RELATED TERMS; Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Platationocene; Cultural geography; Postanthropocentrism; Posthuman; Posthumanism;

One strand of narrative environments may be defined as Anthropo-Scenes: they concern what the world is like both now, what it might be like in times to come and what life, including human life, in those present and future worlds is like and might be like. This is to acknowledge the importance of narrative in understanding and communicating issues related to the notion of an ‘anthropocene’, a concept which begins its life in the discourse of Earth System Science but which has given rise to a wider intellectual event-space termed the Anthropo-Scene, a term denoting “a flurry of activity with far-reaching ontological, epistemic, political and aesthetic consequences” (Lorimer, 2016).

Castree (2015) argues that,

“The current Anthroposcene is far too science led. It is dominated by those who regard planetary change, and human responses to it, as amenable to analysis and influence absent any deep engagement with other forms of knowing and acting. While we should thank geoscientists for sounding the environmental alarm, other epistemic communities beyond a few social science fields (notably environmental economics) need to shape the discourse before it solidifies. The stakes are much too high for people not yet part of ‘global change science’ (GCS) to watch from the sidelines.”

In the context of the design of narrative environments, Anthropo-Scenes bring together design and science to characterise the historicity of the ’present moment’, historicity here including futurity. In other words, the historicity or historical being of ‘anthropocene’ acknowledges the entangling of its distinct temporalities, such as the cultural, economic, ecological and geological, in narrativity. [Historicity as the narrativisation of temporality, to create factual historiographies and fictional stories].

References

Castree N (2015) Changing the Anthropo(s)cene: Geographers, global environmental change and the politics of knowledge. Dialogues in Human Geography 5(3): 301–316.

Lorimer, J. (2017). The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed. Social Studies of Science, 47 (1), 117–142. Available from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312716671039 [Accessed 22 August 2019].

Other sources

Anthropo-scene: art and nature in a manufactured era [Art exhibition website] http://Anthroposcene.weebly.com/

Climaginaries [Website] https://www.climaginaries.org

Narrating Climate Futures [Website] https://www.climatefutures.lu.se/climate-fiction/anthropo-scenes

Technology is our next nature: Anthropo-Scene:  https://www.nextnature.net/search/Anthropo-scene/

The Anthropo.scene [Blog] http://jeremyjschmidt.com/

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantial Model – Greimas; Agon; Narratology; Protagonist

The term antagonist is derived from the Greek word antagonistes, meaning opponent, competitor or rival. The antagonist may be a character, group of characters, or an institution representing the difficulties and obstacles against which the protagonist must struggle, preventing the protagonist from achieving his/her/its/their quest, goal, destination or destiny. In an agonistic model of narrative, such as that conceived by A. J. Greimas for example, which conceptualises the helper and the opponent as actantial contraries, the actantial role of opponent may be played by a single character, who may be human or non-human, or by a series of human or non-human characters.

Drawing upon another binary distinction, that of friend and enemy, the antagonist may also be called the archenemy or arch-foe of the protagonist.

Employing a yet further dualism, that of hero versus villain, the former may be regarded as protagonist and the latter as antagonist.

The antagonist may also represent a major threat or obstacle to the main character simply by their very existence, without necessarily actively targeting him, her or them. In short, as John Yorke (2013) says, in discussing screenwriting and cinema, antagonism is “the sum total of all the obstacles that obstruct a character in the pursuit of their desires.”

Yorke further suggests that, while antagonists can be external, such as in the James Bond films, antagonism can manifest itself in many different ways, perhaps most interestingly when it lies within the protagonist, such as in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Thus, cowardice, drunkenness or lack of self-esteem can serve as internal obstacles that prevent a character reaching fulfilment. Furthermore, antagonists can be both external and internal, as in the film, Jaws. Nevertheless, Yorke claims, in the context of cinema, quoting Alfred Hitchcock, they all have one thing in common: “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.”

References

Yorke, J. (2013) What makes a great screenplay?, Guardian, p. Review 2-4. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/15/john-yorke-best-screenwriting (Accessed: 16 March 2013).

