Traveling Back with Time: On the Rhetorical Significance of Durée
Traveling Back with Time: On the Rhetorical Significance of Durée
Elitza Kotzeva
American University of Armenia
It was a breezy winter day in Central Macedonia. I was sitting in a tour bus headed to Vergina to visit the tomb of Philip II of Macedon. I had just handed my small ticket—the size of a raffle slip—to the tour guide. On the ticket’s tiny face the name of the agency read “Pegasus Tours.” I began thinking about the way language performs its meaning and remembered J. L. Austin’s Speech-Act Theory. I named our minibus “Pegasus,” creating a white horse that was going to take us on its wings back into history. Words can affect our bodies and our social reality but our bodies and their movement—I learned that day—can affect our linguistic and rhetorical capacity. When I mounted “Pegasus” I joined a trip back into Greek history that would help me see new possibilities of how to make and perform arguments.
“Phillip II’s was probably the most glorious funerary ceremony that took place in Greece in historic times,” our Greek guide Sophia said, quoting Diodorus of Sicily, the historian from 1st c. BCE. A brief moment of silence ensued. People on the bus were looking forward to the next piece of information Sophia was going to give us. She was fully aware that her deliberate pause whetted our appetite even more. I impatiently glanced at the cover of the brochure on my lap. The site that we were about to see promised to reveal to its visitors “the magnificent tombs of the members of the Macedonian royal family, particularly the intact tomb of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.” The garrulous family in the front had fallen silent, too, and settled more obediently in their seats. David, our new friend who was sitting at the back of the bus tapped me on the shoulder and commented on the unusual silence in the air by winking at me and pointing his chin to the people upfront: even the talkative Spaniards are listening now. Sophia, as a wise mother to the group (σοφία—Greek for “wisdom”), had already chastised publicly the talkative group and made sure that they abide by her rules—she needed silent and attentive listeners. Finally, Sophia the Wise One took another breath and continued her story about Philip II of Macedon, and his tomb, which we were going to see soon in Vergina.
Our minibus was gliding smoothly along a modern highway in the Northern Greek province of Macedonia—a place that has spurred so many political conflicts over the centuries with its natural beauty and advantageous geographical position. We were passing by farm fields and lackluster agricultural facilities. The land was rather flat for miles to come; one could see in the distant horizon tall mountains exposing their strong chests to the sea as guardians of the Adriatic coast. We had just left the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea; yet it seemed that we were already far away from Thessaloniki, the big ancient city that had sprawled its tentacles across the bay. Our destination was Vergina, known also as Aigai (Αἰγαί), or Aegeae, the first capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia. Vergina was the place where Philip II was assassinated in a theater in 336 BCE and where Alexander the Great was proclaimed king. The site offers contemporary visitors an opportunity to see Philip II’s tomb, tombs of other members of the royal family, and an extensive royal palace. The museum at Vergina showcases an amazing array of relics found at the burial sites, most of them used during the funeral ceremony of the king.
We finally arrived at the site. Without much ado, impatient to show us what was inside, Sophia ushered us into the museum. As if she wanted to shock her audience, after giving a short introduction, she took us straight to the section with the funeral pyre of Philip II. Sophia’s story began. Her sweet voice rang and echoed in the big exposition halls, traversing space and time: “Alexander the Great organized and carried out the funeral ceremony of his father. Historians refer to the murder-and-burial of Philip II as a ‘spectacular, world-shaking event.’ Philip was buried with his golden grave crown (a magnificent work of art!), gold-adorned armor, and bronze utensils—among the panoply of treasures found in his tomb.” Sophia pointed to the exhibits behind the glass lining up the room. “In this period in Macedonia, the deceased were usually inhumed—that was specifically the practice in Vergina. Cremations were very rare. The funeral pyre and the cremated remains of Philip II meant that he indeed saw himself as a divine ruler. The cremation of his body in Vergina affirmed his belief in the divine origin of the kings.”
Suddenly, the listeners moved and there was shuffling noise and whispers. The crowd snaking its way after our guide suddenly formed a bulbous mass by one of the walls, all were looking at the golden relics through the glass. Like an anaconda that had just engulfed its pray, it took us a moment to digest the information—kings thought of themselves as gods, part of Greek mythology.
