Global Co-incidence: “Ontos” Poetics of the Worldwide

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research at the Areopagos (Mars Hill) in Athens, Greece, this essay seeks to enact a performative poetics of global intersubjectivity. Emphasizing the spatiality of social being and the materiality of discourse, I argue that heterogeneous encounters at charged heterotopic spaces such as the Areopagos offer ways of theorizing belonging that do not assume their interdependent parts have any one necessary thing in common. The simultaneous heterogeneity of the rock offers a way to rethink globalization as producing and being produced by what I call “co-incidences”: events of coming together in space about which the question of causality must remain suspended. In so doing, the essay supplements theories of performances as twice behaved in time with a theory of performances as once behaved in space.

Keywords:

• Heterotopia
• Spatial Performance
• Belonging
• Globalization

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts of this essay were presented at the 2009 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago and in the author's dissertation, “Global Co-incidence: Heterotopic Performance at the Areopagos” completed in 2009 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of Della Pollock.

Thanks to Matthew Spangler, Andrew Wood, Marjorie Hazeltine, Lawrence Grossberg, Carole Blair, John Pickles, Christian Lundburg, Sarah Sharma, Heidi Rose, Jim Ferris, and the anonymous reviewers for extensive and helpful critical feedback.

Notes

1. I first encountered the hyphenated use of “co-incidence” in Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, but I am using the hyphen in a different sense: whereas Ahmed sees the hyphen as a way to avoid reducing spatial encounters to a matter of chance, my own use of the hyphen attempts to highlight both the accidental and the determined nature of spatial being simultaneously (39).

2. This is but one of several meanings of “heterotopia” outlined in Foucault's brief but provocative lecture on the subject. Importantly in the context of my project, the concept of “heterotopia” is yet another accident that I treat as an “on purpose.” Written in 1967, the notes for the lecture on heterotopia were never fully revised for publication by Foucault himself and were not published until around the time of his death in 1984. Although they sometimes announce themselves as a systematic analysis, Foucault's thoughts on heterotopia are often, as Edward Soja notes, “frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent” (32). In the context of my co-incidental engagement with the Areopagos, I do not read the fragmentary and contradictory nature of these notes on “heterotopology” as signs that this is a dead end in Foucault's thought that he consequently later abandoned. I do not see them as a failure of taxonomy, but as a performance of “heterotopic” thinking that emerges from the places they describe. A full elaboration of this queer taxonomy is beyond the scope of this essay.

3. Aeschylus’ play, first performed at the theatre of Dionysus on the other side of the Acropolis only a few hundred meters away from the Areopagos, is often read as an attempt to intervene into the political debates of its day, something rather rare for Greek drama. The aristocratic Areopagite council had previously been the primary decision-making body for the city state of Athens, but only three or four years before the first production of The Oresteia, the council had been stripped of much of its power. The council retained jurisdiction over matters of homicide, blasphemy, and treason, passionate subjects with which it was, presumably, best not to trust the hoi polloi, but most of the decision-making power was shifted to the more inclusive “demos” that met at the Pnyx, the larger hill just to the west of the Areopagos. Although it has long since moved off site, the modern Greek Supreme Court still takes its name from the Areopagos as the birthplace of “diki” or justice.

4. All scripture references are from the Official Scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (<http://scriptures.lds.org/acts/17>).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David P. Terry

David P. Terry is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University