The cognitive network: Meta-control under tension

The plurality of existing value regimes, including the prominent ones outlined above, philia, economy, religion, and truth, naturally contributes to their mis-application in individual interaction as their boundaries are constantly being tested

319 Theophr. Char. 28.5.

320 Theophr. Char. 10.3.

321 White 2008², 223.

in individual responses to contingency. Unfortunately, the text’s extensive oc-clusion of collective religious practice precludes the evaluation of related conflicts, since the text shields these interaction modes from social deviation. Nevertheless, the Characters does show some examples of the resultant tension between the value systems. The three ‘economic’ sketches are the most explicit portrayal of the extensive misapplication of a collectively valued interaction mode.³²² As a result, tension between interaction modes is visible most prominently between the economic mode, associated by actors in interactions involving the transfer of wealth, especially in the form of money, and the positive reciprocity and trust associated by philia relationships, which are ensured by truth and equality.³²³ Let us now consider a few particularly significant examples from the text in an effort to hone in on the value network painted by the Characters.

The Illiberal Man, for instance, overapplies the economic principles of profit maximisation and expense minimisation by extending them to philia relationships, affecting not only his monetised dealings with the citizen collective, but also with his family and friends.³²⁴ In doing so, he disregards the Aristotelian solution to this issue of code switching by not accepting the predominance of philia and the measure of esteem that makes up the difference.³²⁵ It is not surprising that the description of the Penny-pincher also provides many examples of such tension:

he forbids his wife to perform an essential neighbourhood service that greases the social network surrounding the oikos, namely lending small items of every-day use, and himself forbids others from partaking of his fruit trees.³²⁶ When a fellow citizen does him a favour by saving him a trip to the market, he complains about the expense – i.e. economic loss – rather than reinforcing the trust relationship that enabled the action.³²⁷ The value configuration of the text seems to dictate

322 Theophr. Char. 10; 22; 30. This form of bad timing is generally visible in the Untimely Man sketch (12), though it obviously derives from a lack of perceptiveness, a failure to coordinate perception and identity in accordance with norm. The other prominent form of code misapplication is the misuse of sanctioning mechanisms, for example the use of corrective communication and meta-communication in disagreement with truth, visible e.g. as slander (28), rumour (8), and faux disbelief (1.10). These sanctioning mechanisms will be discussed below, e.g. p. 155, as they are integral to the social net-work structure.

323 Konstan 1997a, 82, notes the non-economic nature of friendship. For the conflict ob-served here see also the theoretical observations by Luhmann 1988b, 240f.

324 Theophr. Char. 22.2f. (collective), 4, 6, 10 (family), 9 (friends).

325 Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1163b10-20. With Finley 1973b, 21 this appears as a conceptual con-sequence of the underdevelopment of the economic sub-system.

326 Theophr. Char. 10.8, 13. Dem. 55.23 shows that the normal cordial behaviour between neighbours extended to bonds between the women.

327 Theophr. Char. 10.4.

that friends be treated as economically privileged partners through balanced or positive reciprocity, the collective demanding the precedence of the philia mod-ifier over the economic code. This constructed primacy of philia is intended to allow for the resolution of all social situations by providing a hierarchy of inter-action modes, while simultaneously curtailing the social connectivity generated by the economic interaction mode. Economic fraud among friends, as in the case of the Shabby Profiteer, who sells his friend watered-down wine, is thus charac-terised as particularly heinous, precisely because two contingency-reducing value systems conflict, both of which are sanctioned by the collective.³²⁸ The pro-minence of the eranos loan as a social institution in the text is thus not surprising, because it blurs the boundaries between philia and economic interaction mode:

unsurprisingly, the Illiberal Man evades such a loan, taking advantage of social meta-communication to apply the economic interaction mode.³²⁹ The Ungrateful Grumbler, on the other hand, ultimately agrees to contribute to a loan for a friend, controlling individual contingency by reproducing the collective norm.³³⁰ The Distrustful Man (ἄπιστος) is similarly on the cusp, since only very close friendship or a blood relationship can convince him to give precedence to philia over the economic mode.³³¹ Notably, the primacy of philia over the economic mode goes so far as to cause the Penny-pincher to be sanctioned for not allowing his business partner any profit-margin of his own after a sale.³³² The priority of the philia sys-tem over the economic code is thus asserted even within purely economic trans-actions and emerges as the central structuring principle of the Characters’ abstract network of identities.

The reason for this may lie in the nature of the economic code, which sim-plifies interaction by offering an absolute code for its evaluation – is payment complete or not? – and invites the attachment of subsequent interactions that operate on the same code.³³³ This runs counter to the model of social connectivity developed in the Characters, which hinges on the value nexus of philia. The latter implements reciprocity, truth, and trust, i.e. the fundamental expectation that every social action incurs an equivalent or better reaction designed to move to-wards balancing a virtual tally without ever achieving balance due to the com-plexity of social interaction. This paradoxical chain of social dominoes aids in the constant reproduction of social interaction in accordance with the constructed value order and thereby enforces collectivism, the precedence of the collective of

328 Theophr. Char. 30.5, 12.

329 Theophr. Char. 22.9.

330 Theophr. Char. 15.7.

331 Theophr. Char. 18.7.

332 Theophr. Char. 10.7.

333 Luhmann 1988, 244.

other, but equal individuals, i.e. the wealthy citizens of the socio-political com-munity constructed by the patrios politeia. The narrative of the Characters with its underlying, unspecific, mediating norms impresses on the individual that he is to construct contingency and resolve its perception in accordance with these col-lective configurations: while reciprocity removes individual contingency since the individual is reassured that any action will produce an equal or equivalent reaction, collectivism levels the individual, reducing and focusing the idiosyncratic plurality of identities that form the individual and cause the deviations visible in the Characters.