Sophia gave us a stern look that silenced everyone, even the Spaniards, then continued: “Philip did not see himself simply as a descendant of the divine order; he thought of himself as a god. The king had already added his statue to those of the twelve Olympian gods in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus during his daughter’s wedding. It was not usual for the Greeks in the 4th c. BCE to deify the kings. The Macedon kingship resembled the Homeric kingship in its reverence to the gods. They considered the kings to to be descendants of the gods but not equal to them. According to some historians, this arrogant deed of Philip II was the last straw to finalize the plot of his assassination and is considered to be ‘his final and fatal mistake’.”
Our new friend David pulled at my sleeve and whispered into my ear, “Philip’s self-deification may be the final mistake that led to his death.” David’s voice was louder than he thought. The last phrase accidentally ricocheted off the walls of the the big hall and reached Sophia’s ears. She adjusted the glasses on the top of her fine Greek nose, looked around the group, and responded, “Yes, it may have been a mistake. Maybe it was the gods who punished his hubris.” She looked around and studied our facial expressions. “But Philip II was fully aware of what he was doing—his gesture had an immense rhetorical significance for both his kingdom at the time and for posterity. Erecting his statue next to the gods meant that Philip identified with the archetype of the divine ancestors and tried to re-ha-bi-li-tate it.” Sophia let every syllable of the word ring independently and linger for a moment in the air. One could almost see the statue of Philip, a king-god rise up in the middle of the room. “By putting an image of his own body along the statues of the gods, he revived the archetype,” she continued. “This way he rejected recent history and united the time of his rule to the time of the gods, and that, my friends, is called illo tempore—the time of the primordial origins. With that, he actualized the myth of the eternal return, reviving the mythical moment of the archetypal birth of a deity by repeating it.”
We all remained silent for a very long moment following some unwritten rule. The silence conveyed our surprise by Sophia’s story and perhaps even showed our reverence to Philip II and the gods, to illo tempore, to the myth of the eternal return. I remembered reading about the myth of the eternal return many years before for a high school class. I was impressed by the concept and copied many sections of Eliade’s text into my notebook. One of them graced the beginning of my notes and still stands in front of my eyes, as if penned yesterday. In red ink it read, “The repetition constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings. It gives a cyclic direction to time and thus annuls its irreversibility.” This is exactly what Philip did—he annulled the irreversibility of time, he refused history, he made time cyclical again.
David shaped his hands into a funnel and glued it to my ear, his communication attempt more discrete this time, “Philip II saw history as part of what Bergson’s calls durée (duration).” I looked back at him puzzled. David, a professor of philosophy at the American University in Beirut, knows well his French philosophers. He elaborated, “this is time not as we know it through physics where it is measured scientifically. Bergon’s notion of durée represents the way an individual experiences time, and it is measured by the qualitative multiplicity of successive states.” His explanation left me even more perplexed. But it put an image into my head which somehow made sense: Philip’s statue next to that of the gods makes him part of one daguerreotype in a series of different states that shape the archetype. In my head, I pictured Eadweard Muybridge’s series of cards depicting the movement of a horse, the first attempt to photographically record the passing of time. I leaned toward David and whispered my question into his ear, “Like The Horse in Motion, Muybridge’s photos?” David’s eyes sparked, and he winked at me in agreement, “Yes, similar to that.” I imagined Philip’s statue as part of a series of pictures in motion, each one preceding the other, each one following another. It suddenly struck me that Philip had devised a great rhetorical strategy.
I had read somewhere that Philip II was interested in the advances of rhetoric and wanted to train his son in the art of persuasive speaking. The king even invited Aristotle to move to Northern Greece and tutor his son, Alexander, and thereupon the philosopher spent seven years at Philip’s palace, before going back to Athens to found his school. I am certain that Alexander had absorbed a lot about the art of persuasion from Aristotle, but he must have learned about the art of rhetoric from his father too. Philip’s attempt to inscribe the time of his rule into the archetypal book of the gods was likely the most important rhetorical strategy he showed to his son. It suddenly all made sense. After Philip’s death, Alexander continued the project of restoring the cosmic time of the gods, the time of primordial ritual, or as David suggested, time as durée.
