Contingency caused by undermining collective cohesion and agency

If everyone were like me, there’d be no more courts, people would not drag each other off to prison, there would be no war – everyone would be contented having moderate possessions.³⁰⁶

Knemon (Menander Dyskolos 743-745)

The second form of collective contingency is even more fundamental than the violations of its prominent control regimes, since it is constructed in response to the collective’s concern for its very existence, i.e. the integrity of the social network and its manifestation in the exercise of agency. In order to maintain the master-narrative of the control regimes, the constructing body, the collective, needs to maintain its configuration in action. While it obviously does so also by living the control regimes outlined above, the Characters also shows more direct threats to this collective’s cohesion. The first of these expands on a point made earlier in the analysis of the truth regime: it consists in the creation by individual interaction of sub-networks of semantic control that split up the civic collective and fracture the communicative cohesion of its social network. The Oligarch in-viting his friends to withdraw from the web of observation in place in the sanc-tioned fora of collective interaction and the Country Bumpkin disclosing infor-mation from the assembly to slaves and non-citizens are the most obvious exam-ples of this contingency being controlled through sanction in the text.³⁰⁷

305 Theophr. Char. 15.4.

306 Menand. Dyskolos 743-745: [εἰ τοιοῦτ]οι πάντες ἦσαν, οὔτε τὰ δικαστήρια/ ἦν ἄν, οὔθ’ αὑτοὺς ἀπῆγον εἰς τὰ δεσμωτήρια,/ οὔτε πόλεμος ἦν, ἔχων δ’ ἂν μέτρι’ ἕκαστος ἠγάπα. The Dyskolos was performed in 316 BC and is thus roughly contemporary with the Characters. The passage quoted is part of a retrospective self-defence offered by the titular grumbler, Knemon, after his reformation. While Green 1990, 73f., reads this passage as a plea for a simpler world, I think it probable that social discourse is once again more com-plicated: The passage is a construction of a retrojected social imaginary that margin-alises the newly perceived contingencies while simultaneously integrating them.

307 Theophr. Char. 4.3; 26.3.

The quotation from the Dyskolos above evokes a perfectly cohesive world based on complete identity across society, and thereby makes us aware of a num-ber of things to be found also in the Characters. The first is that this kind of societal fracturing is countered by another control regime, namely that of equality.³⁰⁸ The Characters offers a specific construction of this value in that there is no talk of ἰσότης, a notion of equality that was subject to substantial semantic tension.

Various critics of Athenian democracy, such as Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to name a few, document a discourse that contrasts a meritocratic form of equality with a levelling form; unsurprisingly, these particular intellectuals prefer merito-cracy.³⁰⁹

The Characters, I would argue, sidestep this issue by simply avoiding the con-tested word and implementing a related concept via the construction of a com-munity of ἐλευθέριοι, of “free, wealthy men who act the part.” Eleutherios thus describes the implementation of a specific concept of eleutheria in interaction.

Visible also elsewhere in Theophrastus and even criticised as a social ideal peculiar to the Peripatetic circle,³¹⁰ this concept is most explicit in the ἀνελεύθερος sketch, rendered by Diggle as the ‘Illiberal Man’. In describing behaviour inappropriate to a free man, the text seems to focus exclusively on parsimonious behaviour, which fits well with the criticism levelled against the Peripatetics, but also high-lights that the avoidance of paying for slaves and clothing constitutes a destruction of the visible markers of an eleutherios and thus interferes with the legibility of the social sphere and its web of observation and control.³¹¹ A closer look reveals further interference with collective agency: rather than manifesting the collectively and institutionally assigned honour granted by his choral victory in an appropriate fashion, the Illiberal Man chooses the cheapest possible option, a wooden head-band with minimal inscription. In the second scene, he quietly slinks out of the ekklesia rather than honouring the collective’s call for epidoseis.³¹² These situations are alike in that the collective is vulnerable and its cohesion and its implemen-tation of control through the exercise of collective agency depend on an individual

308 It is also countered by the collective sanctioning certain kinds of social sub-networks in certain contexts, e.g. the symposium.

