The social network dynamics of the Characters

The final step in this analysis of Theophrastus’ Characters is now to abstract the ideal structure of the social network implicitly envisaged in the text’s normative inversions. Translated into network terms, the emphasis on equal, balanced con-nectivity embodied in philia equates to a value-correlated quantitative and quali-tative balance between in-degree and out-degree for every node in the network.

That simply means that every individual’s outgoing and incoming interactions are supposed to be in balance, because they are controlled by philia. The individual interactions visible in the Characters are therefore envisaged as being never truly dyadic, but always triadic in that they are being controlled by the collective, which is present not only within the identity configurations of both ego and alter, but, as we just saw, is also embodied in the spaces sanctioned for interaction by said collective. In Callon’s terms, this configuration, whereby an abstract collective acts as the obligatory passage point for all interaction, is both highly irreversible and convergent, i.e. stable.³⁷³ At the level of the overarching societal network, the text seems thus to be aiming to keep this network as stable and as perfectly formed as possible, maintaining very high and even connectivity across all nodes by means of the implemented control regimes. Ideally, social connectivity is equal across all nodes, resulting in a fully distributed network structure.

This configuration imposes caps on the growth dynamics of individual nodes, limiting the clusters individuals like the Oligarch can form, and further denies the addition of new nodes beyond the established network bounds. From the point of view of any individual node, the consequence is a balanced growth dynamic that increases the density of the network rather than its size, further contributing to the high connectivity of the social network as a whole. All these factors result in a cohesive small-world structure of the collective social network and cause so-called “weak ties”, relationships between people who are not close friends or family, to be strengthened in that the value cosmos that governs strong ties is applied also to them.³⁷⁴ The dynamics of such a social structure would theo-retically not only allow for the maintenance of collective control over said struc-ture by means of the web of observation, but should also increase the resilience of the network to external and internal attack, while also enabling information to cascade across the network rapidly.³⁷⁵ Information can thus be smoothly eva-luated by the entire collective. It is worth emphasising that these dynamics are

373 Callon 1986, 196, 203-218. See above p. 54.

374 On strong and weak ties see Granovetter 1973a.

375 On cascades and rapid processes of diffusion in networks, see Barabasi 2002, 119-121, 211; on information cascades see Granovetter, Mark S. “Threshold Models of Collec-tive Behavior”, in: American Journal of Sociology 83:6 (1978), 1420-1443; Bikhchandani,

well suited to resisting external change that is not collectively vetted, as long as actions are being correlated with the normative order developed here, as the cascade would shut undesirable change down quickly.³⁷⁶ Even in terms of net-work dynamics, the netnet-work is therefore built with an eye towards boundaries rather than towards unfettered connectivity and growth.

Let us put these results back in context. As I argued above, the socio-political discourse of Athens in the 320s and 310s BC was characterised by a destabilisation of meaning, which manifested most prominently in the census restrictions im-posed from 322-318 and 317-307 BC that destabilised what it meant to be an Athenian citizen.³⁷⁷ In the late fourth century, the size of the social group depicted and constructed in the Characters may potentially be located somewhere in the range of 10-20.000 individual (male) citizens.³⁷⁸ Conceived of as a social network, a group of this size would necessarily appear as a complex network, even if it were artificially limited to include only the well-to-do citizens as the Characters does.

The conflicted socio-political discourse that produced this text both naturally and manifestly exerted pressure on the configuration of this complex network. In response, the societal model of the Characters seems to envision an ideal con-figuration for this Athenian elite social network, but expressed in a faux-realistic,

Sushil, Hirshleifer, David, and Welch, Ivo. “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change in Informational Cascades”, in: Journal of Political Economy 100:5 (1992), 992-1026; Goldenberg, Jacob, Libai, Barak, and Muller, Eitan. “Talk of the Network:

A Complex Systems Look at the Underlying Process of Word-of-mouth”, in: Marketing Letters 12:3 (2001), 211-223.

376 Baran 1964, 1-10; Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch 1992. All these hypothetical statements are obviously still located at the level of discourse.

377 This line of conflict is visible also in the description of the build-up to the Lamian War at Diod. 18.10.1.

378 This range is suggested by the figures given for the census restrictions implemented in the periods predominated by Phokion and Demetrios of Phaleron (Diod. 18.18.1-6 and 18.74.3; Plut. Phoc. 28.4; see O’Sullivan 2009a, 108-116 for discussion). A network of this size would be complex by definition. On the concept of the complex network see Strogatz, Steven H. “Exploring Complex Networks”, in: Nature 410:6825 (2001), 268-276. For an overview of real complex social networks see Estrada, Ernesto. The Structure of Complex Networks: Theory and Applications. Oxford 2011, 402-408. Complex networks are notoriously difficult to study empirically, as is pointed out by Golden-berg, Libai, and Muller 2001, 212f.: “The spread of information in a given social system may be described as “an adaptive complex system”, i.e., a system that consists of a large number of individual entities which interact with each other (in what is sometimes an indiscernible manner), ultimately generating large-scale, collective visible behavior.