I spent the following week in the library of our university learning about durée (duration) and stitching together all parts of the story I learned in Vergina. In Bergsonism, an entire book dedicated to Bergson’s philosophy of time, Gilles Deleuze writes: “the past is ‘contemporaneous’ with the present that has been” (58). Deleuze focuses on Bergson’s idea of duration as a qualitative multiplicity of successive states. He elaborates on Bergson’s point: “the past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist” (Deleuze 58-9). This interpretation of Bergson’s concept of durée (duration) stresses the coexistence not simply of successive moments but of an object or an event (a ritual) in time—in a series of successive moments. Similarly, Philip’s II burial ceremony coexists with the archetypal ritual that took place in illo tempore.
Deleuze illustrates further his understanding of duration as coexistence of alterations of the same object in time with a lump of sugar placed in water, an example that Bergson himself uses in Creative Evolution (Deleuze 31; Bergson 9-10). The process of its dissolution reveals that the sugar differs in kind (as opposed to degree) from other things, but first and foremost from itself (Deleuze 32). This implies the coexistence of different alterations of the same object in time—“the thing differs in kind from all others and from itself (alteration),” Deleuze concludes (31). The burial ceremony of Philip II can be then seen as an alteration of the ritual in illo tempore, and they both coexist in a continuous and heterogeneous multiplicity of the duration, i.e., qualitative succession of states (Bergson, Creative 10, 339-40). What is more: the king himself is an alteration of the archetype of the gods. He had already erected a statue of himself next to the gods, thus reifying himself in the divine order through the material culture of the time, but most importantly claiming divine status simply as an alteration of the Olympic deities. Philip II’s statue coexists with those of the gods in the temple of Artemis, making a strong statement about his desire to revive the mythical time and unite it with that of his reign. However, it is not this rhetoric that helps the subject (the king) become an alteration of the gods and differ simply in kind from them. The burial ritual actualizes the myth of the eternal return by repeating the archetypal ceremony in illo tempore. More specifically, the repetition of the creation in the ritual has the rhetorical power to accredit the time of the king as one alteration in the successive states of time as duration.
In his study of Bergsonism, Deleuze focuses on the main characteristic of Bergson’s duration—its qualitative multiplicity. He explains that in reality duration divides up constantly (“That is why it is a multiplicity.”) and in the process it changes in kind, and not in degree (42). This results in a nonnumerical multiplicity—there is other without there being several, as numbers exist only potentially (Bergson, Time 121). Bergson’s nonnumerical multiplicity of duration moves from the subjective, the virtual, to its actualization as it creates “lines of differentiation that correspond to its difference in kind” (Deleuze 43). The repetition of the burial ritual in illo tempore actualizes the virtual that begets the line of differentiation where the burial ceremony of Philip II’s resides as an alteration different in kind from the archetype. And within the ritual repetition, the alterations are rhetorically significant as they reflect the movement along the line of differentiation in kind—that is qualitative, from within.
The movement toward alterations of the original does not happen in degree but only in kind, and yet it is rhetorically powerful. In the case of Philip II, it places him in the temple of the gods and unites the time of his rule with that in illo tempore, supplanting it with time as duration. The movement, however, has а double nature—physical movement accompanies qualitative motion without a corresponding spatial representation. Bergson suggests that we can analyze the concept of motion in the same way as that of the object—the physical experience is itself a composite of two things: the space traversed by the moving object, which creates an indefinitely divisible numerical multiplicity, and the pure movement, which is an alteration, a virtual quantitative multiplicity, that changes qualitatively each time it divides (Time 227, 209-19; Matter 71). Deleuze contends that Bergson’s division between space and time adds to the development of his philosophy a double progression—space is not going to simply be a form of exteriority, a “screen that denatures duration” but space also is based in things, in relations between things and between durations (49). In Creative Evolution, Bergson himself writes that, “all movement is articulated inwardly” (310-11). Deleuze chooses another example used by Bergson—Zeno’s paradox—to illustrate the lack of interdependence between movement measured in spatial numerical units and the experience of time, i.e., duration. In the run of Achilles—yet another mythical archetype—the movement is divisible in steps, which are different in kind, and that is different in quality (Deleuze 47; Bergson, Creative 311-3; 13; Time 113-5).
