be more or less blanket.) Given that the exceptional individual is fairly isolated in those tendencies, the person who is forced to confront that difference (and does not chose to just reject them out of hand as 'unnatural') will view the strange person as closest to the opposite pole of gender in direct preportion to the particular quality expressed. In the case of aggression, it is quite likely that the individuals observing Aspasia noted the aggression and added to the mental list of attributes associated with Aspasia all the qualities they associated with aggression, expressed as a function of what tends to be biologically associated with the 'natural' heterosexual position (think missionary, though I am well aware that people have been having all kinds of interesting sex since they pulled themselves out of the ocean on vestigal legs millions of years ago.) To put it bluntly, she had to be somehow sexually promiscuous if she was mentally promiscuous.
So Aspasia becomes some kind of semi-man, whom nature has given passive equipment. As such, if she is not to be a monster (and she cannot be, if she has contributed to the education of so many outstanding citizens), then she must be subservient to a great man. After all, the gods play tricks, do they not? It would not be beyond them to raise up a few exceptional women from that class, and, given that they do not make monsters of themselves by trying to remain utterly independent (Aspasia would likely have been considered monstrous if she had not made such sterling contributions to the polis), they too can enjoy some form of prestige.
Just not as often as men do.
The frieze with Aspasia in odalesque is a reminder of that; she, exceptional, is placed.
“Feminist Hysteriography: a Fresco and a Footnote”
I too believe that aggression should be promoted in the spaces where arguers meet. I think that conflict works as the catalyst in any interpersonal relationship, in business, academia, friendship or romance.
I admired Gale when she situated herself in the indefensible position asserted by Swearingen, that “‘you have to have something to problematize, and if you have no history at all, no knowledge at all of those people, then you’re talking about a nonexistent problematic’ (“Octalog 22”)” (Gale 361). So Gale finds no problem with abandoning any relativity in the Truth of historical writing, and because absolute truth is an unattainable ideal, then why bother with evidence. Gale decides to subject her readers “‘to connect the real and the discourse’ when proofs are unavailable” (Glenn cited by Gale, 365). And I agree with Dasenbrock as he “laments […] the current practice that ‘the theory itself defines what is to count as evidence for it’ (548)” (Dasenbrock cited by Gale, 369).What evidence of Aspasia do we have to talk about? An image in a fresco and a footnote by Plato.
Gale sets up her argument by exposing obvious fallacies about truth finding in current and past historical writing. But then she abandons any relative qualities of truth, debunking truth as well, if we cannot recover the absolute truth, let’s swing the pendulum of recovery away from Truth toward Invention. Gale begs the reader to see Truth as impossible and irrelevant.
I want to read rhetorical texts, unfortunately none exist from women or else I would want to read them as well. Nevertheless, a move toward feminist readings and reconstructions of male-dominated classical rhetoric may better start with a contrapuntal (Edward W. Said) reading of existing texts.
What I don’t like is my space for gaining any authority to make informed arguments, by acquiring a knowledge base of classical rhetorical texts is now being eclipsed by the personal agendas of Jarratt and Ong, because I see their recovery of Aspasia as really a manifestation of an identity crisis among these feminist historiographers made manifest by the invention of I don’t even know what…. the legend of Aspasia.
Because Gale steps up to write Aspasia into the canon, naturally I thought it appropriate to write my own opinions into Gale. For example, here is how I finished the following claim by Gale (my invented emphasis): It is a tremendous challenge to write Aspasia (and other historical women) into the canonical rhetorical tradition because writing Aspasia is a fabrication.
I would earnestly support any discourse regarding Aspasia and her power, the power of of one exceptional woman among all other subverted women, that Jarratt and Ong would incite through whatever it is they are recovering. But let them conjure a primary text that we can read and cite before we begin to argue. Then let’s call J/O’s recovered product a work of fiction, maybe a novel even. Then make a space for the recovered Aspasia in a literature course, and call it Contemporary Feminist Fiction.
I think it ironic that feminists are eager to criticize Plato but willing to write volumes of speculative criticism about Plato championing a woman in a world of not men and women but mean and child bearers, in which the sexual ideal was seen not in the bodies of women but in the bodies of boys.
I think that after reading the first half of Gale’s article that I am already more informed on Gale than Gale is on Aspasia, and I speculate that maybe Gale would rather be recovered than cited. Therefore I stopped reading at page 370.
I acknowledge that I have conflicting thoughts and reactions to the Glenn, Gale, and Jarratt/Ong readings. Glenn’s succinct phrase – “the tension between history and history writing” – describes my conflict.
On the one hand, I am thrilled to read about Aspasia and how she may have influenced rhetoric in ancient Greece and, more important to me, that she broke the mold of the “closed woman” that Glenn describes as the ideal of Athenian society.
At the same time, I have to consider what Gale wrote: “On the other hand, Jarratt and Ong’s study depends heavily on interpretation and speculation, with a preoccupation for their feminist goals, that it accentuates the question of the roles that interpretation and speculation play in writing history.” (p.373)
Although the evidence for Aspasia is sketchy, there are enough fragments and suggestions to make me believe – or is it that I want to believe – this woman not only existed, she had influence on some of the pillars of Greek rhetoric and oratory. The reference to her in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks adds some credibility to her existence. For me, the Plutarch reference is more convincing than the references to her in Plato’s Menexenus. Menexenus was written many years after Aspasia lived. Her words and those about her are either fictitious or based on what has been told about her, but are not an actual account, an actual recording of her words and actions. Another question that I have is Jarratt and Ong’s interpretation of why Plato included Aspasia in the dialogue. They write, “Plato’s choice to speak through Aspasia, a non-Athenian woman, echoes his ridicule in other dialogues of those naïve enough to listen to the words of an outsider. Menexenus’s wonderment that Aspasia, who is only a woman, should be able to compose such a speech ironically emphasizes the Platonic disdain for the foreigner/woman/sophist who would presume to have knowledge about the virtues of Atheno-androcentric citizenship.” (p.20) This interpretation of why Plato inserted Aspasia into Menexenus does not convince me of Aspasia’s contributions to rhetoric. Instead, I am questioning just how influential she really was if Plato was using her in this way.