RELATED TERMS: Tragic theatre – Aristotle; Metalepsis

A Greek tragedy usually starts with a ‘flashback’ or analepsis, a recapitulation of the incidents of the story which occurred prior to those which were selected for the plot. The reader is plunged in medias res (‘into the middle of things’), and earlier incidents in the story are introduced artfully at various stages in the plot, often in the form of retrospective narration. (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 34)

It is analepsis which allows for prolepsis, or ‘flash forward’, to various other moments in the narration by means of which the story is unfolded through the plot.

In the design of narrative environments, such plot movements back and forth in time against a (pre-existing) story timeline may be parallelled or contradicted by the spatial movements of the body against the contours of a (pre-constructed) place, to reinforce or to unsettle the the deictic centre of the narrative environment world by playing with the narrative and spatial parameters of orientation, dis-orientation and re-orientation, as an articulation of storyworld, world of the story, the spatial processional and the embodied experiential worlds of imagination, logic and emotion.

References

Selden, R., Widdowson, P. and Brooker, P. (2005). A Reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory, 5th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.

Use for Distancing effect; estrangement effect

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation; Literary theory; Psychogeography; Situationist International; Epic theatre – Brecht; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud

Mode of address and mode of engagement of audience and/or participant are important aspects of the threshold and immersive experience of design interaction, in terms of narrative beginning and sequential progression as well as environmental entrance and situational flow. They concern the character of the performative invitation to engage with, and persist with, the designed entity. The question that arises, then, is whether this constitutes an empathic engagement or some mixture of empathic and intellectual engagement, which may prompt consideration of the value of the alienation effect discussed by Brecht and the defamiliarisation process discussed by Shklovsky, as devices for guiding responses and interactions.

Alienation effect is a term derived from the theoretical and theatrical practice of the German Marxist playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956. Brecht sought to discover ways of dramatising Marx’s insights into the ways capitalism works. To this end, he sought to create a ‘dialectical theatre’ by means of a set of devices in staging, music, acting, and the telling of parable. The goals was to confound an audience’s comfortable empathic identification with characters and story, as is encouraged by conventional realism [1] or naturalism (Brooker, 2003: 5), through the illusion of the real, the natural and/or the inevitable, i,e, as ‘matters-of-fact’ in contrast to ‘matters of concern’, in Latour’s terms.

Brecht introduces the term Verfremdungseffekt, translated as ‘alienation effect’ [2], in an article entitled “On Chinese Acting” [3], arguing thatthe term had been used in Germany with reference to plays that were of a non-Aristotelian kind, by which he means plays that did not rely on an identification on the audience’s part with the characters on the stage. In Brecht’s (1961: 130) words, the alienation effect refers to,

“… attempts to act in such a manner that the spectator is prevented from feeling his way into the characters. Acceptance or rejection of the characters’ words is thus placed in the conscious realm, not, as hitherto, in the spectator’s subconscious.”

Together these techniques produced the ‘alienation effect’.

Martin Esslin (1960) writes that Brecht could never successfully achieve his famous ‘Verfremdungseffekt, the inhibition of any identification between spectator and actor, in his own highly rational theatre. ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ really comes into its own in the Theatre of the Absurd, where it is impossible to identify oneself with characters one does not understand or whose motives remain a closed book, and so the distance between the public and the happenings on the stage can be maintained.

As Selden, Widdowson and Brooker (2005: 89) explain, Brecht rejected what he called Aristotelian theatre, referring to Aristotle’s formalisation of the practices of Greek tragedy, a form of drama performed in theatres across ancient Greece from the late 6th century BCE whose main proponents were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Cartwright, 2013). Aristotle emphasised the universality and unity of the tragic action, and the identification of audience and hero in an empathic relation which produces a catharsis of emotions. In contrast, Brecht urges that the dramatist avoid a smoothly interconnected plot and prevent any sense of inevitability or universality. The facts of social injustice, Brecht contended, needed to be presented as if they were shockingly unnatural and totally surprising.

To avoid lulling the audience into a state of passive acceptance, the illusion of reality, achieved through the audience’s empathic identification with the tragic hero figure, must be shattered by the use of the alienation effect. The actors must not lose themselves in their roles or seek to promote a purely empathic audience identification. They must present a role to the audience as both recognizable and unfamiliar (recalling Freud’s notion of the uncanny), so that a process of critical assessment can be initiated. The situation, emotions and dilemmas of the characters must be understood from the outside and presented as strange and problematic. This is not to say that actors should avoid the use of emotion, simply that they should not resort to empathy. This is achieved by ‘baring the device’, to use the Formalist term (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 90).

