The Revolution of Everyday Life

I study theories of the everyday because I believe in them, not simply because they are interesting – and I believe in them on a practical level, not simply a theoretical one. A problem arises from this: on a practical level, in my real, everyday life, what does effective political action look like? What is a viable politics or style of living?

If Debord and Lefebvre are right, and I believe they are, everyday life has been colonized by capitalism. We don’t see how ideology encodes every aspect of our lives – mostly because we don’t look. The division of labour led to a division of the spheres of life (family, work, leisure), turning us into divided beings. In which sphere of life do we find authentic experience? Arguably, each sphere is authentic and they come together somehow to create a total being. But in reality, our everyday lives revolve around work and, even if we like what we do, we look for ways to escape the mundaneness and necessity of that labour. The quality of our family lives, in turn, is determined by our labour and is dictated in large part by consumption. Even if we “make time” to spend with our families, even if we try to prioritize our private lives, the quality of our domestic lives are still largely determined by capital – whether in terms of money, time, or status. We turn to leisure for a “break” from the demands of everyday life – but even our leisure activities are alienated. They are dictated by advertising, governed by capitalism, and serve only to appease our dissatisfaction so that we continue to be “productive” members of society. Even the most “authentic” of leisure activities or styles of living is quickly co-opted by capital and turned into a commodity. We don’t even understand our own needs or desires anymore, beyond the basics, because our needs and desires are dictated to us by capital. Leisure becomes an escape that only further alienates us from our social reality. And hey, why not? According to Lefebvre, the reality of our lives is something we should want to escape. Everyday life in modern society is impoverished, it lags behind what is possible. “‘Progress,’” he says, “has affected existing social realities only secondarily, modifying them as little as possible, according to the strict dictates of capitalist profitability. The important thing is that human beings be profitable, not that their lives by changed” (Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 1, 230).

Revolution, in the classical Marxist sense, isn’t viable anymore. This makes sense to me – can the working class really reclaim the tools of production and overthrow capitalism? We’re now dealing with a global capitalism that is so deeply embedded in every aspect of everyone’s lives that nothing short of a global catastrophe will overturn it. Instead, we need to effect change from the bottom up in order to truly increase the quality of our lives. We need to engage in resistance at the everyday level in hopes of changing the landscape of the everyday itself. All we really have is the everyday. This is where we live – rather than trying to escape it, we should embrace it, critique it, and change it in every way we can.

Theory proposes a variety of practices for a revolution of everyday life – détournement, or appropriating symbols and icons of the dominant ideology for different uses; dérive, or wandering the city in order to understand its ideological landscape and then make your own mark on it; tactics, ways of “making do” with the tools available to you in order to reclaim power over your daily activities in every sphere; potlatch or gift exchange as an alternative economy; creating “situations” that heighten the experience of real social life and de-alienate the individual. To me, this style of resistance includes activities like performance art, street art, avant-garde art, guerilla film-making, zine publishing, yarn bombing, and a number of other “anarchist” activities, no matter how benign they seem. Creativity gives the revolution of everyday life its utopian character.

Here’s the problem I have though: we still have to make room for collective political action, directed at political structures themselves. We may not be able to overturn the global political and economic system, but we still maintain influence over some policy decisions. I’m not so cynical yet that I believe all classical political action is futile. In this part of the world, we can vote for our leaders and our votes make a difference. Signing petitions and writing letters to our representatives still works, even if not in every single situation. Work strikes are complicated now because they are often seen as a means to support corrupt unions and feed their members’ greed – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for them anymore. They still exert sufficient pressure on businesses and governments, they just need to be used better. I’m not sure about the value of protesting anymore. A peaceful protest will achieve visibility for an issue but little else; however, a violent protest usually just creates a stronger resistance against it while also undermining the protestors’ cause. I think more creative public statements, on the level of everyday life, are more effective.

