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?

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:

"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;

"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...