Although the individual interactions may be simple in many such adaptive systems, the large scale of the system at work allows the emergence of patterns which are hard to predict, hard to track empirically, and are often almost impossible to analyze analyti-cally.”

inverted form. The value-correlation of the social network in the Characters has emerged as aiming to produce and reproduce a qualitatively assortative social net-work,³⁷⁹ while also keeping the natural scale-free tendencies within this network in check: equals are to associate more strongly to keep individualism under con-trol, and are thereby reinforced as equals. Expressed in graph terms, the value-correlation constructed here aims to dampen the network’s tendency towards power-law distribution (meaning that a small number of nodes have most of the connections) and pushes for normal distribution (meaning that connections are evenly distributed among all nodes), thereby levelling extremes of clustering within the network. This is achieved by pushing for high internal connectivity, which is produced by inclusively sanctioning individuals for actions that affect their connectivity either positively or negatively, always in non-conforming ways.

The Grumbler’s and the Arrogant Man’s behaviour, for instance, affects their connectivity negatively, whereas the Toady, the Boastful Man, and the Over-zealous Man all increase their social surface, but in ways that are not compatible with the value cosmos implemented in the text.³⁸⁰ In so doing, the text implicitly imposes a distributed small-world structure that aims to limit scale-free dynamics by dampening preferential attachment and rejecting growth.

3.8 Conclusions

On my reading, Theophrastus’ Characters has emerged as an incoherent yet para-doxically cohesive observation of lived discursive reality in late fourth century Athens, rendered as snapshots of interaction. The work appears as the bones of a theory of society expounded not by means of straightforward exposition but through the practice of close observation and its narrative re-shaping, a theory that recognises the centrality of deviation-control by means of value regimes and social density. This ‘practical theory’ is highly specific to its time, the late 320s and 310s BC, in that it is embedded in a contemporary discourse among the group of individuals who identify as wealthy citizens about the nature of the ‘democratic’

Athenian collective, which was under threat due to the contemporary exacer-bation of political faultlines. These include, but are by no means limited to, the problem of external affiliation to Kassander or any of the other Diadochi, the franchise debate engendered by Antipater, the questions surrounding the rule of

379 Assortative networks are characterized by links being most common between similarly connected nodes, see Estrada 2011, 31. In the terminology of social network analysis, this equates to positive degree-degree correlation.

380 Theophr. Char. 2; 13.5; 17.2f., 7-9; 23; 24.2, 6, 8-12.

law and its degree of interference in the household, the contention about pay-ments for civic participation, as well as the question of liturgies and the assign-ment of individual honour.³⁸¹ This bundle of social, political and legal issues contributes to a socio-political discourse under stress with which the Characters interacts with. The text does so by rephrasing what has here been cast as the social network configuration of a specific group, emphasising the construction of this group as socio-politically relevant and the construction of its agency as the source of collective significance, and re-formulating the ways in which this agency should function and be employed.

Within this discourse, the text seems to offer a very specific solution to com-plexities and faultlines perceived by Theophrastus within his contemporary dis-cursive reality. The Characters provides both a societal model and its imple-mentation by negotiating between male adult individual and the collective gen-erated by their interactions and relations among one another. We have observed the tension between individual and collective when it comes to generating social cohesion while maintaining individual agency: the individual’s construction of his own actions tends to differ from the collective’s construction due to the plurality of interaction modes available. These tensions have to be harnessed to allow for the deployment of collective agency. The Characters shows how this can be done, by sketching out how individual and collective agency can be constructed, chan-nelled, and constrained in tandem. First of all, the text acknowledges individual contingency perception and agency, implicitly giving it substantial room by docu-menting it and thereby making it thinkable and even – to a certain extent – acceptable. If one considers that the complexity of networks can have occluding effects, one might then say that unperceived complexity in social action takes effect to reduce contingency, since the plurality of anticipatable behaviour makes unanticipatable situations rarer. By humourously reinforcing cognitive categories and interaction modes for deviant behaviour the Characters thus facilitates social cohesion at an extradiegetic level. In that, the text gives shape to a paradox of contingency-control: in narratively controlling behaviour, it is codified. That said, truly bad behaviour is actually placed beyond the text, implicitly rendering it un-thinkable within the textual society.³⁸²

