The Myth of/at the Origin(al)
W RITING ( AND / IN ) THE HISTORY OF MIMESIS
For Gebauer and Wulf, the Platonic transformation cannot be understood without an awareness of the changes brought about by the introduction of writing as analyzed by Havelock.1
Not only do we encounter a new or specifically philosophical treatment of mimesis with Plato but, in fact, after his reformulations “the entire complex of language, bodies, images, medium, and social control underwent a change from the ground up.”2
Through writing, the acoustic medium of communication changes into a visible object with the quality of being quotable and verifiable as fact. Its outcome is the very idea of theory, contemplation, theorein. The Platonic transformation, in this reading, consists in leveling a critique of the earlier modes of communication, gathering the diverse practices and their content under the name of mimesis for the first time, and isolating the
conceptual knowledge that remained conditioned to time and the senses in these practices, by distinguishing between true knowledge (episteme)and received authority (doxa), between pure thinking (noesis) and sensorial experience (aesthesis).3
The result, in their reading, is that the type of practices associated with mimetic production—
specifically with mousikē—appear as a concern with becoming instead of being, with the many instead of the one, and with the visible instead of the intelligible. Moreover, they
1 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 45.
2 Idem. 3 Idem, 50.
argue, the monopoly held by the poets and the sophists of this type of knowledge leads Plato to relegate it to “a sphere of its own, aesthetics, which yields only a qualified form of knowledge.”4
This transformation, however it is defined, appears as the non-origin of theory, of aesthetics, of philosophy as such. It also seems to begin a chapter in the history of
mimesis in which the sounding and performative aspects of mousikē have a progressively limited role to play, being quickly overshadowed by painting, poetry, and especially tragedy. We can begin to talk then, even, of a redistribution of the sensorium, of a
displacement from the aural to the visual, and from the visual to the intelligible. The most important transformation involved by this displacement, however, is that we encounter for the first time an unambiguous distinction between a models and copies, along with a hierarchization of their value and a regulation for their production. And this, in
Havelock’s reading, would not be anything like an epistemic change nor an aesthetic revolution, as much as the unavoidable consequences of the rise of literacy.
Thus far, we have entertained Havelock’s theory in the context of archaic mimesis and with respect to his discussion of Homeric poetry, but we haven’t engaged with his treatment of Plato. What is crucial in Havelock is that Plato’s text is, at the same time, a testimony—a document for the historian—of the general passage from orality and literacy as well as a crucial actor—an author for the philosopher—in the transformation as the regulator, codifier, and in fact programmer of the subsequent conditions for understanding and judging archaic and classical mimesis. Considering Plato’s role in the history of mimesis along these lines poses a fundamental question about the place of mimesis in the theory of literacy in general. How can we account for the privilege that Plato seems to have of being aware at any level of the massive transformations that are said to be taking place during his time? In other words, are we to read Plato
symptomatically as a document of the transformations, or as the author of a doctrine of mimesis that rides upon these transformations while at the same time exposing the conditions for its own possibility? A more immediate version of the same question is
4 Idem.
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 59 suggested by Havelock himself with respect to Plato’s own awareness of the
transformations he was experiencing. The problem Havelock poses is, how was Plato able to reject the culture that had raised him or, in other words, “if the educational system which transmitted the Hellenic mores had indeed relied on the perpetual stimulation of the young in a kind of hypnotic trance, to use Plato’s language, how did the Greeks ever wake up?”5
In approaching these questions, we encounter what is at stake in the Platonic transformation for the history of mimesis, as well as securing the place that we assign to Plato’s text in the entire scheme. We engage Plato as just that, a text, in which what is at stake is nothing other than its very condition as text, as a written text. That is to say, we seek to understand the role of writing in the history of mimesis by questioning the very notion of writing that is written into the history of mimesis. This is because writing is already in a problematic relation with mimesis, and the type of writing that has been taken as the condition for such transformation is already a result of the history it attempts to write: To write about the history of mimesis is to ask about the place of writing in that history. But questioning their relation might just jeopardize the entire possibility of understanding the nature of such transformation and thus of making sense of the history as a whole. Let us move more slowly.
Havelock contends that philosophy is only possible through the type of reflexivity afforded by the growing literary culture, by the mediation that writing provides. Writing is a condition for the possibility of abstraction and logical thought, indeed for the
emergence of abstract ideas as such, and it parallels the displacement of an acoustic orientation without fixity to a visual, static one. According to the “literacy thesis” in Havelock’s account, the very distinction between subject and object, between the knower and the known, is a result of the introduction of writing. Only poetry as written could be truly examined and analyzed with the sense objectivity which we know today and which was beginning to be experienced in Plato’s time. But this is not all. The entire mindset of
5 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 208.
ancient culture was transformed by writing, specifically by the Greek alphabet which represents all sounds, not just consonants, thus presumably requiring no interpretation (the filling in of the vowels) for its decoding, freeing the mind from the task of
memorization. Freed from this task, the “soul” becomes autonomous, independent of the content of what is memorized. Thus, Havelock claims, the very notion of a soul, of
psyche, is at odds with the experience of the “Homeric mind,” and it does not emerge until Plato.
