A suggestion from Dean

http://michaelshannon.us/makeabook/

Question: What is the Athenian Symposium?

The greek word for a drinking party is symposium.These get togethers were "dedicated to a varying blend of eating, drinking, games of all sorts, philosophical discourse and public sex with prostitutes, concubines and other men, but never with wives."

The prostitutes or as they were called in greek, hetaeri,were the more refined of their profession and by participating in the symposiums (symposia?) it allowed them access to an element of male society not available to most women. Even with this privilege it did not seem to advance their status in society nor gain the respect from their symposium colleagues.

Sexual power and domination over the prostitutes was used to demean the older ones and confer favour on the younger women. A young man would be introduced to the symposium and the hetaeri in order to "liberate him from the awe of his mother and any other female authority figures." It seems that teaching them to humiliate and dominate a woman is what they thought it took to cut the apron strings.

These symposia took place in the men's quarters of private homes. This area would be the largest and most luxurious in the home and accessible directly from the outside so as not to disturb the wives and children. A typical symposium evening would unfold something like this.
Dinner (peppered with philosophical discourse), washing of hands, a toast of libations to the gods, female musicians perform, inebriation, female flute and harp playing, sex (rough, anal and oral) with whomever.
It seems the women did everything: music, dance, conversation, song and sex. I'm not sure who did the cooking, maybe it was the wife?

Question: Would it be good to revive?
Answer: Did they ever go away? Now we have strip clubs and sex slaves and not much conversation.

The preceeding is my summary of a chapter from The Reign Of The Phallus-Sexual Politics In Ancient Athens by Eva C. Keuls, University of California Press, 1985

Ger

The Salon; marginal and subversive...continued

Quote #5

...gave way to a more anonymous style of sociability, oriented towards spectacles and celebrities and centred not only on salons but on le Boulevard, where shopping, the cafe, and the activities of a whole constellation of new and exclusive social clubs accommodated a larger more heterogeneous society. pg 189

Questions #5

• What is the place of the generalist in today's world?
• Is shopping the great leveler leading us to a non-
hierarchical world of consumption?
• What is the relationship between the spectacle and anonymity?
What would you call a spectacle in your world?

Quote #6

...the decadence of conversation could be blamed on crinnoline , which "invaded [women's ] moral life, debased their character by destroying their influence , reduces their field of action, and narrowed the terrain of their ambition. " pg. 209

Questions #6

• Do we live in a world where lots of brainy women have a strong
public presence in their own right?
• Is fashion a place where differences come together to create
a new civil world order?
• what does the obsession with physical beauty
and decoration do to the female brain?
and what is it doing to the male brain?
And what does it do to their interactions?

The Salon; marginal and subversive...continued

Quote #3

As the values of the market place progressively took precedence over the dictates of social and cultural discrimination, salonnieres imperceptibly lost the ability to select guests according to talent , intelligence or L'esprit. The triumph of the star system made it harder and harder to tell the difference between innate ability, earned reputation and the kind of glory [ celebrity] conferred by public success... Pg 163

Questions #3

• Why do celebrity opinions outside their own field merit attention?
• Is this quote relevant to a description or discussion of contemporary mass media?
• Can you find a relationship between the sentiments in this quotation and the society in which you live?
• Did you see the interview with Britney Spears about how she voted?

Quote #4

Madame de Stael had set the tone for a mondain critique of "the party system" in the 1790's by noting that partisanship united people around common hatreds rather than feelings of friendship and mutual esteem. The morality of mondain relations, she argued, suffered when those with "the same political religion" excused the vices of their allies and ignored the positive qualities of their foes... Pg 167

Questions #4

• what is the vehicle in our culture, or global culture, which facilitates the coming together of people with different political "religions" or different artistic "religions" or different religions to, discuss differences civilly and create a larger world?
• Is there a difference between tolerance and acceptance?

Interesting Creative Project and Blog

The Salon; marginal and subversive, its relevance and history

Kale, Stephen, French Salons, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

Quote #1

Madame de Stael worked to make her salon a new Athenian symposium where those responsible for the government of men could cultivate the wisdom necessary to bring reason and virtue into the art of making policy and writing legislation. Pg 52

Questions #1

• Could you call government policy-making and legislation-writing an "art"
being practiced in Ottawa?
• What is the Athenian symposium?
• Would it be a good thing to revive? Has it already been done?