Thereby, the collective takes possession of the individual’s agency. Put differently, this means that the individual has to endure the individual contingencies he per-ceives in order to reduce contingency for the collective. To that end, contingen-cies are countered by individual agency constructed in the sense of the collective, i.e. in response to collective contingency.

The next step is to provide a more detailed analysis of these two mediating value systems normatively implemented in the Characters’ social imaginary. Even a cur-sory reading of the Characters will reveal that an insistence on reciprocity is central to the text, as it was to Greek culture.³³⁴ Besides the sphere of social and divine interaction,³³⁵ this is particularly visible in the economy of sharing, lending, and borrowing that can be traced in almost every sketch, taking the shape of what Thomas Gallant has called a “hierarchically differentiated support network”.³³⁶ This economy, which has been thoroughly studied by Paul Millett, consists in helping one another out and in sharing not only items of every-day use, but also information, relating, for instance, to trade and society.³³⁷ A more specifically economic aspect is the socio-economic institution of eranos we touched on above,

334 On reciprocity in Greek culture see e.g. Herman, Gabriel. Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City. Cambridge 1987, esp. 92-94 (on trust and reciprocity); Millett 1991, esp. 30-44, 110; Gallant 1991, 146-152; Mitchell 1997, esp. 1, 16, 164-166; note also the con-tributions collected in Christopher Gill, Norman Postlethwaite, and Richard Seaford (eds.). Reciprocity in Ancient Greece. Oxford 1998.

335 Theophr. Char. 15.3 (greeting); 15.11 (gods).

336 The economy of sharing, lending, and borrowing encompasses everything from com-munal loans to items of every-day use and information: Theophr. Char. 1.5; 2.6, 9, 10;

3.3 (information about the price of grain); 4.13-15; 9.3; 10.2-4, 8, 11-13; 11.7; 12.4 (standing bail); 14.8; 15.5, 7; 17.2; 17.9; 22.4, 9; 30. See esp. Millett 1991, esp. 143-148;

Gallant 1991, 143-169, esp. 152-155 (quotation from 152). Gallant abstracts the value-correlated social network he is discussing in the form of concentric circles. As the problems for the individual grow, the further afield his search for support takes him, in a progress from close friends to distant polis-level benefactors. On the practice of lending in the early Hellenistic period cf. also Walser, Andreas V. Bauern und Zinsnehmer.

Politik, Recht und Wirtschaft im frühhellenistischen Ephesos. Munich 2008, 105-195.

337 Cf. e.g. Lys. 1.14 and Aristoph. Eccl. 376-477, where information and services are shared in a similar fashion.

a communal meal or an interest-free neighbourhood loan that evens out the wealth distribution within a social peer group, conserving its socio-economic cohesion.³³⁸ We have now seen that collective sanction is employed against indi-viduals that refuse to participate in interaction networks structured by philia, or participate only selectively or even exploitatively. Reciprocity as the interaction mode of philia thus emerges as a central, contingency-reducing expectation for interaction. Since it is particularly crucial within a social network like the one constructed by the Characters, in which the male civic community is supposedly egalitarian, it is not at all surprising that this value system is so prominently policed in this text.

The second central mediating value system is collective precedence, made manifest in the collective hegemony over truth and its intent on self-preservation.

The centrality of this value concept is visible already in the fact that ‘excessive’

engagement for the collective in accordance with the normative cosmos is not found as a deviant behavioural type in the Characters.³³⁹ The previous analysis of contingency construction has shown that the collectivism implemented in this text consists in prioritising contingencies constructed by the collective over con-tingencies that may be perceived by the individual, meaning that the individual subscribes to the value judgements of society and employs his agency in com-patible ways. This is the result of a continuously reinforced consensus about the nominal equality of the individual constituents of the collective and the resultant precedence of majority interest,³⁴⁰ which is of course deeply embedded in the political institutions that embody collective agency, namely the majority vote and the lot.³⁴¹ The value is thus tied to the maintenance of collective agency. In the context of the dichotomy between individual and collective studied here, collec-tivism has another level to it, namely a certain degree of individual transparency:

collective observation and evaluation have been constructed as a prerequisite for the stability of the collective. As a consequence, the individual has to endure the

338 Theophr. Char. 1.5; 15.7; 17.9; 22.9.

339 Cf. Plut. Phoc. 10.3, where Hypereides is made to contrast individual gain and collective welfare: ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, μὴ σκοπεῖτε μόνον εἰ πικρός, ἀλλ᾽ εἰ προῖκά εἰμι πικρός (“Ath-enians, test not only whether I am harsh, but whether I am harsh without being bribed”).

340 On egalitarianism see Schofield, Malcolm. “Political Friendship and the Ideology of Reciprocity”, in: Paul Cartledge, Paul Millett, and Sitta von Reden (eds.). Kosmos. Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens. Cambridge 1998, 37-51, here 43-47.

The precedence of majority interest is also visible in the monopoly of honour exercised by the institutionalised political collective (Ma 2013b), made manifest in the civic space through monumentalisation (e.g. also at Theophr. Char. 22.1f.).

341 On the majority vote see Bleicken 1995⁴, 193-209, and recently Flaig, Egon. Die Mehr-heitsentscheidung: Entstehung und kulturelle Dynamik. Paderborn 2013.

individual contingencies identified above by subscribing to the superimposed collective narrative of contingency.