Philip II’s burial ritual represents a movement toward the mythical time of the gods that is measured in relation to the other steps. It is different in kind, an alteration of the other rituals. Alexander organized and carried out a funeral ceremony for his father that was clearly fashioned after the burial rituals described in ancient Greek epics. The heroes from the Homeric poems were cremated in a monumental pyre, and so was Philip II’s body. The dead body of the king in 336 BCE was treated in the same way as the corpses of the heroes from ancient Greek epics. The ceremony resembled the tumulus-burials from the Homeric poems—those of Patroclus, Achilles, and Hector (Hammond 350). In each of these cases, the bones of the heroes were collected from the pyre and placed in a golden container. Those of Achilles were washed in unmixed wine and unguents, and then placed in a golden urn, similar to the way the bones of Philip II were treated:
when the flame of Hephaestus had made an end of thee, in the morning we gathered thy white bones, Achilles, and laid them in unmixed wine and unguents. (Homer, The Odyssey, 24.74)
After the bones of Philip II were washed in wine, they were wrapped up in a red cloth, and then placed in a golden coffer (Hammond 350). When Hector dies at the end of The Illiad, his bones, too, are covered with soft purple cloths and laid in a golden coffer, a larnax.
The snowy bones his friends and brothers place
(With tears collected) in a golden vase;
The golden vase in purple palls they roll’d,
Of softest texture, and inwrought with gold.
Last o’er the urn the sacred earth they spread,
And raised the tomb, memorial of the dead. (The Illiad, 23. 795-96)
The sacrifice during the burial ceremony of Philip II resembled the sacrifice from the Greek heroic age. Philip’s wife—most likely his Thracian wife Meda—was burned at the pyre together with the king, and her bones, carefully wrapped in a golden-purple cloth, found in another golden larnax in the king’s tomb. I remember how Sophia’s face twisted in disgust as she was pointing to the decorated box with the remains of his wife buried alive. After Philip’s death, his son Alexander had ordered the execution of the “condemned men and the sons of Pausanias” at the tumulus. The Greek archeologist Manolis Andronikos found their remains on the inside of the top part of the tumulus during his excavations in 1977 (Hammond 349). The ceremony conducted by Alexander was another archetypal gesture. Alexander repeated the ritual from mythical time, illo tempore, uniting the rule of his father with the time of the gods, reviving cyclical time, and refusing history.
The rhetorical significance of the burial ritual of Philip II as an eternal return is enhanced by the inward movement of the experienced time, that is duration, which simultaneously has an associated physical movement in the actual performance of the ritual. The physical movement of the ritualistic performance then actualizes time as duration for the participants in the ritual who are present in that very moment. The participation in the ritual happens “in the world” in a particular time, reflecting the idea of Heidegger’s Dasein—there-being, “Being-in-the-world” (Being 79, 83). Dasein is characterized with existential spatiality, which is not similar to the physical experience of “Being-present-at-hand” (83, 67). Heidegger derives his idea of Desein based on Bergson’s conception of time as duration, even if he does not openly acknowledge that (e.g., he only mentions Bergson in footnotes in Being and Time, and toward the end completely dismisses his theory). As a result, Heidegger has developed his understanding of being in time as metaphysically defined and yet possessing certain ontological characteristics. Dasein exists in time; even more, Dasein does not exist without time. The Dasein of the ritual allows its participants the possibility to experience physical movement—spatially and therefore numerically represented—which offers as a final reward alteration, a movement from within, a qualitative state in time as duration.
The Dasein of the ritual performance offers a possibility to its participants—an important observation for the rhetorical significance of the resulting alteration, movement from within. The potentiality of the act—the performance—precedes its actuality, which is in contrast to Aristotle’s ontology. In Book IX of the Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that potentiality1 and act taken together form both the origin and the guarantee for becoming: “things that are posterior in becoming are prior in form and in substantiality, and because everything that comes to be moves towards a principle, i.e., an end… and the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potency is acquired” (1047a 10-14). For Aristotle, actuality precedes potentiality, and potentiality develops because of actuality. In Aristotle’s ontology, the distinction between potentiality and act defines the search for substantiality, i.e, ousiology (from Greek ousia (οὐσία)—most commonly translated as essence, substance, thing-hood, or thingliness) (Metaphysics 150-1, 174-6). Beings are in search for substantiality, and therefore distinguishing between potentiality and act is important to their becoming (Aristotle, Metaphysics 184-5). If the search for substantiality defines beings, and the search for con-substantiality defines the rhetorical act, as Kenneth Burke stipulates, then the relationship between potentiality and act is fundamental for rhetoric (A Rhetoric 21). The conceptualization of time with regard to space and substance guides the desired alteration, the movement from within.