Brecht did not seek, through this effect, to reinforce alienation in Marx’s sense. Marx depicts a condition of human alienation from nature, from other people and from the products of his/her own labour. The latter, in particular, is induced by the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, enforcing an identification of the worker with the commodity value of the products of labour. Ultimately, this is seen by Marx to produce a profound alienation of humans from themselves.

Brecht’s intentions were precisely the opposite: to induce a ‘critical attitude’ which would dispel the acceptance necessary to the maintenance of the conditions producing alienation under capitalism. Brecht intended to describe a technique of distancing the audience from intense empathic involvement in the action of a play, in order to encourage and enable them to reflect objectively on the content, themes and messages inherent in that action.

This difference can be seen in the term Brecht used in German. Marx used the word Entfremdung while Brecht wrote of the Verfremdungseffekt, for which a better translation would be ‘de-alienation’ effect. As such, it is related to similar devices in modernist theory and art such as ‘defamiliarization’ or ostranenie and ‘making strange’ or ‘estrangement’, though these have not always had the overtly politicizing intention of Brecht’s method.

Brecht’s ideas were widely adopted, often in association with feminism, psychoanalysis and the Marxism of Louis Althusser, in the film theory of the 1970s associated with the British film journal Screen.

Brecht’s concept is to a degree indebted to the theories of montage developed in Soviet cinema theory and practice of the 1920s, notably in the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein. Later examples in the ‘Brechtian’ tradition in theatre are Heiner Müller, John Arden, Edward Bond, Dario Fo; and in cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Marie Straub, and Hal Hartley and Peter Greenaway, the latter two more indirectly.

The alienation effect is now pervasive. It can be found in advertising and television programming as well as cinema and theatre. Consequently such devices are no longer the province of a critical avant-garde. Scepticism about its continued value is related to arguments about a loss of distinction between the image and the real in postmodern society and the frustrations therefore attending any form of artistic or theoretical ideology critique.

Notes

[1] In particular, Brecht opposed Socialist Realism. This offended the East German authorities after he settled there in 1949. Socialist Realism favoured realistic illusion, formal unity and ‘positive’ heroes. He called his theory of realism ‘anti-Aristotelian’, a covert way of attacking the theory of his opponents (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 89)

[2] Henri Lefebvre discusses the adequacy of this translation and also the risks and dangers inherent in Brecht’s dialectical theatre in a passage in the Introduction to volume 1 of Critique of Everyday Life. Thus, Lefebvre (1995: 23) argues that in Brecht’s theatre,

“The spectator wavers between an externalized judgement – an intellectual state which implies high culture – and an immersion in the image proposed. Perhaps this is what the dialectic of the Verfremdungseffekt is. The spectator is meant to disalienate himself in and through the consciousness of alienation. He is meant to feel wrenched from his self but only in order to enter more effectively into his self and become conscious of the real and the contradictions of the real.”

(Lefebvre 1995: 23)

However, Lefebvre (1995: 24) continues, there is a risk that this dialectic process will fail and take on the disturbing form of fascination, which is a worse outcome than the identification that takes place in the Aristotelian model of tragic theatre: rather than ‘classic’, tragic completeness, the audience will look for satisfaction in “ a sort of bloody ecstasy” (Lefebvre, 1995: 24). Furthermore, Lefebvre (1995: 24) notes, “generalized strangeness entails a danger”, one that was avoided by Brecht but is not necessarily avoided by the people who produce his plays or write about them.

The danger is that in seeking to construct a drama that, while based on alienation, seeks to struggle against it, the drama will end up sanctioning alienation. It is significant, in this respect, that Brecht’s term Verfremdungseffekt is translated as ‘effet d’alienation’ in French and as ‘alienation effect’ in English, as if alienation were the goal of the effect rather than that which it seeks to overcome.

