I'm sorry to stir up so much trouble, but I'm seeing a basic philosophical problem in the foundation of this line of thinking: when we study history, when we objectify it, and we thereby necessarily affirm a kind of Platonism. We implicitly affirm our own position at some ideal point; a place from which our gaze originates, and at which our soul resides. The present. This location must always lies beyond, outside of the surrounding pattern of worldly events. This point allows us to frame what we observe; to measure 'outer' ('other') events from a fixed perspective, and thus identify definite patterns of interrelationship between and among them. These are the patterns that Plato identifies as the Forms. They are the definite, mathematical functions describing patterns of interrelationship we see manifested in the goings-on of the world around us. These patterns are the only true object of knowledge; at least any knowledge conceived as transcendental familiarity.
The simplest Form as such is the dialectic: binary code! It can compile iteratively and collapse back upon itself to produce all manner of forms. In fact, due to the ordered infinity recognized by Cantor as the Form of the set of all integers, we can literally model any mathematical pattern in binary code. This magical mathematical reducibility underlies the early development and conception of the computer -i.e. by Turing- as a universal instrument; a metamachine. The computer, because its hardware instantiates a dialectical language, can simulate -or model, we could say; mimic- the functional apparatus of any other machine. Including other computer programs, which are really just more limited, more functionally heterogeneous instantiations of mathematical thought, thought of as the continuity of functional syntax...
So does privileging the mathematical necessarily mean that we should devalue more naive kinds of experience? This is an important point to clarify, and Whitehead is one of the best when it comes to this point. In his later work, particularly Modes of Thought, he insisted that Form should not be exclusively identified with thought. Rather, he insists on the relative superficiality of conceptual thought to the totality of our conscious experience:
“The pitfall of philosophy is exclusive concentration on these manageable relationships, to the neglect of the underlying necessities of nature. Thus thinkers repudiate our intimate vague experiences in favor of a mere play of distinct sensations, coupled with a fable about underlying reality.”
And I'm not trying to start a quarrel with Whitehead. On the contrary, I think he raises precisely the point that we need to realize: outmoded linguistic forms can't be dispatched with weapons that they themselves have supplied. The clear conceptual divisions of Aristotelian logic have fascinated our epoch as surely as the songs of the Homeric poets fascinated the public of Plato's and Socrates' time. This is emphatically not to say that it should be abolished, or replaced by a superior form. Just as the transition from oral to literate forms of thought and social organization are and were much more subtle and complex than mere replacement, so does the transition heralded by digital and electronic media today need to learn to include and incorporate the advances made by its predecessor.
When we attempt to negate Aristotelian logic, or to categorize definitively Platonic Idealism, we are actually engaging in nonsensical linguistic operations, we are building programs with recursive loops in them, that will not be able to ever stop, to ever arrive at a solution, but will instead spin around in circles forever. Not that this is necessarily always a bad thing! A trans-Aristotelian-and-Platonic logic would have to learn to perform its data-processing operations without relying on negation, and to think the Forms of things without relying on outmoded categories.
Perhaps to sum this up: in our critique of idealism we are forced to rely on idealism, i.e. in our assumption of categorical formations -idealist/pragmatic, visual/acoustic, spatial/temporal, etc. Derrida, working a little after Havelock, and in a much different milieu, identified a set of similar formations as essential metaphysical binaries of Western Philosophy. Perhaps it is, after all, only through something like the Derridean method of Deconstruction that we could truly achieve the return of a Protagorean, or even a Socratic Pragmatism...?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
afterthoughts
"The difference that shows itself as creative is the passage that leads the nightmare back to the dream, and the dream to a project (which is fully aware of the difficult and limitation) of life. If difference is resistance, the dream can live its historical projection in a fully aware and conscious manner. If difference is a mode of life, it identifies the mode of life as productive. No one here is putting critical and transcendental action into question: but we should pity it, comprehend it in the radical aporia that gives rise to it, and which does not allow it to take root in the only natural and temporal difference that counts: that of power. As a matter of fact, in the theory of creative difference there is something like an extremely strong return to an origin that is not burdened with nightmares and repressive violences. This is not an illusion but the very thing which is here at stake. Difference does not become creative when it identifies itself with an origin (burdened by the past), but when it confounds itself with a power that is always new open onto what is to-come. Difference destroys every determinate ontological foundation because it is the creative determination of an ontology of freedom."
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.
"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.
"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
temperments
In his introduction to The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, Havelock again draws our attention to what I referred to in an earlier post as the epochal structure of history:
"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)
Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:
"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)
This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.
"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)
Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:
"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)
This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.
anxieties and their discontents
In response to Ruthie's perceptive comment on my last post:
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B
Monday, September 13, 2010
anxieties of influence
in this post I would like to approach not only Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, but also the article that Prof. Moretti sent out last week about language's effects on thought.
