[lbo-talk] USA 2003

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Sep 17 00:05:01 PDT 2003


At 9:28 PM -0400 9/16/03, Brian Siano wrote:
>[A]ll of the above [law, medicine, engineering, business, physics,
>chemistry, woodwork, etc.] are trades, and skills, which are
>continually tested against the Real World. Some, like doctors,
>lawyers, and engineers, have responsibility for a great deal of our
>general well-being, and their decisons affect the lives of others in
>profound ways. Others are simply trades, where they keep the
>machinery of our lives humming. But their labor affects the world,
>and when mistakes are made, the results are (frequently) obvious and
>profound.
>
>Now... Let's take Literary Theory-- or, to be more inclusive,
>Cultural Studies. What does this involve? Reading texts, basically,
>and developing insights about these texts which others may find
>insightful.

The above theory of the Real World, in one respect, is a variation of Plato's argument against the poet and other artists and teachers of words:

***** And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?

That appears to be so. . . .

Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him?

I should say not.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them. . . .

(_Republic_, Book X, <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html>) *****

Except that Plato in fact knew real-world consequences -- or rather real-world dangers -- of the art of telling and interpreting stories ("literary theory," if you will, but, more fittingly, rhetoric, which subsumes not just poetry and criticism but also arguments in public spheres of law and politics) and of exposing the masses to this art: "we shall have to say that about men poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man's own loss and another's gain -- these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite" (_Republic_, Book III, <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.4.iii.html>). Education in rhetoric allows us to better analyze social relations of power that are masked by, for instance, an idea that "justice" in class society can be profitable to all, regardless of classes -- hence Plato's dislikes of poets, sophists, and other "culture warriors." -- Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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