The Republic is, as we said, both a testimony and the first articulation of the notion of soul. Or to be more precise, as Havelock writes, Socrates affirms and exploits a notion which was the slow creation of thinkers like Heraclitus and Democritus, a
development which involves not only the semantics of the word psyche as opposed to “body” or “corpse,” but the very possibility of articulating the notion of a “self,” of an “I” that remains unchanged throughout its affections, a self-governing consciousness.6
This is because, in the Homeric mind, the self is inseparable from what it does, from its
enactments and re-enactments—the self is simultaneously constituted and exceeded by alterity in a mimetic epidemic. The poem as a cultural repository exceeds the individual in order to be preserved and communicated. The educational experience of Homeric poetry, the identification of poets and listeners, implies that the content of the poem exists only in its embodied performance, it does not preexist it and it does not exist outside of it. Insofar as the entire acoustic assemblage is deployed for the preservation and distribution of the poem, the poem is coextensive with all the participants of the performance, from the memory of the poem to the affective engagement of the audience that ensures the actualization of the mores and customs it preserves and aims to maintain.
The “identification” of the poet and the audience with the content of the poem in its re-enactment is necessary for the poem’s preservation, for its effect. From this follows that there is no way of understanding what the actual “content” of the poem is, since “its acceptance and retention are made psychologically possible by a mechanism of self- surrender to the poetic performance, and of self-identification with the situations and the
6 Idem, 200.
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 61 stories related in the performance.”7
This means that the poem cannot be properly “understood” by the poet or the audience because both poet and audience remain within the mimetic epidemic, insofar as they merge with it, or are co-constituted by it. There is no way of remaining “outside” of the performance, just as there is no way of attending to the poem without getting carried away in its flow. And conversely, there is no way of maintaining any unified notion of a “self” or an “I” that is not in a constant becoming- other, a self that is not at once a poet in performance and the hero he performs, who is not bound to the constraints of time that make up the poetic performance. The transmission of ethos mores and customs in this way implies that there is no interiority in which to ponder and reflect what these customs are and what they signify by themselves, outside of their daily application—there are no timeless, abstract laws, only the right thing to be done, the proper way to honor the gods.
By the time of Plato, this poetic culture was already at odds with the mindset that emerged with the spread of alphabetic writing, with the experience that the text as a self- standing object afforded the reader. The written text enabled the reader to “dispense with most of that emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was sure of recall.”8
The ability to return to a statement, evaluate it, and compare it with others depends, for Havelock, on writing only. In fact, the Socratic method of dialectics, he holds, is already a result of this experience. When Socrates demands of his interlocutors to repeat, explain, and rephrase their statements, he is effectively interrupting the
identification of the speaker with the spoken and isolating specific issues for careful examination.9 Dialectics “was a weapon for arousing the consciousness from its dream
language and stimulating it to think abstractly,”10
yet this capacity had been already enabled by the written text—even if Socrates, famously, never wrote a word.
7 Idem, 198.
8 Idem, 208.
9 In fact, we will argue below, Socrates is exploiting the possibility for iteration that already belongs in speech, a possibility that is characteristic of writing but not in the sense that Havelock understands it here. 10 Idem, 209.
All the essential elements of Platonism—the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, the one and the many, being and becoming—can thus be explained as a result of the possibility of stopping the mimetic flow of the poetic performance to examine it outside of its sensorial and temporal constraints.11
Plato’s fundamental aim in the face of these changes, as presented in the Republic, is to secure theoretically the force of a thinking, self-identical subject and the affirmation of an abstract, timeless object of knowledge against the poetic experience that still dominates his sociocultural milieu, emphasizing the separation between the listener and the poem. In Havelock’s words, Plato demands of Athenians that,
They should examine this [poetic] experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the “subject” who stands apart from the “object” and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just “imitating” it.12
The strategy consists in presenting the poetic experience as a confused and contradictory form of knowledge (he calls it doxa) that cannot reach the type of knowledge, the
episteme, that the new mindset requires. Plato points out a type of cognitive dissonance between the operations of the mind as he now understands it, and the way mimesis engages with them, finding those of mimesis to be limited, misguided, and dangerous. But this means that the definition of mimesis as presented in the Republic, the
recollection and analysis of the Homeric poetic experience, is made possible by the appearance and spread of writing, and it is advanced in order to establish Platonism, philosophy as such, as its counterpart, as its vanquisher. The philosophical episteme is precisely what mimesis can never offer. What mimesis does offer, the rich, complex and contradictory experience of human action, aisthesis, and becoming, is what threatens philosophy from all flanks.
