New Poem

THE ARTIST

—for Jim Tompkins

With paint and clay he invites the drala to stay.
He feels the precise curve of the real,
the empty space changing and charging the seen with
new breath, a pulse, a vigor, now, now…

His work reminds us that real work
is the diligent engrossed gamesmanship of the child at play,
a dot of attention effortlessly right on the spot.

The artist embraces the most difficult discipline of rediscovering
the child’s eye: to see again the wonder,
its bright colors, its languorous shades,
the delightful shock of its shape,
the texture of magic that is
the visceral feel of each unique thing,
its cosmic signature:

Luminescent lines lingering
to caress the soft flesh of the visible.

The artist’s heart
in his fingertips’ touch
imprints his work with a secret code.
We are inspired to look, and look again

to see

an infinite and unexpected fiesta:

the blueness of blue
the yellowness of yellow
the redness of red—

Colors whirl and pierce the eye
with a strange familiarity.

The painting and the ceramic bowl whisper
with the breath that blows in the wind.

Sibilant silences sound us
to be where and how and as we are.

By Request: A Close Reading of "An Old Man Asleep" (Lifted from the Diss)

The opening poem of Wallace Stevens's The Rock, “An Old Man Asleep,” is a short poem of three two-line stanzas:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

In this compact, exquisitely constructed opening to the volume, the rhythm of the verse reinforces formally the main thematic drama of the poem: a dichotomy—the “two worlds” of line one, further specified in the first line of the second stanza to be the “self” and the “earth”—drowsily transforms into a mysterious unity both subjective and objective, cosmic and worldly. The rhythm of the first line encapsulates this overall formal effect, as the initial caesura enacts on the level of temporal sound the sense of a dichotomy between two remarkably similar but nevertheless distinct verbal entities, “are asleep” and “are sleeping,” while the second caesura literally creates a temporal space in which the collapsing of this dichotomy—rhythmic and verbal at once—can take place in the present “now” of the poem. Additionally, the movement from “asleep” to “sleeping,” from an adjective—a settled state—to a participle—a verb-form inflected with motion—evokes in this very first line of the poem what the poem as a whole is most deeply “about.” By the end of the poem, “The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R,” a line that simultaneously concludes and tropes the poem in its entirety, has disrupted any settled state comfortable with resting in dichotomies like self and earth (imagination and reality), replacing it with a mysterious motion that, though at best fleetingly grasped only through the remnants of the previously secure dichotomy, manages to point to an elusive cosmic presence at the heart of being.

The most surprising moment in the poem, a poetic act that encapsulates the mysterious disruption of habitual awareness that the poem achieves, is the sudden jump to the second-person mode of address after the dramatically appositive caesura brought about by the dash in the first line of the second stanza. With the “your,” all the more surprising because of the third-person orientation of the poem’s title, the poem and its readers overtly interpenetrate as readers are nudged out of the false conviction, reinforced by the sleepy dumb solemnity of the opening two-and-a-half lines, that they were witnessing the poem’s events from the outside as purely objective observers. Though readers are directly plunged inside the poem by the second-person “your,” where precisely they locate themselves within the poem’s terms is a complex matter. It does not appear that readers can simply identify their presence in the poem with the “self,” for it is precisely the self and the earth that are (is) equated with the various nouns associated with the “your.” A further complication: the self and the earth, the two interpenetrating worlds whose sleeping constitutes the primary action of the poem, somehow issue in both the most seemingly personal, “subjective” aspects of readers’ waking lives—thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and disbeliefs—and the apparently “objective” reddish chestnut trees. Strikingly, since they are also modified by the adjective “your,” the chestnut trees appear to be an aspect of personal possession every bit as intimate as thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and disbeliefs [I am indebted to B. J. Leggett for this insight, and in fact my overall reading of the poem borrows much from Leggett's fine study of late Stevens] . In short, the “your” is inserted into the poem in an in-motion verbal space that is neither subjective nor objective, but both. The word “plot,” which is the final word of the second stanza, vibrates with a double meaning and thereby condenses within a single word this complex motion of the poem’s merging worlds, for a “plot” can be a place where both the “objective” chestnut trees and the “subjective” thoughts, feelings, beliefs and disbeliefs are “planted.” In other words, the plot—the story—of readers’ emotional and intellectual lives is irretrievably punned with a plot of ineffable ground that is composed of both the self and the earth. In the volume as a whole, Stevens figures this ineffable ground in the image of the Rock; as the present study will claim, such a metaphorical, yet real, ground is described by many ancient and modern thinkers as the soul -- "soul" being understood in this case not as an immortal, individual, and ultimately otherworldly substance but as a tropological process inseparable from the natural world.

