Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece

Chapter 1: Contesting Virtuosity: Agonism and the Production of Aretē

Z 1 Z Contesting Virtuosity Agonism and the Production of Aretē The role of the agōn, the struggle or contest, in early Greek culture cannot be overemphasized: it was the place where wars were won or lost (or, for that matter, happened at all), the reason gods and goddesses came into being, the context for the emergence of philosophy and art, and even, according to Hesiod, the reason crops grew (Works and Days 11ff.). In the name and spirit of the agōn, bodies not only came together, they became bodies, bodies capable of action and (hence) identity formation. This chapter will focus on the notion of agonism as a dynamic through which the ancients repeatedly produced themselves, and which functioned as a point of cultural connection between athletics and rhetoric. It must be stressed from the outset that the agōn is more than the one-on-one sparring that is emphasized in most treatments of the topic. That is, agonism is not merely a synonym for competition, which usually has victory as its goal. For outcome-driven competition, the Greeks used the term athlios, from the verb athleuein, meaning to contend for a prize. The agōn, by contrast, is not necessarily as focused on the outcome as is athlios, the more explicit struggle for a prize. Rather, the root meaning of agōn is ‘‘gathering’’ or ‘‘assembly’’ (LSJ ). The Olympic Games, for example, depended on the gathering of athletes, judges, and spectators alike. Agora, the marketplace, shares the same derivation and a strikingly similar force of meaning as agōn, and, as is commonly known, functioned as the ancient gathering place par excellence. Whereas athlios emphasizes the prize and hence the victor, agōn empha15 sizes the event of the gathering itself—the contestive encounter rather than strictly the division between opposing sides. To be sure, however, the ‘‘gathering’’ force of agōn to some extent entails —and is enabled by—victory. An aim of this exploration, though, is less to consider agonism’s teleological, victory-driven side, and more to foreground the agonistic encounter itself. For rhetoric, this encountergathering side of agōn constitutes the more pervasive agonal dynamic; it is this dynamic that figures prominently in the shape of rhetoric’s agonism , and, by extension, its status as a bodily art. John Poulakos’ important book on the sophists (1995) points out the agonistic connection between rhetoric and athletics (32–39), arguing that the sophists effectively ‘‘turned rhetoric into a competitive enterprise ’’ (35) and that athletics provided a ‘‘rich vocabulary’’ for the rhetorical art. Poulakos’ account, however, focuses on the athlios side of agonism, the ‘‘victory at all cost’’ mentality. Yet the ‘‘gathering’’ force of the agōn inheres in rhetoric as well, most obviously in the very structure of rhetorical situations and their dependence on an assembly, but also in the training and production of a rhetorical subject. The realm of training, further, shows most clearly the close relation between athlios and agōn, as a drive for the prize depends on agonistic logic from the very beginning. Agōn is also connected with the verb agein, which is generally translated ‘‘to lead,’’ but in some instances is linked to training and can be translated ‘‘to bring up, train, educate’’ (e.g., Plato, Laws 782d). So the word agōn can suggest movement through struggle, a productive training practice wherein subject production takes place through the encounter itself. As Nietzsche observes, the Greeks produced themselves through active struggle; their pedagogy depended on agonism (1974b: 58). Taking seriously rhetoric’s emergence in the context of the agōn requires a reconfiguration of rhetoric as an agonistic encounter. That is, for the sophists at least, agonism produces rhetoric as a gathering of forces—cultural, bodily, and discursive—thus complicating the easy portrayal of rhetoric as telos-driven persuasion (i.e., persuasion with a specific end) or as a means to reach consensus. Further, the emergence of agonistic rhetoric and its relationship to virtuosity was enabled by the agonistic force of athletics. As a result, the sophistic rhetorical exemplar was the athlete in action. Perhaps the stranger in Plato’s Sophist said it best when he dubbed the typical sophist ‘‘an athlete in the conBODILY ARTS 16 test of words’’ (agōnistikēs peri logous ēn tis athlētēs) (231e). I will argue, then, that it was a peculiarly athletic notion of agonism—one...