Secondly, however, the work implements a clearly configured cognitive net-work of value regimes designed to shape individual and collective agency along a collectivist line of thought. While the Characters appears to be blantantly indivi-dualist at first glance, the second part of the text’s underlying message in fact

381 See above p. 102.

382 White 2008², 36f.

consists in the construction of collective normative control, whereby an abstrac-ted collectivist identity defines and controls the parameters of contingency. To do so, the text establishes a social space in which this normative control takes effect by implementing a construction of the individual as a distributed self and a sphere of action that is constituted by the very fact that it is occupied by the actions of these distributed individuals. Within this sphere of action, it then asserts the primacy of a specific construction of philia by developing a set of collective control regimes and interaction modes over which the prevalence of philia is asserted, particularly in relation to the economic interaction mode.

The text implements this configuration by introducing a range of sanctioning control mechanisms at a variety of textual levels, while also placing certain aspects of life beyond question, for instance by excluding collective (or ‘polis’) religion from its subject matter. Implicitly, asserting collective agency via collective-con-forming action is thus portrayed as the field of action on which the wealthy individual can adequately deploy his individual agency. The text thereby evokes and reaffirms a collective of the well-to-do, levelling individual deviation of all kinds, ensuring relationships and connectivity, and implicitly bolstering the col-lective agency of its eleutheroi by reasserting how crucial it is to observe others. In this construction, which seems reminiscent of prior formulations of the patrios politeia and appears as a re-formulation rather than an innovation ex nihilo, societal power and contingency control lie in the cohesive collective agency of this group.

Although its members act as individuals within a value-correlated social network to define the world and its meaning, they are also configured as being continually sanctioned by the embodiment of collective observation and sanction infused both into every individual and into civic space, into the very streets of the polis.

To put it rather drastically, the text thus denies that the exertion of semantic hegemony lies within the scope of the individual’s agency by writing it out of the normative boundaries and asserting the polis-collective of friends as the ideal locus of self. While it thus accommodates the individual to an extent, it ultimately locates it in the collective.

The Characters affirms the power of the collective in yet another way by im-plementing resilient social network dynamics as well as control regimes suited to their preservation. Rather than presenting these dynamics and regimes, the text offers narratives that reflect processes of contingency control in inversion and thereby subtly ensures that the constructed collective remains relatively stable and can assert semantic meta-control over the constructed society without explicitly formulating positive norms.³⁸³ Based on the evidence available in the text, one

383 Cf. Eidinow 2011, 33 who makes a similar observation in relation to the sphere of polis religion.

can thus posit that this construction, viewed as a social network, is envisaged as dense and distributed, with a balanced distribution of ties among its nodes, allow-ing for both resilience and information cascades due to high connectivity and low centralisation. In so doing, the text implicitly imposes a distributed small-world structure that simultaneously aims to limit scale-free dynamics in that the un-balanced growth of individual nodes and centralisation are rejected.

Finally, it seems necessary to return to the wider observations and claims made at the beginning of this chapter. I emphasise once more that this analysis claims to be nothing more than one possible interpretation of a facet of the power discourse that existed within the poleis of the early Hellenistic period. This has not been a comprehensive study of ‘the individual in polis society’ – to my mind, and within the conceptual framework adopted here, that seems impossible to achieve, even if the evidence were better than it is. What I hope to have offered is a con-sidered, structural assessment of a unique literary construction of the well-to-do Athenian and his social mesh as a reaction and contribution to contemporary Athenian discourse. This construction seems typical of its time in that it is con-cerned with controlling tensions within an existing collective configuration by activating a historical imaginary. In analysing this construct, value-correlated social connectivity emerged as the essential check on this textual Athenian society.

Shaping this control mechanism is true power, and the text subtly locates this power within the distributed collective of individual citizens rather than else-where.

So far, this citizen collective has been treated in isolation, with the result that it has appeared to be supremely capable of controlling its constituent parts, the main tension being between individual and collective control. The early Hel-lenistic power discourse – or any power discourse for that matter – is obviously more complicated than this, and further analysis shall reveal how conservative and simplistic the Characters’ imaginary is, and how extensively it occludes external tensions. The results achieved here accordingly call for qualification and shall be contrasted with a study of the interpenetration of collective networks of meaning.

Before I can address that task (in Chapters 5 and 6), however, a parallel enquiry needs to be undertaken in order to establish a point of comparison. We thus turn now to my second societal imaginary, that of the emergent Hellenistic court.