I realize that most of what I’ve said is hugely generalized. Getting into the specifics of this problem demands the space of a book, or at least an ongoing conversation. The question that I want to work out is how I can reconcile the need for big political action with a politics of everyday life – not just in theory, but in practice, in real life. When do we move from one mode of resistance to the other, or how do we work them together? I suppose I won’t come up with one big answer because each situation calls for a different tactic.

The Meaning of Life

In a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Interim (1919), the 5th installment in the 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, Katherine Mansfield writes:

For them [certain modern authors] the whole art of writing consists in the power with which they are able to register that faint inward shock of recognition. Glancing through life they make the discovery that there are certain experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs. There is a quality in the familiarity of these experiences or in their strangeness which evokes an immediate mysterious response — a desire for expression. But now, instead of going any further, instead of attempting to relate their “experiences” to life or to see them against any kind of background, these writers are, as we see them, content to remain in the air, hovering over, as if the thrilling moment were enough and more than enough. Indeed, far from desiring to explore it, it is as though they would guard the secret for themselves as well as for us, so that when they do dart away all is as untouched, as unbroken as before.

But what is the effect of this kind of writing upon the reader? How is he to judge the importance of one thing rather than another if each is to be seen in isolation? [...]

In it [Interim] Miriam is enclosed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, and though she receives, as usual, shock after shock of inward recognition, they are produced by such things as well-browned mutton, gas jets, varnished wallpapers. Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling, as before, that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.

Precisely the thing that Mansfield felt was a shortcoming of Pilgrimage is what I find most interesting about it. It seems to me that by focusing on the subjective experience of everyday moments and objects, and by refusing to frame them as part of a larger, more meaningful narrative, Richardson expresses that which is nearly impossible to express: the everyday itself, that which cannot be contained in any single detail but persists in the whole.

Mansfield’s argument that assigning “equal importance” to every detail causes every detail to become equally unimportant is exactly the mode of thought that has taken us away from the everyday. We focus on the marvellous, the inspirational, the philosophical, those things that stand out from the ordinary, and thus sacrifice our understanding of real experience as consisting of the mundane.

This is exactly why I love Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. “What is the meaning of life?” It seems like such a big question. But it’s really not. Life is birth, death, sex, work, love, friendship, laughter. Life is, quite simply, the everyday.

The Winter of our Discontent

So lately I’ve been reading loads of feminist theory and am slightly shocked to discover that many of these works from the 1970s still speak an undeniable truth. I’m definitely not a feminist type, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, but some of what I’ve read has roused unexpected and passionate feelings in me. Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray both take Freud to town on his portrait of femininity and it is truly a joy to watch them do it. But it’s interesting too, to see how some of the things they are deconstructing are stigma about women that still hang around. Freud talks about woman’s sexuality as a “dark continent,” he talks about “the riddle of the nature of femininity,” men as “active” and women as “passive,” masochism as “truly feminine,” women as naturally hysterical, and he essentially implies that women’s function in society is to be men’s objects of desire. And then there’s the one that makes me blindly crazy whenever I read it: “Women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization.” Except, of course, plaiting and weaving, which he argues is somehow an imitation of our natural shame about being women. You can certainly dismiss much of what Freud says by recognizing that he was a man borne of a particular time in history, which is what I’ve always done. But let’s face it, the discourse of psychoanalysis is so deeply embedded in our culture now that we have sustained many of these views without even acknowledging it. How many of us women out there have been brushed off as “crazy” or labeled as incomprehensible. Femininity as a “riddle,” feminine sexuality as a “dark continent,” still seems to me to be the dominant discourse about women on an everyday level. Sure some of our material conditions have drastically improved in the past hundred years, but as far as I’m concerned we’ve got a long way left to go. And it’s not about having more rights necessarily — it’s about how we are talked about, how we talk about ourselves, and how we talk about each other.