Lefebvre (1995: 24) concludes that it would be a cruel paradox if Brecht’s drama were “to sanction alienation by giving it all the glamour of violence”, a danger, Lefebvre thinks, that is more evident in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty that Brecht’s epic or dialectical theatre.

[3] Min Tian (1997) warns that Chinese acting does not in fact generate anything identical with, or even similar to, the Brechtian Alienation effect, and that the influence of Asian theatre on Brecht should not be overemphasised. Long before he saw Mei Lan-fang’s performance in 1935, Brecht had formulated in his theoretical writings and theatrical practices his new conceptions of theatre and acting, in particuliar his theory of the epic style of acting. What later came to be called the Alienation effect was already firmly established and clearly articulated as the core of his epic theatre, as outlined, for example, in “The Street Scene” (Brecht, 1978a). While he later elaborated the theory in greater detail, none of the basic ideas were changed (Hecht 1961, 95-96). John Willett, furthermore, contends that Brecht’s term Verfremdung, which was virtually a neologism, appears to be a precise translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s term “priem ostranenniya”, i.e. the device of making strange (Brecht 1978b, 99).

Rather than deriving from elements of Chinese theatre, Tian argues that, to a large extent, Brechtian theatre represents a return to the mainstream of the European classical tradition. A similar point is made by Jacques Derrida (1978, 244) who, while citing Antonin Artaud’s discussion of the theatre of cruelty, noted that,

“The Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect] remains the prisoner of a classical paradox and of “the European ideal of art” which “attempts to cast the mind into an attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation” (TD, p. 10). Since “in the ‘theater of cruelty’ the spectator is in the center and the spectacle surrounds him” (TD, p. 81), the distance of vision is no longer pure, cannot be abstracted from the totality of the sensory milieu; the infused spectator can no longer constitute his spectacle and provide himself with its object. There is no longer spectator or spectacle, but festival (cf. TD, p. 85).”

(Derrida, 1978, 244)

References

Brecht, B. (1961). On Chinese acting. Tulane Drama Review, 6 (1), 130–136.

Brecht, B. (1978a). The Street scene: a basic model for an epic theatre. In: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 121–129.

Brecht, B. (1978b). Brecht on theatre, edited by John Willett. London, UK: Methuen Drama.

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

Derrida, J. (1978). The Theater of cruelty and the closure of represenation. In: Writing and difference. London: Routledge, 232-250.

Esslin, M. (1960) ‘The Theatre of the absurd’, The Tulane Drama Review, 4(2), pp. 68–70. Available at: http://web.iitd.ac.in/~angelie/courses_files/TOA/esslin essay tdr.pdf.

Hecht, W. (1961). The Development of Brecht’s theory of the epic theatre, 1918-1933. Tulane Drama Review, 6 (1), 40–97. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125006 [Accessed 22 March 2016].

Lefebvre, H. (1995). Critique of everyday life. Volume 1: Introduction. London, UK: Verso.

Selden, R., Widdowson, P. and Brooker, P. (2005). A Reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory, 5th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.

Tian, M. (1997). ‘Alienation-effect’ for whom? Brecht’s (mis)interpretation of the classical Chinese theatre. Asian Theatre Journal, 14 (2), 200–222. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124277 [Accessed 11 March 2016].

Related terms; Alienation-effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Alltäglichkeit; The Commodity; Historical materialism – Marxism; Lefebvre; Reification;

In general, alienation refers to the sense of distance from nature, separation from others, and helplessness that is an effect of modern existence since the time of the Industrial Revolution in the West, from approximately 1750 onwards.

In Karl Marx’s writings, alienation is depicted as a condition of human alienation from nature; from other people; and of a person from the products of his/her own labour. The last form of alienation, from the products of one’s own labour, is induced by the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, Marx argues, enforcing an identification of the worker with the commodity value of the products of labour. Ultimately, this is seen by Marx to produce a profound alienation of humans from themselves.

In psychoanalytic theory, alienation refers to the split in subjectivity between the ego cogito and the unconscious, and the recognition that one is not in control of one’s thoughts, actions, and desires because of the existence of unconscious drives brought into play in interaction with one’s social and material environments.

Continue reading “Alienation”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Ergodic; Historicism; Interaction Design; Literary theory; Music

The term aleatory derives from the Latin word alea, meaning dice or game of chance. In composition, whether literary, poetic or musical, it implies the use of the element of chance and dependence on contingencies.