Substance is undeniably related to the experience of time. For Aristotle, “time is just this—number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’” (arithmos keneseos kata to proteron kai husteron) where the motion refers to a moving body (Metaphysics 219). In a book that studies the question of being in Aristotle and Heidegger, Ted Sadler explains that “time, on Aristotle’s definition, is the measure of movement in general, of all movements, of every variety” (71). Things are in time as long as they can be measured in units; conversely, time cannot exist without things. To be in time means to be “measurable by the activity of counting off time-units” for the Greek philosopher (Sadler 72). While Aristotle sees time as measurable and fundamental in defining space, i.e., time is space, Bergson—according to Heidegger—simply reverses Aristotle’s arithmos keneseos and “prefaces his analysis of time with analysis of number” (Being 501). Bergson does not contribute much to the conception of time, according to Heidegger. Heidegger admits, however, that Bergson’s efforts are “valuable because they manifest a philosophical effort to surpass the traditional concept of time” (Basic Concepts 328-9). Yet Bergson’s is a “failed attempt to go beyond Aristotle and get to the root of time” as Heath Massey interprets Heidegger’s reaction to Bergson’s theory in his book The Origin of Time (146-7).
Bergson’s understanding of time is predicated on a different ousiological relationship between potentiality and act from that of Aristotle, and because of that his conception plays an important role in establishing the rhetorical significance of body movement. Time is a measure of change, a physical change with regard to spatial position—motion—of an object, as Aristotle stipulates; for him actuality (the motion) precedes its potentiality. Time as duration for Bergson is a qualitative succession of states that are not measurable. For both Bergson and Heidegger potentiality coexists with and can even precede actuality. Numbers exist only potentially in time as duration (Bergson, Time 121). Dasein has potentiality-for-Being, which is not Being-present-at-hand and therefore defined by physical presence in the moment, but is rather Being-possible, and that is defined by its possibilities (Heidegger, Being 183).
The qualitative succession of states, which defines time as duration, comes together or before the quantitative measurement of their change. Change as alteration from within, happens at the same time or before change measured in space. As to the rhetorical significance of time in the ritual—the physical movement in ritual begins an alteration along a line of differentiations that precedes or comes together with the act. The experience of time enacts a rhetorical qualitative change, or a rhetorical alteration.
Now I can clearly see the main intent of Sophia’s tour. As I remember the trip with its details, I make sense of her shamanistic purpose. At the beginning of our day in Vergina, Sophia ushered us into the entry room of the museum in Aigai. The group surrounded a big model of the tombs encased in glass. As she was getting ready to tell us about the spatial organization of the site and the plan of our tour, one of the talkative Spaniards swiftly took out her camera and snapped a picture of the model. Sophia’s eyes widened, her jaw dropped in shock; then she promptly composed herself and with a strict tone and stern expression explained to the group that picture-taking is absolutely forbidden throughout the whole museum. “This is a sacred place,” she concluded her prohibitive remark, “every time I come here, emotions well up and I get choked.” Then she slowly continued with her story about the magnificent reign of Philip II of Macedon and that of his son, Alexander the Great. Time as we knew it stopped in the room—we got transported back to 336 BCE when Philip II was assassinated, as we were moving from one exhibit room to another. Sophia aptly led us through the museum, repeating the tour she had given multiple times before. We were part of her ritual on that day, an alteration of the ritual that happens every time she takes a group of tourists to the museum. Sophia seemed to be aware of our participation in a ceremony—she was making us part of her story, part of her time as a guide showing us the way around the tombs. She directed the behavior of our bodies too—no picture-taking, no touching, no speaking. Sophia was offering us an opportunity for rhetorical demonstration by asking us to be silent participants in the tour, by making us part of a ritual that revives cyclical time, a ritual that requires physical and solemn movement through space. A ritual that led us to access time as duration and commence our rhetorical qualitative change from within, an alteration of our own arguments about history and our role in it.