Cixous says that men have pitted women against each other. And isn’t that still true? Even still, in my adulthood, in the 21st century, I find it difficult to avoid competition and bitterness amongst groups of girls. She also talks about the limitlessness of women’s desire. But don’t many of the women you know still find satisfaction by simply subjecting passively to sex? I know that’s a gross generalization, but I am constantly amazed that so many of the women I’ve spoken to about it over the past few years experience desire under totally masculine terms.

All I’m saying ladies is that we have a long way to go. And it amazes me that the concerns of 30 years ago are still around to such an extent.

The Great Masquerade

Let’s be honest here. Though we feel that we have a core, a someone who we really are deep down, who we really are in the world actually depends on what we do. Right? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, wondering just how different people’s perception of me is from my own perception of myself. Surely, I sometimes do things and I think to myself that they are out of character for me. But the rest of the world doesn’t see my inner dialogue, my intentions, my feelings. All they see is what I do. So isn’t that what I am? We are social beings, our lives are fully defined by our place in the world. That is, after all, what civilization is built on. It’s what separates us from animals.

The upside of all this is that a person can really be whomever they would like to be. I’m not saying we don’t have individual personalities — sure, we are probably pre-disposed to certain behaviours, and whether or not that’s nature or nurture doesn’t matter so much. The point is that it is there. But we still have control over our actions and we can hopefully act in a way that feels real and honest. That’s what the concept of integrity is all about. The downside is that sometimes the performance doesn’t match up with whatever is going on inside. Or sometimes the performances contradict each other. I’ve long known that I am an inconsistent person and I have largely accepted it. But there are certain hypocrisies about my life that truly bother me.

I have all kinds of political and social ideals. I think about them, I talk about them (though uncommittedly), and I sometimes even begrudge people who I feel are acting socially irresponsible (though not always outwardly). Yet a friend pointedly reminded me the other day that I was carrying a Prada purse and wearing diamond earrings. And I just bought a new iPod, even though I really don’t need one. I am such a slave to commodities and I’m really ashamed of it. My ex used to say that it was okay — at least I’m aware of the reality and that is what is most important. But it’s not! I was reading Slavoj Žižek the other day, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and the first chapter is called “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” It’s such a great book and it hit home for me in a really big way. He talks about how, in earlier stages of capitalism, ideological critique provided sufficient resistance. The idea was that, once you knew how exploitative the hegemony was, once you could see its inner workings for what they were, then you were equipped to act otherwise. The problem though is that now we almost all know it but we still act as if we don’t. We know that global warming is going to destroy the earth and our civilization along with it, yet we still contribute to it. We know that when we buy something from Nike it was probably made by a 10 year old kid in a third world country who got paid 5 cents for his labour, yet we still buy it. We know that when we pay 10 times more for a product than it is actually worth simply because it is the hottest new thing we are contributing to the alienation of modern society and lining some fat cat’s capitalist pockets, yet we still buy it. Like me. I do all of these things. And I really do hate myself for it. But at the same time, I don’t feel ready to fully give it up. For Žižek, the fantasy isn’t ideological anymore, it is located on a practical, material level. It doesn’t matter what we think or say, what counts is what we do. So until I stop behaving in this way I can hardly believe that I am a socialist, or that I am eco-friendly, or that I am socially responsible.

What to do?

Civilization and Its Discontents

I learned something today while I was studying — first and foremost, when you are not in a very healthy headspace reading Freud can be very unsettling. In fact, it can be downright depressing at points and encourages a kind of destructive self-analysis best avoided. That said, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable either. I just finished Civilization and Its Discontents and, even though it took me about ten times longer than it should have to get through, it’s pretty dope.