309 Isoc. 3.14; 7.21. Plat. Rep. 558c and Leg. 757b-c; Aristot. Pol. 1301a26-1301b4; 1302a7.

310 Teles 40f. Hense; cf. Diog. Laert. 6.90 where Theophrastus is portrayed as being gen-erally known for his rich attire. Cf. also Isoc. 4 49; Aristot. Pol. 1339b5, where the term is used to refer to refined education and taste; in Xen. Mem. 2.1.22 it is a positive, visible quality.

311 Theophr. Char. 22.5-13. Slaves: 4, 7, 10, 12; clothing: 5, 8, 11, 13. Cf. Millett 2007, 101-103.

312 Theophr. Char. 22. Cf. Theophr. Char. 13.2, where the Overzealous Man may be committing himself to financial aid he cannot actually provide, generating similar con-tingency in a vulnerable situation for the collective.

responding – in the first case the collective has assigned a distinction the indi-vidual is expected to confirm, whereas in the second scenario, the collective is dependent on the financial aid of its constituents, again in exchange for honour.

The Illiberal Man thus disregards the value of honour that ensures the collectively guarded balance between said collective and the distinguished individual, so dis-regards the medium that maintains equality in difference. The Toady similarly deviates against this control regime of equality by exhibiting slave-like behaviour that is inappropriate to someone who has the means to be an eleutherios.³¹³ The Arrogant Man treats his fellow citizens as inferior, to the point of rejecting offices he has been elected to,³¹⁴ and the Oligarch emphatically dissociates himself from those he perceives to be of lower social standing.³¹⁵ All these passages document the destruction of the cohesion of this constructed community through actions that remove individuals from this value-correlated group and impose individual control over the construction of the relevant community.

The second issue raised by the quotation from the Dyskolos is the significance of collective agency. Knemon claims that perfect collective identity would abolish the need for institutions of collective agency, naming courts and warfare as examples. The constructivist approach easily dismantles this wishful thinking by highlighting that the cohesion of the collective is renewed precisely via the con-stant exercise of agency as a collective. Ensuring collective agency in the courts, the smooth functioning of the fora and the networks of sociopolitical exchange in general is hence a core concern of the Characters. The Talker, the Tactless Man, the Repulsive Man (βδελυρὸς), the Overzealous Man (περίεργος), the Obtuse Man (ἀναίσθητος), and the Friend of Villains all interfere with collective action and thus prevent the exercise of agency in sync with the normative order, resulting in its disturbance.³¹⁶ Whereas the Talker’s appreciation of his own voice leads him to halt progress in the law court and the theatre, the Man who has lost all sense, for instance, destablises the law court by being so frequently involved in legal disputes and by disrupting procedure by introducing motions and bringing excessive amounts of evidence.³¹⁷ The Obtuse Man finally wastes the time of his fellow citizens by missing an appointment at court and generally by being an untrust-worthy part of the social network.³¹⁸ In the assembly, the Slanderer besmirches

313 Theophr. Char. 2.5, 8 (acts as go-between); 9 (goes shopping in the women’s agora, cf.

22.7); 11 (explicitly tears the pillow from the slave’s hands in the theatre). On acting like a slave cf. Millett 2007.

314 Theophr. Char. 24 passim.

315 Theophr. Char. 26.3-5.

316 Theophr. Char. 7.7f.; 11.3, 5, 8; 12; 13.2f., 5-7, 11; 14.3f.; 29.6.

317 Theophr. Char. 6.8.

318 Theophr. Char. 14.3 and passim.

the speaker’s reputation, similarly harming the bonds of trust necessary for col-lective action.³¹⁹ The Characters further highlights that collective agency is deve-loped not only at the political level of polis politics, but also at the social level of collective meals, where the individual’s contribution to collective agency is simi-larly enforced. Hence the Penny-pincher’s sub-par contribution to a communal meal is a case of the deficiency of the part weakening the whole.³²⁰ The smooth functioning of the social network of the constructed collective of eleutheroi as embodied by the exercise of collective agency by a firmly delineated, value-correlated collective is thus reinforced throughout the text, ensuring that the collective value constructs are constantly being enacted in individual interaction.