Marc Saporta’s novel, Composition No. 1, which is entirely loose-leafed, and its 150 pages can be read in any order, is an extreme example of the genre of aleatory literature or interactive literature. Each of these two terms, however, has very different connotations. The first potentially points towards meaninglessness, futility or absurdity, with no connection other than chance. The second potentially points towards co-created meaningfulness, with accumulated choices revealing patterns of interaction as meaning-creating. Both terms, nevertheless, imply contingency and consecution. Other examples of aleatory literature cited by Jonathan Coe (2011, 28 October) are Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted With Tea.

While Coe does not use the term ‘ergodic’, it might be said to occupy a similar territory to aleatory literature and interactive literature. Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” in the context of cybertextuality and hypertextuality.

Hypertext can be considered an example of ergodic discourse in which, rather than ‘nothing follows’, it might be argued that ‘everything follows’, an abundance of sequences are possible which undermine contingency, and hence, ‘narrative drive’.

In music, John Cage became a strong proponent of aleatoric techniques. Such techniques are an important element of 20th century musical composition. In aleatory music, either an element of the composition is left to chance or a primary element of a composed work’s realisation is left to the performer; or perhaps both.

Reference

Coe, J. (2011, 28 October). Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta – review. The Guardian, 28 October 2011. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/28/composition-no-1-saporta-review. Accessed on 18 April 2013.

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Avant-Garde Movements

As is noted under the term Agon, the terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist can be of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of narrative environments, particularly when considered from the point of view of dramatic conflict. Renato Poggioli (1968: 65), furthermore, argues that agonism is a moment of enormous import as a disposition within modern culture. The particular significance of agonism within avant-garde art is his specific area of interest, however.

Agonism derives form the Greek root words agone and agonia but, Poggioli suggests, its modern sense transcends the purely etymological meanings of the two terms. Thus, he reasons, if agonism meant no more than agone, it would simply be a synonym for activism and would express the modern cult of contest, sport and game, that is, of competition and competitiveness. On the other hand, if agonism meant no more than agonia, it would allude to the tragic sense of life so intensely felt by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, a sense that was rendered popular by the existentialist philosophy of the 1960s.

However, within the context of avant-garde art, what is meant by agonism is more pathetic than tragic, and is neither Christian nor Dionysian. It represents the deepest psychological motivation behind the decadent movement, Poggioli asserts, and also the general currents, from which the decadent movement emerged, that reach back to romanticism itself.

In these currents, the agnostic attitude is not a passive state of mind, exclusively dominated by a sense of imminent catastrophe. Rather, it strives to transform the catastrophic into a miracle. By so acting, through its very failure, it tends toward a result that both justifies and transcends itself.

Thus, in this context, agonism means tension; and it means sacrifice and consecration. As an hyperbolic passion, a bow bent toward the impossible, it forms a paradoxical and positive form of spiritual defeatism, such as exemplified by Mallarme’s “Un coup de des”.

For Mario Praz, the romantic agony is among the most extreme and symptomatic themes of modern literature, keenly suggesting a continuity between romantic and avant-garde mentalities. The presence of an agonistic mentality in the avant-garde aesthetic consciousness can be demonstrated through the frequent appearance of the hyperbolic image in modern poetry. Within critical discourse, similarly, the contrast between a work and the atmosphere in which it is produced presupposes that the creative act takes place in a state of crisis.

Poggioli proposes that in an epoch such as that which encompassed the 1960s, which is dominated by an anxiety or anguish that is impervious to any metaphysical or mystical redemption, agonism must be conceived of as a sacrifice to the Moloch of historicism, in which history is made into a divinity.

This, Poggioli contends, is precisely the transcendental function (ideal mission) of avant-garde agonism as futurism, understood as a general tendency or orientation toward the future, and not the determinate movement that took on that name. Thus, Poggioli defines the agonistic variant of futurism as a self-sacrifice to the glory of posterity (an agonistic sacrifice to the future). Nevertheless, he points out, avant-garde artists sometimes permitted themselves to be seduced by an agonism that was almost gratuitous, that is, by a sense of sacrifice and a morbid taste for present suffering that was not conceived of as self-immolation on behalf of future generations.

