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.

"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?