[lbo-talk] USA 2003

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

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

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