I'd like to suggest a concept that these pieces and the matters they have us considering might be profitably understood in common through the use of a little idea that we can attribute to the Yale Literary Critic Howard Bloom: the anxiety of influence.
the anxiety of influence is a generalizeable concept; Bloom employes it as a lit crit tool, but you can see in Havelock a very similar notion with more overtly philosophical, or even metaphysical connotations. Plato's attack on poetry provides a paradigmatic example of Bloom's concept.
whereas Bloom's work is explicitly concerned with poetic creativity, we can see his point thru a the more generally Freudian lens of the Oedipal complex, whereby the father becomes the enemy through a poorly-integrated incestual impulse. The Oedipal complex is unconscious, and thus expresses itself symptomatically; it cannot be perceived directly, but can only really be inferred from the set of distortions it introduces into its local field of actions and experiences...
all of this talk about Whorf and how he obviously got it wrong carries, by my reading, a strong Oedipal signature. Whorf is the deadbeat father of analytical linguistics (Sapir is perhaps its codependent mother), whose legacy must be forcibly appropriated (by Chomsky?), much like Zeus has, in Aeschylus' tale, usurped the throne from his father (Kronos), and Titanic retinue. But in all cases, such violent usurpation leads only to further trouble, to what Emerson called 'secret retributions', which become necessary, either as the fallout from divine politics -as in Aeschylus, or Homer-,or as internal deviations from the moral rectitude of dispassionate philosophy -for Plato-, or by simple virtue of the mounting anxiety of symptomatic deferral -for Freud or Bloom. It's like a deferred, karmic version of Newton's second law.
but as we see in all these cases, this little literary/theoretical problem quickly becomes a great historical/socioeconomic one. The anxiety of influence belies a dissimulative tendency in our comprehension of ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. This dissimulation (or misapprehension) occurs as a function of what we could call epochality, a notion which receives an interesting treatment in Heidegger's work, but the general concept -that we are somehow culturally predisposed to an erroneous conception of history- motivates in an interesting way the work of a wide range of thinkers -usually historians and philosophers of science- including Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World), Kuhn (The Structures of Scientific Revolutions), and Foucault (who draws from Canguilhem, and is drawn on by Agamben)...
this is not a simple problem. With regard to Deutscher's NYT article, his early dismissal of Whorf turns out to be a ploy for our attention; he closes on the note that, "We [do] not know as yet how to measure these consequences [of language on thought] directly...", effectively undermining his own smug assertion, expressed earlier in the article, that Whorf's theory had "crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims."
this kind of waffling seems symptomatic to me. The whole point of Whorf's theory (and Deutscher's, as it turns out), is that the seeming solidity of 'common sense' can be mistaken. And the much more interesting (than political games of attribution and usurpation) question that arises from all of this is: what could possibly constitute 'hard' evidence for an epochal (and this is also the preeminent theme in Husserl's work) structure of language? In the final analysis, I think Aeschylus' story serves as an excellent allegory for the overreliance on fact and reason. Prometheus never shows any 'hard facts' to support his prognostications, yet his foresight is a gift that even Zeus will eventually be unable, either to extinguish, or to do without.
I'd like to suggest a concept that these pieces and the matters they have us considering might be profitably understood in common through the use of a little idea that we can attribute to the Yale Literary Critic Howard Bloom: the anxiety of influence.
the anxiety of influence is a generalizeable concept; Bloom employes it as a lit crit tool, but you can see in Havelock a very similar notion with more overtly philosophical, or even metaphysical connotations. Plato's attack on poetry provides a paradigmatic example of Bloom's concept.
whereas Bloom's work is explicitly concerned with poetic creativity, we can see his point thru a the more generally Freudian lens of the Oedipal complex, whereby the father becomes the enemy through a poorly-integrated incestual impulse. The Oedipal complex is unconscious, and thus expresses itself symptomatically; it cannot be perceived directly, but can only really be inferred from the set of distortions it introduces into its local field of actions and experiences...
all of this talk about Whorf and how he obviously got it wrong carries, by my reading, a strong Oedipal signature. Whorf is the deadbeat father of analytical linguistics (Sapir is perhaps its codependent mother), whose legacy must be forcibly appropriated (by Chomsky?), much like Zeus has, in Aeschylus' tale, usurped the throne from his father (Kronos), and Titanic retinue. But in all cases, such violent usurpation leads only to further trouble, to what Emerson called 'secret retributions', which become necessary, either as the fallout from divine politics -as in Aeschylus, or Homer-,or as internal deviations from the moral rectitude of dispassionate philosophy -for Plato-, or by simple virtue of the mounting anxiety of symptomatic deferral -for Freud or Bloom. It's like a deferred, karmic version of Newton's second law.