Quote #2

[under Louis xviii] ...doubts about the political influence of salons centred on two forms of deception, one involving the use of elegant manners by charlatans to give them selves an "illusory importance " and the other concerning the ability of the mediocre to silence merit with ridicule and lower the general political intelligence of society. Pg 100

Questions #2

• If we substitute the name of an "all news channel " or a "cable network" for
the word "salon" in the quote above, does anything specific come to mind ?
• Does history repeat itself?

The Conversational Salon

The Conversational Salon

Some not so idle chitchat by Sophie Anne Edwards

Somewhere along the oral line, the act and locus of conversing has diminished along with the meaning of conversation itself.

While discussion and dialogue have been critical forms of exchange and idea development for centuries, we now are more familiar with e-mail and short forms. We email rather than call; when we must call, we hope for the answering machine so we can simply leave a message.

Perhaps the general dissolution of the art of conversation and the lack of the deliberate locus for it, has left us fearful of modern oral exchange – the idle chitchat, the gossip, the meaningless talk that form the bulk of our vocal exchanges.

The New Penguin Dictionary, 2001 (all definitions herein attributable to same) defines Converse: verb intrans. 1. to exchange thoughts and opinions in speech; to talk. 2. to carry on an exchange similar to a conversation; esp. to interact with a computer.

Interact with a computer? Even I was surprised at that. How did the art of conversation diminish to the point that it can now be defined as something that does not even entail an exchange between two living beings?

Where once conversation entailed a movement toward greater understanding or interaction, it now means little more than talk. Talk is just sound created by air passing over our vocal cords. Conversation once meant that intelligence and thought directed the sounds we created.

In the 1800s, the conversational salon, while in the private sphere of the woman’s space, was publicly influential; and was used as a tool for dialogue. Salons gathered people of all classes and both genders together to discuss and debate issues and ideas – adherents were intelligent, thoughtful, insightful and interested in change. The women ‘dirigentes’ of the salons invited literary figures, artists, politicians, philosophers, and writers. These women were influential, respected and often powerful.

The salon has been subverted over time, to the point that it now most commonly refers to: Salon: 1. a commercial establishment where hairdressers, beauticians, couturiers, etc. see their clients. 2. an elegant reception room or living room. This indeed reflects the reality that chitchat and gossip are now more associated with salon than true conversation.

A conversable person, is: 1. literary pleasant and easy to converse with: Mrs. Bardel let lodgings to many conversable single gentlemen – Dickens. 2. archaic. Relating to or suitable for conversation or social interaction.

Through salons, women were influencing society and politics; over time, adherance to societal norms subverted this act of conversation through salon. Women became good hostesses, rather than animators and activists – the host became the polite conversationalist, the one serving biscuits and tea, rather than the true conversationalist, asking pointed questions and creating discussion.

Elizabeth Fay, in a University of Massachusetts paper wrote:

“I would like to remark first on what I mean by "salon theory." The eighteenth-century salon, which was so crucial to the development and intellectual projects of the first generation Bluestockings, was more than anything a place where the mind could flourish through the exchange of ideas. If witticisms and literary flourishes despoiled some of this exchange, so much the better since this provided a socially acceptable cover for what could be talked about. To think that, like the earlier coterie gatherings, men and women could get together and talk about ideas. Talk, rather than writing and its exchange, fosters thought by association; ideas can spiral, vine about, bloom in odd ways when no one Socrates figure is directing the flow of things. Because salons encouraged people to cluster together in small groups, many conversations occurred simultaneously. Less than a room of one's own, more than a seat in a family parlor, the salon offered women in particular a place to be intellectual. Moreover, the role of conversation—the exchange of words and ideas, rather than a lecture; the equitable pitting of topics, the easy chance of digressions, the richness of associable ideas and inferences—is valued in Bluestocking salons. It should be valued today for its open-endedness, its plausible leads, its intellectual heritage. It is invaluable for women students who find the tension of seminar discussions a block to verbalizing their ideas, but it is equally helpful to men students by providing a platform for hashing out ideas before seminar meetings, while provoking them to examine their assumptions in light of their colleagues' reactions.

We are said to have lost the art of conversation in the present age, but that is a reference to parlor talk; we have indeed lost the tool of conversation, and that is something we could and should remedy, because students should not have to think in isolation, should not have wrestle with ideas on their own, should not come to erroneous versions of history or literature because they did not have to try out their version on someone else.”

And so, in that spirit - to embrace the art, and embody the act, i5 now launches it’s online salon – not as an electronic replacement for the exchange between people in person, but as an adjunct to our upcoming in situ Salon Series in Malta.

Perhaps the technology of our age can be used to support the intelligent practices of previous ones.