There are a couple of points that need thinking over a bit, but I’ll only touch on one for now. Freud has a view of ethics that is so vastly different from Derrida’s. I say this because I was reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx just before this and it was fresh in my mind. Derrida feels that ethics is all about responsibility to others, and the most ethical position you can take is to recognize that you will never completely fulfill that responsibility. Not that you shouldn’t try to treat every person and every situation in the justest way possible, but that you must be aware of an ongoing debt to society that is embodied in the person you may inadvertently treat unjustly in the process. If this isn’t clear I think I talked about it a few months ago in another post about ethics. Now Freud also talks about a responsibility to the other, as is represented in the maxim “love thy neighbour as thyself.” However, he believes that although this is valued as one of the highest ideals in human relations it is inherently impossible because human beings are instinctively aggressive towards one another and will always be enemies and competitors at their core. He even goes so far as to make a value judgment on the ideal, claiming that to love his neighbour may actually be unjust in some situations. He argues that some people may be unworthy of love, and that by extending the same understanding to them it devalues the love we share with the people who actually deserve it and is thus unjust towards them. He presents it with a nearly airtight logic — but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.

Though Civilization and Its Discontents is a well-written and fascinating read, it is deeply pessimistic. There is much more to it than I have the energy to go into right at this moment, but suffice it to say he paints a very bleak picture of the state of civilization and human relations. It is interesting to suggest, as he does, that all of culture originates in a struggle between Eros and Death. But it is also a rather hopeless view of the possibilities for humanity’s future. This requires a much more extensive explanation, which I may get into later. For now though, I think I’ll try to suppress my self-destructive death drive and actually get some sleep.

Adaptation

The plenary panel for this recent conference I went to was about film adaptation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the plenary was like the panel of keynote speakers — 3 individuals, this year from 3 different fields. One was a literary critic, one was a biologist, and one was a natural philosopher. Being the film buff that I am, and having done a ton of academic work on film adaptation, I was really looking forward to the presentation.

Right. So their big plan was to develop a new theory of adaptation in response to the problem that everyone is still caught up in fidelity discourse. What this means is that people generally judge the success of an adaptation based on its degree of faithfulness to the textual original. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least of which, it privileges the ‘original’ just by virtue of it coming first; it doesn’t account for differences in media; it doesn’t acknowledge other influences; and it’s a really stupid way of judging a work of art. These are all excellent observations. They are also observations that were being made by academic film critics more than 10 years ago.

As an alternative, the panel was proposing a theory that uses scientific discourse to explain the nature of cultural adaptations. They wanted to make a “homology” (or analogy) between biological adaptation and film adaptation. So rather than looking at the adaptation as a derivative of its original, we should instead trace its genealogy. As in nature, when one feature of a species adapts to its environment, the story being told adapts to another medium or a slightly different retelling in order to talk to a contemporary audience. The success of an adaptation, just as in nature, is thus measured on two things — the longevity of the story and whether it interacts well with its environment (i.e. how widely it is received by the intended audience).

I have a number of issues with this. First, to measure the success of an adaptation by how well it is received reduces the adaptation to a commodity. It is successful if lots of people buy it, pay to watch it, buy the memorabilia, etc. This is not my own take on it — the speakers were actually saying these things. Now, it may be the case that culture has been almost completely commodified anyway, but this is a problem and I can’t believe that they would talk so plainly about it without acknowledging it as a problem.

Second, to measure the success of adaptations based on how long a story persists completely ignores the power structures that are at work in culture. Whether or not something is widely read or watched in schools and in the public depends a great deal on what those in power would like us to read or watch. Would we still study Shakespeare so diligently if a few dead white academics hadn’t decided it would be so?

Third, part of what they wanted to do was get out of the temporality of fidelity discourse, i.e. evaluating adaptations based on their sequence. But developing a history of the retellings of a particular story still does just that. It still becomes a myth of origins.

Fourth, by talking about stories in the way they are, they are essentially saying what the French Structuralists said 50 years ago: There are only so many stories, with a wide range of shifting details based on cultural moments, etc. It was like having Levi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” read back to me in a different context. The panel even suggested that it would be interesting to chart the history of a story, i.e. to map out all the variations of the Romeo and Juliet story and all of its influences. Didn’t someone do that already? Isn’t that what structuralism was all about? And didn’t it not work? Remember when Barthes tried to map out all the textual and cultural influences that went into each phrase of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z? It all fell apart. That’s why S/Z is so interesting, because he shows us the whole system unravelling and thus opens the door for a different way of thinking about stories.