but as we see in all these cases, this little literary/theoretical problem quickly becomes a great historical/socioeconomic one. The anxiety of influence belies a dissimulative tendency in our comprehension of ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. This dissimulation (or misapprehension) occurs as a function of what we could call epochality, a notion which receives an interesting treatment in Heidegger's work, but the general concept -that we are somehow culturally predisposed to an erroneous conception of history- motivates in an interesting way the work of a wide range of thinkers -usually historians and philosophers of science- including Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World), Kuhn (The Structures of Scientific Revolutions), and Foucault (who draws from Canguilhem, and is drawn on by Agamben)...
this is not a simple problem. With regard to Deutscher's NYT article, his early dismissal of Whorf turns out to be a ploy for our attention; he closes on the note that, "We [do] not know as yet how to measure these consequences [of language on thought] directly...", effectively undermining his own smug assertion, expressed earlier in the article, that Whorf's theory had "crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims."
this kind of waffling seems symptomatic to me. The whole point of Whorf's theory (and Deutscher's, as it turns out), is that the seeming solidity of 'common sense' can be mistaken. And the much more interesting (than political games of attribution and usurpation) question that arises from all of this is: what could possibly constitute 'hard' evidence for an epochal (and this is also the preeminent theme in Husserl's work) structure of language? In the final analysis, I think Aeschylus' story serves as an excellent allegory for the overreliance on fact and reason. Prometheus never shows any 'hard facts' to support his prognostications, yet his foresight is a gift that even Zeus will eventually be unable, either to extinguish, or to do without.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
doggin' it..
wrapping up this extended meditation on Havelock... First of all, let's notice Havelock's use of the term 'cynical'; he uses it in its contemporary sense, referring to a kind of critical irresponsibility, indicating precisely the opposite of the Platonic notion of an 'inner' morality. This is a peculiar lapse; Havelock attempts to describe the advent of this way of thinking with a concept that derives from it. And not just any concept; cynic refers specifically to Plato's greatest contemporary rival, Diogenes of Sinope, the philosophical heir to one of Socrates' senior students (Antisthenes), who mocked Plato for his capitulation to political power and canonization of Socrates.
and rightly so! Despite Foucault's late attempts to rehabilitate him, Plato's weirdness seems to exceed even Derrida's best attempts at mimesis... Consider, for example, Havelock's argument that for Plato, mimesis refers not only to the imitation of a technical lesson as the outcome of a kind of rote learning, but to the identification of the student-audience with this lesson's demonstration; in short, to the communicative (thus educational, cf. Havelock p.158) technology of a predominantly oral culture.
but this is not as easy as condemning the oral psyche in favor of a literate one, or vice versa! Socrates/Plato (Platocrates/Socrato?) himself in the Phaedrus condemns writing as a poison of the mind, as corrosive to memory and morality as poetry in the Republic. This brings me to the point I wanted to argue too late in our last meeting: thinking of the Platonic mutation of orality into literacy as a linear transformation obscures the complexity of this fascinating situation. With the advent of writing, orality does not simply disappear, but is incorporated; transformed, relegated to a supporting position. As for its complex repertoire of musical and rhythmic performative techniques and patterns of embodiment described so brilliantly by Havelock, rather than simply thinking of them as being lost, can we begin to reidentify their modes of continuing functionality? Can we not rediscover them in our new media?
"What kind of learning process was this? Surely it was one in which you learned by doing. But the doing, so far as it concerns the preservation of important language, was of a special kind. What you 'did' were the thousand acts and thoughts, battles, speeches, journeys, lives, and deaths that you were reciting in rhythmic verse, or hearing, or repeating. [...] The pattern of behavior in artist and audience was therefore in some important respects identical. It can be described mechanically as a continual repeating of rhythmic doings. Psychologically it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification." (Ibid., p.159-160.)and Plato attacks this communication-technology, or medium (it is in this sense that Havelock refers to the Homeric Encyclopedia; i.e. as a technical apparatus), on the basis of its alleged immorality. The performative self-identification of the poet with his/her materials is for Plato a 'divine madness'; the poetic statement a "phantom of reality" (ibid., p.165). The poet and his/her audience (i.e. Presocratic Greek culture) are so wrapped up in the doing that they are unable to contemplate being; the this is the trap that Socrates devotes his strange life to trying to spring.
but this is not as easy as condemning the oral psyche in favor of a literate one, or vice versa! Socrates/Plato (Platocrates/Socrato?) himself in the Phaedrus condemns writing as a poison of the mind, as corrosive to memory and morality as poetry in the Republic. This brings me to the point I wanted to argue too late in our last meeting: thinking of the Platonic mutation of orality into literacy as a linear transformation obscures the complexity of this fascinating situation. With the advent of writing, orality does not simply disappear, but is incorporated; transformed, relegated to a supporting position. As for its complex repertoire of musical and rhythmic performative techniques and patterns of embodiment described so brilliantly by Havelock, rather than simply thinking of them as being lost, can we begin to reidentify their modes of continuing functionality? Can we not rediscover them in our new media?