Without exaggerating this polarization, it is already clear that the account of archaic mimesis that we find in the Republic is constituted by philosophy as its other, it is
11 Idem, 218.
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 63 the outside of philosophy, it is what philosophy is not (sophistry is another other of this other of philosophy, the charges against both are very similar). Each formulation in the text is already outside the experience of orality as Havelock wants to describe it (he will say the same about the written Homer we possess), and thus it is only constituted by
philosophy, it derives from it.
Placed in opposition to philosophy, mimesis might be said to belong to it. There is therefore nothing original about archaic mimesis. We should be suspect, then, of Plato’s account as a document, as a historical record, as what it can tell us about the “original” experience of archaic mimesis and mousikē. But, paradoxically, this makes philosophy
itself be constituted by the exclusion of what is established as mimetic by mousikē. Philosophy appears by differentiating itself from mousikē, by creating the scaffold of what will allow it to distinguish itself from it. Thus, mousikē, and hence mimesis,are already in philosophy, they are part of it as its outside—that is to say, they are the origin of philosophy, its motivation. Mimesis, being outside of philosophy, is constituted by the philosophy of which it is the origin without belonging to it.13
It is rather unarchaic and anarchic: unoriginal.
We can easily see how this interpretation attracted the attention of deconstruction. To understand this paradox, we will have to distinguish, further on, between a general
mimesis that, without being itself original, originates the restricted mimesis that we find in Plato. This points us to the general structure of what I call, after Lacoue-Labarthe, a
mimetology, a philosophical elaboration of mimesis that attempts to set down and define its limits and boundaries. Paradoxically, however, a mimetology is grounded in an experience that already does not belong to it but everywhere affects it. Mimesis gives mimetology this possibility from without, with the effect that “the more it resembles, the more it differs.” This mimetology introduces a historical aspect; it marks a break, a
13 This analysis, and what follows, is based on Derrida’s reading of Saussure in the first part of Of Grammatology, where the system of writing is defined as exterior and yet constitutive of the system of language that pretends to exclude it. The formulation towards which we are approaching is that “writing [and mimesis are] at the same time more exterior to speech, not being its “image” or its “symbol,” and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing.” Derrida Of Grammatology, 46. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Stanford, (CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
distinction between what used to be and what now is and should be. In defining itself as present, it defines the past from the perspective of its present and rewrites the past as its
past, a past with which it wants nothing to do. Thus, for instance, the infamous “expulsion of the poets” does not only function as a regulation for an ideal city, for a utopia, but also, or moreover, it has the effect of banishing mimesis retroactively from its own history—we say moreover because this banishment was in fact more effective than the one “prescribed” for the future, to which Aristotle was already quick in replying.
Mimesis, then, is outside of philosophy, and yet somehow inside it. The abyssal logic of this formulation will be made clearer by returning to the problem of writing, as writing is also at the origin of philosophy, according to Havelock. Does this mean that
mousikē and writing are in the same position with respect to philosophy? Certainly, insofar as they both constitute it from the outside and are in turn constituted
philosophically as its exclusion. This does not mean that mimesis and writing are equivalent in any simple sense. For, as is well known, Plato is in what we could call a complicated relationship with writing, an ambivalence that led him to formulate attacks in the seventh letter and the Phaedrus.14
Havelock, in fact, devotes very little discussion to these texts and to the problem in general of accounting for Plato’s self-awareness of the definitive role of writing for his philosophy. Plato’s “preference for oral methods was not only conservative but illogical, since the Platonic episteme which was to supplant
doxa was being nursed to birth by the literate revolution.”15
Coming close to begging the question, Havelock here makes clear that he denies Plato any self-awareness of the effects of writing upon these transformations, yet by this move his theory falls into a simple technological determinism, exaggerating his claim about the influence of writing in problematic ways, starting with the very formulation of writing as a “technology,” as a
14 On writing and the Phaedrus, see Derrida, Dissemination. See also Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).
15 Idem, 56. In The Muse Learns to Write, he refers to Aristotle’s choice of the word theoria, contemplation, as a “subconscious” choice to signal a passage from the acoustic to the visual, and subsequently refers to the Phaedrus as Plato’s attempt to “give the oral message priority over the written, though with ambiguous