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Accommodating the Individual

IDENTITY AND CONTROL AFTER ALEXANDER

Henry Heitmann-Gordon

ACCOMMODATING THE INDIVIDUAL

This study has attempted to approach the fluctuations of socio-political power in times of macro-political change a little differently by investigating the sources relating to such a historical period in terms of their narrative constructions of uncertainty and the conceptions of society they formulate in response.

 My hope is that this has provided a fruitful, complementary perspective on the war-torn years of conflict that we call the period of Alexander’s successors, capable of supplementing the important historiographical reconstruction of this period.

The starting point of my argument was to understand the period in question as fundamentally characterised by an increased perception of macro-political contingency, which called for re-configuration and re-affirmation at a very fundamental level of society.

By studying source texts as narratives operating within contested attempts at control over cognitive networks of meaning, I hope to have shown how long-standing semantic orders were subtly rewired and shifted to respond to these experiences of contingency.

The interest in approaching the period of the Diadochi in this way grew out of an engagement with sociological and narrative theory that was presented in Chapter 2 and led to the formulation of what I have described as a ‘network perspective.

 The starting point of this perspective was the argument put forward by scholars of ANT that every text, and thus also every source, is an actor in a network that negotiates social meaning by forging strands of meaning into unified compounds, which are used to change the world.

This perspective functioned as a heuristic lens that produced results primarily by changing the way in which texts and objects were read, transforming them from historical sources to be stripped of ideology into actors in networks of discourse that contributed to constituting reality.

The main interest in applying this perspective lay in identifying a specific form of societal power that consists of the controls that determine the relational places of self for both individuals and collectives.

These controls were in turn sought in narrative constructions of uncertainty or contingency and of the means of control developed to combat it. These narratives come together as network structures that regulate the situational pertinence of norms. With Harrison White, these were described as stories and control (or value) regimes, which serve to structure social cohesiveness in socio-political networks by giving them boundaries.

The most significant of the elements involved in the narrative creation of this second level of societal control was finally identified with the generalised media of communication studied by Niklas Luhmann and others, which include basic systemic codes of evaluation, such as self-identity/ difference, belief/non-belief, payment/non-payment, and true/false. The rivalling conceptualisations