And I have saved my biggest question for last. Does anyone care? Adaptation is not a really hot topic right now. Not to mention, I don’t think that we even have a problem with fidelity discourse. Critics have been taking that apart and proposing new approaches for like 10 years. Very little of the recent stuff I’ve read on adaptation falls into that trap anymore. It’s like they’re a decade late. And even if they’d been on time, the theory is so flawed anyway that it doesn’t really matter.

My last comment is not so much a question I had about the material, but a problem I had with the speakers themselves. Or one particular speaker — the literary critic. The delivery of the presentation was fantastic, it was clear, exciting, well-paced, and with multi-media. But the Q&A period was abysmal. There were many questions and comments after the presentation, and several challenges put forth to the theory, some of them similar to my own issues. But the one speaker monopolized the floor and responded to almost all of the questions. Or rather, didn’t respond. She was so arrogant and dismissive that she refused to answer to many of the challenges, refused to respond to some questions, and even told a few people that they were flat out wrong and didn’t even add as to why. One girl asked a very astute question and, rather than answering, she turned to the panel organizer and said “I think you can just move on to the next one”! It was a very good reminder that we should always be humble and never get too smart. There’s always more to learn and if you can’t accept the advice or perspective of others then you risk losing your way. I can certainly say that, even though this literary critic is the queen bee of Canadian academia, her new book on adaptation is not going to make waves. And when your work stops mattering, people stop reading it.

Everyday Myths

I’m not currently working on my dissertation — no writing yet, no research for now — as I am far too occupied with studying for my candidacy exams. But I did come across something today which is plainly related to studies of the everyday. I was reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and, though I’ve read it before, I haven’t thought about it for quite awhile. What struck me is just how much Barthes’ work falls in line with other theorists of the everyday. He even returns to Baudelaire, Proust, Mallarmé, Bataille — all modern writers to whom other theorists of the everyday refer.

Mythologies in particular is about how various cultural productions, from texts, to photographs, to advertisements, to everyday myths and narratives, are at their base ideological. Even the most taken-for-granted truths or the most benign or neutral-appearing representations carry the traces of an ideological message. He makes connections between cultural representations and the material conditions of existence; for instance, he suggests that the specific chemical structures of cleaning products directly correlate to the real conditions of the women who use them: “the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman’s movements when she beats the clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board.” In addition, the advertising of those products is intimately connected to the idiosyncracies of class: “Persil Whiteness for instance, bases its prestige on the evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than the other.” This particular example also carries the connotations of racial distinction.

What Barthes makes apparent is not just that everyday representations are ideological, but that ideology is most effectively disseminated through coded everyday representations. I can’t help but wonder why Barthes has not made an appearance in the canon of everyday life theory. Especially considering that it is essentially a branch of cultural studies and Barthes could easily be regarded as a forefather of the discipline. Perhaps because it is still a developing field and no one has made it into that corner yet. Or perhaps people in the academy are not particularly interested in Barthes right now (I’ve certainly gotten that impression in general). Or maybe he doesn’t really fit and I just don’t know enough about this particular field to see that yet. I have to say though, if Barthes suddenly makes a splash onto the everyday scene in the next year or two, without my having already made my comments on him, I’m going to kick myself for doubting it.

My Confusion

Purposiveness: The quality or fact of being purposive.

Purposive: 1. Characterized by being adapted to some purpose or end; serving or tending to serve some purpose in the constitution of things. 2. Acting or performed with conscious purpose or design.

Kant says, “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose.”

So here’s the question: How can something, an art object for instance, have purposiveness but have no purpose? Does it mean that art is imbued with some kind of intent but it still has no particular practical function? I know I’m a little slow to the draw sometimes, but this is downright perplexing to me.