Gale makes an accusation on page 376 that “Jarratt has created a rather exciting way of doing history, through reinterpretation and speculation.” While I agree that Jarratt and Ong interpret their evidence and even speculate on Aspasia’s role, they also point out that their interpretation is based on fragments. In their opening paragraph in Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology, they write that “diving into layers of representation, with inevitable colorations of ‘envy and ill will,’ ‘favor and flattery,’ deepens the mystery. . . . Plutarch’s historiographical hesitations inform our project.” Jarratt and Ong acknowledge they are working from historiography.
Perhaps the creation of history from historiography is too much of a leap. But if Jarratt and Ong were not taking that leap, that risk, we would not know about Aspasia, we would not be debating her role, and we would not have an opportunity to further investigate the possibility that this woman existed and had influence. I believe the extent of her role has yet to be proven, but the fact that we are debating her and the methods of studying her increase the likelihood that her role will eventually be fixed in history.
With respect to Glenn's comments on Gale's article, I find it interesting that she does not directly address comments made by her fellow rhetorician. Although Gale is quite direct in her dislike of the respective historiographies and conclusions reached by Glenn and Jarratt, she also provides a number of charges in her essay relating to the real/recovered/historical Aspasia that are not answered.
For example, to Glenn's assertion that Aspasia "established a reputation as a rhetoriciam, as a philosopher, and as a member of the Athenian intellegentsia [. . .]; [and] she left firmly and fully realized contributions to the the history and theory of rhetoric (Mapping 13), Gale rejoins that Glenn aims at establishing a series of historical truths about Aspasia's accomplishments" (Gale 365). Such a project is roundly dismissed due to Glenn's "contradictions" in desiring to create a truth of Aspasia even as she uses gender studies and postmodern theory to subvert "received" notions of history (Gale 367).
To such a counterargument, Glenn doesn't really proffer a response. While she (perhaps rightly) notes that Gale's critique is an aggressive "polemic", she does not contend the many _specific_ charges brought up by her antagonist. For example, the following claim in her response to Gale that "[those] of us who write histories of rhetoric, especially those of us who write women into those histories, do so in response to intellectual and ethical questions (of evidence, power, and politics) at the same time that we resist received notions of both history and writing history. Speaking only for myself, my goal has not been to supplant the master narrative of rhetorical history with a 'mater' narrative, through such a move has long been considered the paradox of some feminist scholarship. Rather, my goal has been to investigate a number of deeply contextualized narrative in an attempt to bring a fuller, richer--different--picture into focus" (388).
Along with the difficulty of establishing a "historical" Aspasia, the question that is perhaps most immediately pertinent here is whether there is even such a thing as a "master narrative" of rhetoric. Due to the revisionary work that has been advocated for over two decades now, a "traditional" narrative seems to have died out (cf. Lyotard's notion that the "Grand Narratives" have ended). What can it mean to write history now? How can such a thing be conceived if we will tend to write/historicize under the accepted tropological conditions set forth by Hayden White (388)? If we investigate the historical "events" that have occurred (with respect to Aspasia or Socrates or Hitler) under such inherently compromised interpretive relationships, how can we speak of bringing a "fuller, richer--deeper--picture into focus"? Even Glenn's admission that one must work as if the gap between the real and discourse were not there cannot sufficiently answer for this because she--and apparently her colleagues--gives no basis for what or how Foucauldian entities such as knowledge, ethics, and power are to be discovered (or whether these can be acknowledged to be separate, as opposed to just being "power"), even though she asserts that these are problematized by historiography (389).
To me, it is not enough to claim that these are problems; there seems to be an intellectual necessity that allows for one to speak of "an ethics" before there can be "an ethics of historiography"--not allowing for an objective (or at least overarching and more general view) of ethics or knowledge opens one to the charge that the scholarly ambitions of one and all will inevitably slide into relativism, even if such a descent is not intended. In other words, the conversation cannot be sustained because there is no coherent and lasting context in which to place or mediate it.
This is where I think the ongoing controversy over Aspasia is so pertinent. Glenn and Jarratt do make explicit claims for Aspasia's importance, yet notwithstanding Gale's critique, one might ask: "What can such an interpretive 'site' such as Aspasia do, if not to merely advance one's interest that--in hindsight--will read anachronistically and proleptically?" The pro-and-con dialogue devoted to Glenn/Ong/Jarratt's work demonstrates the difficulty of believing in any sort of emendatory historical revision, especially in relation to entities that are now so vague and disputable as culture or gender.
The discourse seems to collapse upon itself.
As I'm working on my research regarding women in antiquity I continually ask myself why are women rhetor's sexuality so important. I am continually finding websites and articles that foreground women's sexuality. It is unsettling to continually find the sexuality of women rhetors before their rhetorical contributions. I wonder if it is because these women are fascinating yet in order to maintain public interest taboo topics become a focal point rather than their contributions. This is just a random idea.
As I understand the research, their is little disagreements regarding Aspasia's existence rather her contributions are questioned. I think back to Susan's comments regarding Socrates, why is it easier to question Aspasia than Socrates? I hope that the work being completed to 'regender' rhetoric in antiquity continues to be successful. I can hardly wait to read about women's contributions to rhetoric in antiquity in twenty years.
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