Our visit to the museum in Aigai made us part of the ritual that united all visitors as one through their common experience, placing them in a different, yet similar duration. Sophia the Wise One knew well that fact. She was not simply an observant of all these alterations of the ritual; she was part of the ritual every time she guided a tour. In fact, she was conducting the ritual, like a shaman, transporting the quality of her experience, her duration into ours, and as a result uniting our time at the museum with that of other visitors before and after us. In effect, we were all part of the same experience, of a version, an alteration of the recurring ritual along Deleuze’s line of differentiation. It was already a rhetorical alteration along a long line of historical events because it helped us achieve a qualitative change in our view and argumentation about the past. Moreover, we felt part of it.
In Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy of time, space relies on the experience of time—space provides a screen for duration to happen. Movement through space depends on the line of differentiation with multiple alterations of time that are different in kind but not in degree. Each visitor of the museum in Aigai actualizes an alteration of the ritual by his physical engagement with space. This movement, just like Bergson sees any motion, is inwardly experienced. Therefore, the engagement with space becomes inseparable from the experience of time, duration, and it has an affective rhetorical component.
Through the ritual of the tour, Sophia’s emotions which—she confesses—make her choke up every time she experiences Greek history, get transferred to the visitors. In addition, her own story of Philip II of Macedon is a version of history likely affected by her own feelings—pride to be a descendant of the ancient Greeks, among many other affects. Her emotional narrative made me realize more than any history book why and how the Greeks were opposed to their northern neighbors’ decision to call their nation Macedonia. It was the history, which took place in the geographic region of Macedonia, that has given the Greeks the most opportunities to revive cyclical time, time of the gods, and mythologize their past in order to compose a patriotic historical narrative. The ancient history of this region relates to this land and is a central building block in Greek national identity. The name Macedonia has an affective weight in Greek historiography, more than I knew before my visit to Vergina. Through her engagement with the physical space of the museum Sophia used affect as a rhetorical tool to help initiate a qualitative change that would take us toward an alteration of history, toward rhetorical alterations.
Taking the affective turn, anthropologist Charles Stewart has explored new ways of historization that can enrich the methodologies in rhetoric. In Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, he accepts the challenge to discover a mode of historical production that does not take the recognizable form of Western historiography. He studies dream and dreaming in island Greece as a method of unconscious historicization. As a powerful way to weave imagery from the past, such unorthodox forms of historicization “barge into consciousness and create affective tensions and identifications between the past and the present” (7). Dreams, as explored by Stewart in his anthropology of island Greek history, represent one mode of furnishing knowledge about the past. Dreaming as an epistemological tool allows for affect to play a major role in the production of history and thus diverges from the protocols of evidence and objective scrutiny, enshrined in Western historical research and documentation (Stewart 7). There is an affective element underpinning the epistemological experiences of both dreaming and composing a museum tour narrative, and by extension in weaving one’s own version of history.
Recollections of personal memories are inevitably laden with emotions from the past—affect that influences the version of history and produces a rhetorical alteration. These individual alterations then partake in the collective memory-crafting toward consubstantiality, or toward alteration of the collective memory imposed by the dominant ideology. While Sophia was telling us her story about the golden treasures found in the tombs of Aigai, she was interspersing her narrative with patriotic statements regarding Greek history in general. The dominant ideology has helped Sophia develop a nationalistic affect that she related to her own story as a descendent of the great kings. Sophia was reliving history in time as duration, connecting her own memory of the past with that of the ancient Greeks, achieving individual transcendence.
The archeological finds help make discoveries about history but they also have an affective rhetorical power—they create an emotional connection between people and their land. The golden treasures made Sophia feel a proud descendant of Philip II of Macedon and fortified her bond with the land where these treasures were buried, where she lives today. In his study of dreams about buried treasures on the Greek island of Naxos, Stewart observes that, “[w]hen people tell stories about such treasures or dream them, they simply address their historicity in an affective expression of relationship to the place they live in” (196). Further in his chapter dedicated to the affective nature of such historicization, the anthropologist poetically describes the temporal effect of such buried objects—they function like “rivets pinning together the socio-temporal fabric of a place” (202). Sophia’s narrative about these treasures served as a shamanistic chant during the ritual, opening “shafts into time” and initiating us, her listeners, into time as duration, revived mythical time that also was a replica of time as understood by contemporary Greeks (Stewart 202).