Help me out people. I know you’re reading so tell me what the deal is yo.

Even Homer Sleeps

According to the ancient Roman poet Horace, even Homer sleeps. What he means is that we should forgive poets and artists for the odd mistake or inconsistency; after all, they are only human. And I think, in some way, he also meant it quite literally. He urges his readers to practice and work hard in order to become better writers, but how good can you be if you are deprived of your rest and good health?

For that reason, I am closing the books and going to bed. Thanks Horace.

My Thoughts On Plato

DISCLAIMER: As usual, if you are not interested in Plato, I wouldn’t bother reading this post, it is probably really, really boring.

Believe it or not, I had my first encounter with Plato’s Republic today. I am doing a Ph.D. in English so you’d think I’d have read it; but until now I have successfully avoided it. It is interesting — but really problematic. Here’s the deal, if you’re at all interested:

Republic Books II, III, and X are dialogues all about how to properly educate the future rulers, or guardians, of the hypothetical ideal society they (Socrates and his buds) are constructing. These books are of particular interest to literary studies because they are about poetry and art, as acts of representation, and their role in this ideal society.

According to Plato’s Socrates, the education system should be comprised of “exercise for the body and cultural studies for the mind” (49). [As an aside, I'm not talking about Plato's opinion or Socrates' opinion -- it is all spoken by Plato's textual representation of Socrates; a clever way of disavowing responsibility for the opinions put forth]. In the dialogue, they agree that cultural studies should come first, as children are told stories from the beginnings of their lives. What is made clear right from the get-go here is that there is a strong moral imperative to censor poetry and stories for children, as these representations shape their view of the world; and, according to Plato’s Socrates, once a world view or ethical code is impressed upon a child, it cannot be changed. Though poetry may be allegorical, children do not have the capacity to tell the difference between something that is allegorical and something that is not; thus, it is important to shield them from the possibility of corruption by censoring poetry (and other art) that is not “true” and morally good. I put true in quotation marks there because I think that Plato’s notion of truth and morality is rather more ambiguous than he would like it to be. More on that later.

So, what he argues is, ultimately, that “a very great deal of importance should be place on ensuring that the first stories [children] hear are best adapted for their moral improvement” (51). From there he is challenged to define what the boundaries of poetry should be. It is unquestionable that the state’s rulers will decide what can be written and what cannot; but how do the rulers make those decisions? It is here that Plato’s Socrates makes his appeal to a universal morality.

First, he takes issue with the idea that gods be represented as all-powerful and responsible for everything. After all, god is good, and hence cannot be responsible for any bad in the world. Gods should not be represented as performing actions out of ill will, as they often are in the epics of his time. It is okay for gods to punish in poetry, but only if it can be shown that those on the receiving end were deserving of punishment, and only as long as the audience does not see those people suffering as a result of their punishment. He also takes issue with gods being represented as shape-shifters. If gods are perfect (as, for him, they undoubtedly are), then they could only change their form for the worse; and any being who is intrinsically good would not even consider changing for the worse. So not only should they not be represented as such in poetry, but women should also refrain from telling their children stories of gods taking on disguises and spying on them in order to encourage good behaviour. Plato’s Socrates claims that if gods are allowed to be represented as such by poets — as shape-shifters, trouble-makers, or fallible beings who act out of vengeance or emotion or trickery — then the future guardians of the Republic would not grow up as religious people, nor would they strive for godliness themselves.

Not only should poets not create unfavourable representations of the gods, but they should also not represent Hades in a negative light, for that instills a fear of death in children and when they grow up to be soldiers they will not have the courage to die in battle if necessary. The logical following from this is that poets should not represent mourning either, for mourning for the loss of someone else implies that their death is not a happy and courageous moment. There is a strong suggestion here that mourning and sadness is also a weakness; that it is not manly or desirable to indulge in emotions. He even goes so far as to say that representations of laughter are equally bad because they encourage laughter in their audience, and laughter is too emotional. Of paramount importance is that poetry not represent indulgence in any bodily pleasures either, including food, drink, and sex. If these things are mentioned in poetry it should only be to show a hero refusing temptation. These criteria don’t only apply to representations of the gods, but also of human heroes and regular people. So Plato’s Republic is a truly ascetic state, rooted in detached rationality.