Massimo Bontempelli concludes that the avant-gardes of the first fifteen years of the 20th century in general submitted to the fate of the military avant-gardes, from whom the image is taken: they were destined for the slaughter so that after them others might be able to build.

Furthermore, this immolation of the self to the art of the future must be understood not just as an anonymous and collective sacrifice, but also the self-immolation of the isolated creative personality. This agonistic sacrifice is felt as the fatal obligation of the individual artists.

In the ideologies of more recent avant-gardes (post-1945), the agonistic sacrifice is conceived in terms of a collective group of men and women born and growing up at the same moment in history, i.e. a lost generation.

This destiny, while accepted as an historic one, is also accepted as a psychological one, suggesting that the agonistic disposition in avant-garde psychosis represents the masochistic impulse while the nihilistic disposition represents the sadistic impulse.

References

Poggioli, R. (1968). Agonism and futurism. In: The Theory of the avant-garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 61–77.

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Antagonist; Dissensus – Ranciere; Dramatic conflict; Focalisation; Human Actantiality; Narratology; Protagonist

The word agon and its cognate terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist are of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of designed entities, particularly when considered in conjunction with a notion of dramatic conflict. Agon is a way of developing the intricacies of dramatic conflict through such notions as contest and struggle, opening the potential to discuss these in playful or in political terms.

It is generally held that the root meaning of the Greek word ‘agon’ is a gathering or an assembly, a group of people brought together for some purpose. It is a term, however, which over time acquired a number of distinct connotations. For example, in the Oresteia, Aeschylus employs the word to refer to struggles of various types, while in The Eumenides the image of a wrestling match is used to describe a deadly contest. Aeschylus’ use of agon in The Eumenides explicitly links the image of athletic contest with that of legal proceedings.

Debra Hawhee (2002: 186) comments that,

” … the word agôn suggests movement through struggle, a productive training practice wherein subjective production takes place through the encounter itself. As Nietzsche suggests, the Greeks produced themselves through active struggle; their pedagogy depended on agonism.”

Thus, in the time of Aeschylus, agon came to connote competition and contention. A generation or so later, the historian Thucydides employs agon to mean extreme anxiety, where agonia signifies the most agonising and conflicting emotions. In this way, agon comes to refer to conflicts which are external, such as competition between opposing forces, and conflicts which are internal, such a mental and emotional agony.

In the English language, agonist was used to mean champion or contender for prizes in the 17th century and now, in the 21st century, it is taken to refer to a person engaged in a contest or a struggle. The more generally used form of the term agonist in English is protagonist against whom is set an antagonist.

The significance of an agonistic approach to narrative environments is that, as Debra Hawhee points out, it highlights the notions of ‘virtue’ (as goodness) and of ‘virtuosity’ (as skill) and it draws out the performative dimension of virtue and virtuosity. Thus, Hawhee notes, at the heart of the ancient agon lies the concept of arete or virtue. Thus is because the struggling contest served as a stage of sorts. Arete was associated with the goodness, courage, and prowess of a warrior.

Furthermore, Hawhee (2002: 187) continues,

” … one cannot just be virtuous, one must become virtuosity by performing and hence embodying virtuous actions in public. In addition to depending on acknowledgement, then, arete also had a performative dimension, which is to say that it must be enacted, embodied. Arete was thus not a telos, but rather a constant call to action that produced particular habits. As a repeated/repeatable style of living, arete was therefore a performative, bodily phenomenon, depending on visibility — on making manifest qualities associated with virtuosity. As such, it was produced through observation, imitation, and learning.”

(Hawhee, 2002: 187)

Thus, Hawhee (2002: 190) concludes, in ancient Greece, one is what one does, or better still, one is what one is perceived as doing.

References

Hawhee, D. (2002). Agonism and Arete. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 35 (3), 185–207. Available from http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/philosophy_and_rhetoric/v035/35.3hawhee.html [Accessed 24 November 2012].

Russo, R. (2002). A Natural history of ‘agonist’. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 45 (3), 350–358. Available from http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v045/45.3russo.html [Accessed 11 November 2015].