Experiencing time as duration has an immense rhetorical power in collective memory-crafting. It allows for an alteration to begin along the line of differentiations toward an alteration of rhetoric that will defy the ahistorical nature of the spectacle. As if depicting time as duration, Stewart describes understanding of temporality in contemporary Greece as a cohabitation of two modes of being, quite different from each other. On the one hand, the Orthodox Greek-speaking population had developed a Romeic mode of understanding time driven by a redemptive Christian philosophy (Stewart 194). On the other hand, a Hellenic mode of being developed based on rationalist orientation toward time—time as linear, progressive, and fundamentally unpredictable. It is interesting to see how these opposing views result in an ambivalent hybrid understanding of history in Greece. An example that relates to the story in Vergina and exemplifies the Helleno-Christian synthesis: Manolis Andronikos, the 20th-century archeologist, carefully “orchestrated” the discovery of the tomb of Philip II to fall on the Feast Day of two Christian angels—Gabriel and Michael (Stewart 195). This hybrid temporal understanding still lives in Greece, and we, the visitors in Aigai, could sense it in the rhetoric permeating Sophia’s narrative. According to her, some of the relics, which dated back to 336 BCE, had Eastern Orthodox Christian motifs. Like a shaman, Sophia was ushering us into the cyclical time of the gods and at the same time with every new tour she was reproducing the ideologically woven narrative, in which Christianity and ancient Greek history intermingled to shape a proud Greek national identity. The paradox was obvious for a lot of her Western listeners: Christian and Hellenistic views of time seemed irreconcilable.
“Museums are rhetorical spaces,” declares Lisa King (125). In her article on Native Hawaiian rhetorics at the Bishop Museum, she references a few museum studies scholars who emphasize the significance of audience in the meaning-making process of the tour. Since most visitors consider museums to be purveyors of truth and authenticity, they “imbue what they consider to be true with a special authority because they make that meaning in a museum” (King 126). Sophia’s narrative at the museum tour in Aigai showed that she was fully aware of her audience and its importance to the success of her tour. She was constantly checking the willingness of her listeners to go along with her story, to follow and engage with her version of “truth,” her version of history. Yet Sophia was very specific in her directions (“Come over here!” “Look at this right now!” “Don’t go down the stairs!”). After all, we were taking part in a ritual, an alteration of the archetype in illo tempore, that she was conducting.
In his definition of ritual, British anthropologist Jon Mitchell describes it as “a special performance of ordinary actions for a special purpose, deeply embedded within symbolic systems” (389). Sophia was instructing us through a series of ordinary actions to move across the space of the museum; her purpose was to initiate us in experiencing time as duration in the space that in her symbolic system occupies a central place. Her argument was logical in its progression. This is a sacred space in relation to her history, in respect to Greek history, and that means to world history too; ergo, we should all be respectful of its rhetoric, or rather, of her rhetoric as a guide. Throughout our tour at the museum in Aigai, we were slowly transported from one place, depicted by our understanding of time as chronological, to another place, defined by the cyclical nature of time, place where the Olympic gods, Eastern Orthodox Christian saints, and contemporary Greeks live together. Through our participation in the tour, we were agreeing to Sophia’s view of time as duration. And by the end of the tour that day, we were transported through ritual to the cyclical time of the gods and the rhetoric of the eternal return. The Spaniards were not snapping pictures any more, nor were they chatting. Everyone was listening attentively to Sophia the Wise One. She has opened a door to let us in and experience time as duration, enacting a rhetorical qualitative change along the line of differentiations, toward an alteration of our own rhetoric.
In the weeks that followed our museum tour in Vergina, David and I exchanged two dozen emails discussing duration and our experience of it during our trip. We knew that Sophia had helped us question our view of the past. But what is more—she made us see our role in it: we as narrators of past events are important to history as much as Philip II. As long as we want to put ourselves on the line of differentiations, participate in re-telling the story, relive the past through the ritual of storytelling, our own rhetorical alteration matters to history.
1. In this text, I use potentiality interchangeably with Aristotle’s potency, which he sees as a composite of power and potential (Metaphysics).
Elitza Kotzeva is an Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Armenia and a literary translator. Her scholarship explores the intersections of material rhetorics, feminist ethnography, and performance theory. Elitza’s work has appeared in Material Culture Review, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, pofenie, and edited volumes focusing on gender and rhetoric in East European and Eurasian cultures. She is also an editorial fellow with the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing at the WAC Clearinghouse Book Series.
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