Ill-literati
Plato, says Havelock, attacks the poets on the basis of a supposed ethical and/or moral deficiency of a purely oral culture, and his attacks on the sophists, whose use of rhetorical technique follows a similar techno-aesthic exigency (persuasion by mellifluity), seem to follow from this. Havelock seems to base his argument on the interpretive power of this explanation; it allows us to integrate the Platonic corpus more elegantly than previous canonical readings which downplay the attack on poetry (cf. Havelock, p.6-7).
but this ethico-moralistic point bears closer examination:
but this ethico-moralistic point bears closer examination:
"the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude which at bottom is cynical. It is more important to keep up appearances than to practise [sic] the reality. Decorum and decent behavior are not obviously violated, but the inner principle of morality is." (Havelock, p.12 again, my italics.)this "pure morality", Havelock asserts, constitutes the Platonic (or Socratic, if you will) innovation:
"It is to be defined and defended for its own sake; its rewards and penalties are to be treated as incidental, and it is to be demonstrated ... [as] the happiest human condition." (ibid.)it is developed and defined in pedagogical terms (in the Republic, for example) in contradistinction to the 'poetic' pedagogy that Havelock identifies as the essential constellation of attributes accompanying an oral culture that must have dominated Presocratic Greece. TBC'd...
Histories of Communication
hello folks, if indeed ye be there...
here we begin this little blogging adventure, out of duty, yea, but also of interest, and the sincere desire to communicate, or at least a duty which is not only inspired by the bureaucratic mechanisms of requirement and adjudication, but but also by our common burden of isolation, the isolation of our separateness as individuals, which both underlies and draws forth these communicative energies...
please excuse the flourishes ; )
now on to a few comments about some of the materials we have been discussing:
in the great Platonic moment, as the sophists are attacked for their reliance on precisely the technical supports that Lord and Parry discovered to be essentially 'oral', or illiterate mnemonic and compositional techniques, we are already confronted with a complex knot of circumstances. As Havelock points out (p.7-8), it is difficult for us ('moderns') to grasp the significance of Plato's indictment of poetry, to which he presents his philosophy as a necessary alternative, since we might prefer to think of poetry as language's benign musicality, incorporable into (or identifiable within) any discourse, be it philosophical, scientific, or artistic...
why should poetry be foreign to philosophy?! For us this seems associable with the worst kind of contemporary positivist essentialism; a Platonic scientism which would rule out as irrelevant all musicality, aesthetic pleasure, and artistic technique. But such an interpretation would cause us to misunderstand the Platonic gesture.
as Havelock points out, Plato is deeply concerned with justice. His indictment of the poetic culture is chiefly an indictment of its deficient morality;
here we begin this little blogging adventure, out of duty, yea, but also of interest, and the sincere desire to communicate, or at least a duty which is not only inspired by the bureaucratic mechanisms of requirement and adjudication, but but also by our common burden of isolation, the isolation of our separateness as individuals, which both underlies and draws forth these communicative energies...
please excuse the flourishes ; )
now on to a few comments about some of the materials we have been discussing:
in the great Platonic moment, as the sophists are attacked for their reliance on precisely the technical supports that Lord and Parry discovered to be essentially 'oral', or illiterate mnemonic and compositional techniques, we are already confronted with a complex knot of circumstances. As Havelock points out (p.7-8), it is difficult for us ('moderns') to grasp the significance of Plato's indictment of poetry, to which he presents his philosophy as a necessary alternative, since we might prefer to think of poetry as language's benign musicality, incorporable into (or identifiable within) any discourse, be it philosophical, scientific, or artistic...
why should poetry be foreign to philosophy?! For us this seems associable with the worst kind of contemporary positivist essentialism; a Platonic scientism which would rule out as irrelevant all musicality, aesthetic pleasure, and artistic technique. But such an interpretation would cause us to misunderstand the Platonic gesture.
as Havelock points out, Plato is deeply concerned with justice. His indictment of the poetic culture is chiefly an indictment of its deficient morality;
"a half-morality, a sort of twilight zone, at best a compromise, at worst a cynical [sic!] conspiracy, according to which the younger generation is continually indoctrinated in the view that what is vital is not so much morality as social prestige and material reward which may flow from a moral reputation whether or not this is deserved." (Havelock, p.12.)and isn't it fascinating for our purposes that Plato's intervention is focused above all on education! To be continued...
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