The Tentacular Aesthetics of Pythian 12

The Tentacular Aesthetics of Pythian 12

This paper offers a new reading of Pythian 12, arguing that Pindar uses cooperative assemblages of the human and nonhuman to theorize choreia as a hybrid collective that transcends the boundaries of the human. My reading of Pythian 12 deploys Donna Haraway’s concept of “Tentacular Thinking,” a theoretical approach that critiques anthropomorphic forms of perception and explores new ways of thinking and perceiving the world (Haraway 2016). To live, think, and perceive through tentacles is to complicate and break down binaries through bodily practices and to embrace dynamic assemblages and multi-species collaborations.

In this paper, I focus on the central sound-producing assemblages that Pindar foregrounds in Pythian 12: the snaky-haired Gorgons and the dyad of aulos and aulist. Accordingly, my paper has two parts. In the first part, I examine the Gorgons, who represent heterogeneity both as a collective and as individuals. I argue that the Gorgons, by virtue of their feminine hybridity, offer a productive image for ambiguating antagonistic dualisms. In the second part, I turn to the aulos and argue that this dyad of instrument and performer, firmly situated in the realm of choral performance, represents another essential form of hybridization, a cooperative assemblage of performer and technology. These fusions between the human and nonhuman exemplify the power of symbiotic relationships and heterogeneous forms. During a choral performance, the dyad of aulos-aulist effectively becomes the Gorgons, renewing their voice eternally through an entanglement of the human and the nonhuman.

My close-reading of Pythian 12 offers a glimpse at the ancient imaginary of choreia and the source of its affective power: its heterogeneity, which allows a chorus to dissolve boundaries and transcend the human. Leveraging theoretical models from the New Materialisms, I build on earlier structuralist studies on the binaries that Pindar centers in this poem: nature and culture, male and female, victory and hardship, human and nonhuman (Clay 1992; Segal 1998). I also engage with recent scholarly interest in the ways that the fusion of heterogeneous forms functions as the source of a chorus’s affective power (Peponi 2012; Weiss 2018; Kurke 2021).