Dunn - Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece

NEAR THE END of Aristophanes Clouds, Strepsiades finds that his plan has backfired. He wanted his son Pheidippides to study at the Thinkery and, by learning newfangled skills in logic and rhetoric, be able to win any argument and so avoid paying their debts. The plan backfires when Pheidippides learns his lessons too well and turns the tables not only on the creditors but also on his own father. When the chorus of Clouds asks Strepsiades how things took this turn for the worse, he explains that it all began when he asked his son to recite some Aeschylus.

And you know what he replied? That he considered Aischylos a poet of colossal stature:Yup, the most colossal, pretentious, pompous, spouting, bombastic bore in poetic history.

I was so damn mad I just about went through the roof. But I gritted my teeth together, mustered up a sick smile and somehow managed to say, All right, son, if thats how you feel, then sing me a passage from one of those highbrow modern plays youre so crazy about. So he recitedyou can guessEuripides! One of those slimy tragedies where, so help me, theres a brother who screws his own sister!

Well, Ladies, that did it! I jumped up, blind with rage, started cursing at him and calling him names, and he started screaming and cursing back and before I knew it, he hauled off andwham!he biffed me and bashed me and clipped me and poked me and choked me and (Clouds 136576)

This domestic squabble between Strepsiades and Pheidippides recalls many of the issues that divided Athenians in the late fifth century: on the one hand stood respect for the past and for traditional values and forms of authority; on the other hand was an interest in novelty and in new literary and moral values, includingmost shocking of alla defiant rejection of paternal authority. Much of this conflict is familiar today. We as readers have experienced rapidly changing times; some of us are old enough to have lived through the 1960s, with their equally shocking rejection of authority. My choice of translation hereWilliam Arrowsmiths deliberately modern version of Clouds, published in 1962is meant to bring out this familiarity. Yet while the upheavals in the 1960s also involved rejecting traditional forms of authority, the effect was substantially different: the social and technological changes and the violent, potentially cataclysmic nature of those changes produced a state of disorientation that in 1970 Alvin Toffler named future shock. By this he meant that people were forced to confront the future without adequate preparation insofar as they were unable to keep up with or make sense of the rate of cultural change.

Changes in late fifth-century Athens were in their own way, I argue, just as rapid and potentially cataclysmic; they included a revolution in 411 and military catastrophes in 413 and 404, as well as the major cultural and intellectual upheavals to which Aristophanes alludes. Yet rather than future shock, these changes produced what I call present shock, whereby the magnitude and speed of change severs ties with the authority of the past, immersing individuals in a disorienting present. How can I navigate these stormy seas, Strepsiades might have asked, without the ballast of traditional values to keep my ship steady?

Whereas Strepsiades found comfort in the past, his modern counterparts instead found it in models of long-term change that seemed relatively steady and progressive: Charles Darwin, for example, attempted not only to explain how species evolved in the past but also to demonstrate that the same mechanisms would generate evolution along such lines into the future, and Karl Marx offered not only a diagnosis of the rise of capitalism and its attendant evils but also a prognosis of how the dialectic of power would continue. While neither of these models was deterministic, each situated the present individual or society within an intelligible trajectory from past to future. Precisely how we make our way from past to present to future became over time increasingly contested as first modernism and then postmodernism complicated and finally splintered these grand narratives;Introduction 3 presence of a larger trajectory. Toffler indicates one particular way in which the inherited trajectory became problematic, as the future seemed to hurtle down upon the present.