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;

"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...