avoidance ofstasis[civil strife or civil war]’at a time when tensions were
high, following the assassination of a prominent democratic reformer:
Gods and citizens must work together for the preservation of civil har-
mony, although the details, of course, are left unspecified.^16 Needless to
say, there’s a great deal more to theOresteia than the plea: don’t let
Athens be dragged into civil war! But when one recalls who would have
been watching Aeschylus’trilogy–thousands of Athenian citizens, many
of whom would be directly involved, in one way or another, in the trou-
bles–this interpretation has a certain plausibility. To make this plea, and
imperatives like it (Stop! Help!), one does not have to be an expert of any
kind. The main qualification for whether such a plea is successful is,first
of all, whether you have an audience at all and, second, whether that
audience is well disposed in the right ways to do your bidding. (This
relates to the performance just as much as to the text–see, for example,
the discussion of‘Access’, below.) Of course, discerning the particular
imperative being made in a particular play text is hardly a simple matter,
and many critics might want to disagree, say, with this interpretation of
Aeschylus: perhaps the reliance on the divine intervention in theOresteia
suggests that the plea is not addressed to the human spectators but to the
immortals? But a broader imperative is often implied in a political play text,
which is easier to spot. The theatre, as we have seen, is originally the‘place
for viewing’; hence, the imperative from the playwright is:‘Look at this!’
Just like questioning, demanding that attention be paid to something
doesn’t necessarily require prior knowledge or expertise (although doubt-
less that can help). If politics is partly about responding to the issues of
the day, then making something an issue–demanding that people pay
attention to it–is rightly considered political. Anybody who has been
involved in administration of any kind, including political administra-
tion, knows that completely ignoring things is an important tool for
ruling, directing or governing. Making things hard to ignore is thus a
perfectly reasonable response from those who are ruled, directed and
governed. So a play that purports to represent how peasants actually live–
miserably, infilth–can raise awareness or draw attention to a social
concern that would have been far from the mind of the average spectator;
but even if the playwright in question didn’t really know about the con-
dition of the peasants, a play that presents a starkly different vision of
how peasants actually live from what spectators are used to might moti-
vate them tofind out more. Thus, it might bring about more knowledge
or more concern, even if it was written in ignorance.^17
This is not to say, of course, that there’s no such thing as a‘wrong’or
faulty question or command. Questions can encode certain assumptions:
the standard example is the prosecutor’s question,‘When did you start
beating your wife?’, which rules out the possibility that the wife was
Collective action 173