When a child is raised with only images of beauty and goodness, then they will inevitably become rational and reasonable. They would learn to love only beautiful things and be necessarily offended by badness or ugliness.

What the dialogue comes to in Book X is that poetry (and all types of artistic representation) is “two generations away from reality” (70) — God creates the true thing, the human manufacturer makes a copy of it, and the artist is only representing the copy. And in addition, representations are always representations of the appearance of things and not things as they actually are. This logic of course relies on the theory of the Idea or the Form: that, of each thing, there is an innate Form or Idea, a type, and all singular manifestations of that type are copies of how the individual creator interprets the Form or Idea. For example, there is the Idea of a table — and there are all the tables that ever were. No individual table contains the complete essence of table-ness. And the artist who paints a table is only representing his own perception of how a particular table looked from a particular angle, through the distortion of his own position. It is a copy of a copy. The audience is the final link in the artistic chain and, by their own perceptions, they further distort the image. So, in the end, there is no truth.

By this logic, poetic representation is merely a form of trickery that plays on our perceptions’ propensity to distort things. His conclusions are such: “a representer knows nothing of value about the things he represents; representation is a kind of game, and shouldn’t be taken seriously; and those who compose tragedies in iambic and epic verse are, without exception, outstanding examples of representers” (74-5). The only way around this problem is the use of reason and rationality — rational thinking, like for instance measuring and counting, cannot be fooled by distorted perceptions.

Not only does poetry provide false representation, but it engages that part of a person who is vulnerable to wrong thinking by moving them to emotion and irrationality. Because of these dangers then, poetry must be banned from the Republic in order to protect the future guardians and provide them a proper moral upbringing. All that Plato’s Socrates would allow would be “hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men. If you admit the entertaining Muse of lyric and epic poetry, then instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kinds of your community will be pleasure and pain” (79). What is at stake in this decision is nothing less than the morality of men and the stability of the state.

There are a few things at issue here. First of all, these decisions are all made by the state’s rulers. He even claims that, though poets lie, and lying is tantamount to committing a crime against the state, it is necessary for the rulers to lie to the people to maintain order and peace. This is a truly terrifying totalitarian state. Who places boundaries on the rulers? No one. They are not even subject to the same morality as everyone else as it is deemed okay for them to take whatever liberties necessary to maintain peace and order, otherwise known as control and power. It is the ongoing state of exception in which all kinds of atrocities are permissable if rulers perceive a threat to their state, which inevitably means a threat to their own power.

Second major issue: This all depends on a universal idea of moral goodness. But where is this morality coming from for Plato? It is clear that he refers to the morals laid out by God — but what are those morals? Is there agreement on them at this particular historical moment? I wasn’t around in Greece a few millennia ago, but I seriously doubt it. If there were agreement, these sorts of writings and reflections would have been unnecessary. Or at the very least, Plato’s Socrates wouldn’t find it necessary for rulers to lie to their people to maintain order, for the people and rulers would already agree on the principles of conduct.

At the conclusion of Book X, he says that what is at stake is “whether one becomes a good or a bad person, and consequently has the calibre not to be distracted by prestige, wealth, political power, or even poetry from applying oneself to morality and whatever else goodness involves” (80). I suppose that, in Plato’s Republic, if people are brought up in the way he suggests, they wouldn’t be vulnerable to those things that make the terrible totalitarian ruler. But I imagine that once those people experienced the power that comes with the state of exception, they may not be so impermeable to corruption.

Incidentally, part of my need to summarize the basics here is to make sure that I actually get the basics… So if you are familiar with Plato, and you think I’m missing something, please tell me!