Greek Tragedy: Atë

The mindset of literacy is the belief in the idea of how we can solve problems (the “mindset” of institutions). Within the framework of grammatology, we need to work with the resources within our own traditional narrative (Lecture Notes). As human beings subject to the civil dictates of habitus, we are “formatted with a culture” from the time we are born. This is called “deep memory” (Lecture Notes).  Deep memory is “put” in the body. It manifests in the way we walk and the way we stand. It is where intuition is learned through the languages and cultures that comprise human experience (Lecture Notes). Virno states that human beings are open to the world, but we obey regulations of humanness as an organism. Human instinctual drives, at the level of organism, belong to the state of nature. These drives that sometimes slip from the frame of culture in conversations, in moments of reflective thought, in our perceptions of ourselves through and among others, are chaos, in Virno’s system, which, while always potentially present, are conditioned by habitus, at the species-specific level and at the level of the institution. There is always a disconnect between our drives and their expression through language and their repression through institutions. Virno writes, quoting Plessner and Gehlen, “Man is ‘problematic’ . . . because he is devoid of a defined environment, thus corresponding, point by point, to his psychosomatic configuration and to his aggressive drive” (16-17). Additionally, “Our species is distinguished by its ‘openness to the world’—‘world’ meaning a vital context that always remains partially undetermined and unpredictable” (17). This overabundance of disconnected stimuli “provokes a constant uncertainty and a disorientation that can never be fully reversed” (17).

This uncertainty and disorientation is always present through the image of ourselves that is fashioned and maintained through culture, “deep memory,” language, and institutions. It is what needs to be appeased or broken up with happiness and the corresponding sense of well-being it inspires. The Greeks enacted this drama of the human condition in theatre. Greek tragedies exemplify the contradiction between human drives and the social/political state. Tragedies grew out of rituals (partially oral, partially scripted); they “focused attention on the imagined community of the Greeks.” The core of tragedy is atë, which means “for the individual, blindness, for the group, calamity or disaster” or ruin, folly, and delusion (Lecture Notes). Atë exemplifies the action performed by “the hero, usually because of his or her hubris that leads to his or her death or downfall” (Absolute Astronomy).

 Mosaic from the Baths of Decius on the Aventine Hill, Rome, 2nd Century CE.

Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone is a good example of atë. Creon becomes ruler of Thebes when his two nephews (Oedipus’s sons) kill each other in combat. He orders burial rights for Eteocles but refuses to offer the same rights to Polynices, who died fighting against Thebes (affiliated with the armies of Argos). Polynices’ sister Antigone goes against Creon’s decree and performs the burial rights. The private dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, her sister, at the beginning of Antigone demonstrates the extent of Antigone’s will to act against Creon’s decree in the name of family honor according to the gods—a notion that Creon himself is blind to in his position of power:

ISMENE:

What’s the matter? Trouble, clearly . . .

You sound so dark, so grim.

ANTIGONE:

Why not? Our own brothers’ burial!

Hasn’t Creon graced one with all the rites,

Disgraced the other? . . . (Trans. Robert Fagles 26-28)

                      ____

why, a city-wide proclamation, rumor has it,
forbids anyone to bury him, even mourn him. (Trans. Robert Fagles 33-34)
                      ____

There you have it. You’ll soon show what your are,
worth your breeding, Ismene, or a coward—
for all your royal blood.

ISMENE:
My poor sister, if things have come to this,
who am I to make or mend them, tell me,
what good am I to you?

ANTIGONE:
                                                 Decide.
Will you share the labor, share the work?

ISMENE:
What work, what’s the risk? What do you mean?

ANTIGONE:
                                                       Raising her hands.
Will you lift up his dead body with these bare hands
and lower it with me?

ISMENE:
                                   What? You’d bury him—
when a law forbids the city? (Trans. Robert Fagles 44-53)
                      ____

ISMENE:
. . .
Now look at the two of us, left so alone . . .
think what a death we’ll die, the worst of all
if we violate the laws and override
the fixed decree of the throne, its power—
we must be sensible. Remember we are women,
we’re not born to contend with men. Then too,
we’re underlings, ruled by must stronger hands,
so we must submit in this, and things still worse.

I, for one, I’ll beg the dead to forgive me—
I’m forced, I have no choice—I must obey
the ones who stand in power. Why rush to extremes?
It’s madness, madness.

ANTIGONE:
                                              I won’t insist,
no, even if you should have a change of heart,
I’d never welcome you in the labor, not with me.
So, do as you like, whatever suits you best—
I will bury him myself.
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Do as you like, dishonor the laws
the gods hold in honor. (Trans. Robert Fagles 60-92)

Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865), Oil on Canvas

Both characters, and the particular situation they find themselves in, illustrate the disruption between what Virno describes as species-specific rules (rituals) or regularity and the rule of law or a positive norm. The concept of katechon, meaning “‘that which restrains’—a force that defers, over and over again, total destruction” (Virno 45), is operating from different loci in Sophocles’ play: the power of the gods and the power of the state (Creon’s decree). Both “rules,” equally viable and coexistent, contradict each other, and create something like the disconnect between human drives and their expression in the logic of the rule at application. Antigone’s decision is imprudent because she refuses to relinquish her joissance (bliss). She becomes uncanny, temporarily insane (atë) (Lecture Notes). Tragedy is a dimension in the world that is irreducible; nobody is immune from it (Lecture Notes).

While tragic plays and the enactment of atë may have been the way to deal with the tragic dimension of the world in Greek life, today’s equivalent is consulting: the EmerAgency (Lecture Notes). Professor Ulmer describes the term EmerAgency on his blog Heuretics: Inventing Electracy:

The EmerAgency is a virtual consultancy, testing a practice of deliberative reason for the Internet. This practice allows netizens (capable of egency within electrate subject formation) to participate in decision-making on public policy issues. Deliberative (practical) reason decides at light speed within the apparatus of electracy, supported by the invention of an image metaphysics that is to digital media what the categories introduced by Aristotle are to literacy.

Policy debates until now have been structured by an impasse — the confrontation between the modalities of thought (metaphysics) created within each of the previous apparati: Religion, faith, obedience (Orality) / Science, knowledge, proof (literacy). The key to understanding the aporetic character of policy problems in modernity is to note the incommensurability of these modalities, and their respective institutionalizations. Another version of the impasse, more revealing of its irreducibility, is the pair Pain/Fact. (Ulmer, pars. 1-2)