The two worlds, the self and the earth, the “your” and its interconnected plot of attributes, and the evocative rhythm of the poem that sets these entities in motion, all flow into the poem’s final line, which uses effects of sound to move beyond denotative logic altogether so as to evoke a cosmic presence flowing through both mind and world. As Charles Altieri writes about this final line, “Here I have to admit that the distinction [between river motion and drowsy motion] is mostly on the level of sound, since the ow sound in ‘drowsy’ so picks up and extends the o’s in the line that it takes the line itself beyond description to an affirmation of peculiar presence” (166). The peculiar flowing presence of the final line, and indeed of the poem as a whole, is enigmatically contained in the poem’s closing gesture, the “R” that undeniably puns “are” and thereby equates the poem’s mysteriously flowing river with being itself, and that perhaps serves as an emblem for Rock, thus pointing to both the volume as a whole and its overarching organizational metaphor. In its total effect, the final line makes explicit the central transformation brought about by the poem. The difficulty readers face in imagining their own presence within the poem—are they inside the poem’s two worlds or are the two worlds inside of them, and how do they and the two worlds relate to the old man whose sleep apparently encompasses all of the entities named in the poem?—leads in the final line to the dawning possibility that the “your” may point not to the reader, but to the river, the flowing mystery that both possesses and generates the various nouns of the poem. And yet, it remains difficult, when looking upstream, as it were, at the repeated appearances of “your,” not to feel personally implicated by such a term. The final line thus merges the “your” and its plot with the river R, which drops readers through to the “recognition that the mind imagining is itself being imagined” (Hillman), the preeminent recognition that Hillman’s writings about the soul seek to foster. The “your” of “An Old Man Asleep” is both an intensely personal and a mysteriously cosmic presence, both the reader of the poem and the Rock—a transpersonal psychological reality—that is inseparable from the flowing reality of the poem, the autonomous activity of the psyche that creates reality every day by means of fantasy.

A Newly Revised Poem

IN THE WORLD

“Poetry has to be something more than
a conception of the mind. It has to be a
revelation of nature. Conceptions are
artificial. Perceptions are essential.”
–- Wallace Stevens


The shadowed silk of the sky
shifts into a blue that is the quintessence
of freshness, and the world, the actual living
world, is suddenly awash in meta-
phor...

The Sweet Perceptual is fully found,
not transplanted by senses apart,
for nature’s heart beats in the eyes’ throbbing core.

Space itself senses its suchness through eye
and ear, nosily circulating through blood
and cell and lung stalk, the “inner” a tissue
of wind and rain and sun and leaf…

Take me back, my green lover, my immortal soil,
for Walt Whitman loafs ahead with leaves
of grass that dance, and spark, and flame,
bright words breathing a blue freedom newly come,
the sweet merge with comrades:
river, beak, storm, root, lotus-flower cave.

My heart beats in time with the pulse of the
world, branching limbs of affection
holding me to the actual landscape:
this home, the only one I’ll ever need.

Derrida, Limited Inc., and the Rhetorical Tradition

(The following essay, like my review of the Ekaterina Haskins book below, was originally composed for a graduate-school seminar presentation, and I have chosen not to revise it for its appearance here in the blogosphere. As such, it maintains both a "context specific" status (e.g., its references to the seminar as a whole) and the rhetorical strategies characteristic of a seminar presentation. Despite this, I hope the essay may be of direct interest to readers of Derrida: philosophers, literary critics, Francophiles, insomniacs.)

As came out in our discussion several weeks ago involving Wayne Booth (in which we heard from several Wayne Booths, really, and therefore examined several versions of Wayne Booth’s rhetoric of fiction), all literary criticism always already involves rhetorical moves [now, with that phrase “always already” you are hereby put on notice that we’ve entered the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism]. We discovered that any particular rhetoric of fiction is simultaneously a fiction of rhetoric. As Dr. Dupree described it, the rhetoric of literary criticism (and indeed the rhetoric of rhetoric) involves defining oneself or one’s arguments by opposing them to particular versions, or appropriations, of other thinkers and writers and their ideas. Thus, by portraying the op-position in a particular way one allows one’s own position to come into view in a persuasive manner. Far from dangerously duplicitous, this operation is simply what goes on in these larger fictions we call literary criticism and rhetorical studies – fictions that disguise themselves as meta-fictions. Readers understand theorists, and presumably theorists understand themselves, by understanding their own understanding of other people’s understanding. The ground of knowledge is therefore endlessly strewn with thinkers standing under each other.

Another way of saying this is that meaning exists in context, or that meaning arises from the rhetorical move of placing ideas in a particular context, a “context” being a matrix of interrelationships in which things (or “texts”) mean due to each other’s reflection. But how describe the meaning of this particular operation, this fiction of rhetoric that seems to involve both finding and creating contexts in which to make persuasive arguments? In other words, how get out of the chain of oppositions, of fictional appropriations, and thus somehow reveal the context of context? Do rhetors engage in a self-conscious form of rhetorical contextualizing in and through which their ideas meaningfully persuade (i.e., rhetoric as a kind of constructionism)? Or are they rather involved in a bi-directional appropriation and interpretation in which they define themselves and are defined within an endless chain of contextual moves (i.e., rhetoric as a complex blend of essentialism and constructionism)? Or to put it another way: how is it that language allows us simultaneously to find meaning by creating it and create meaning by finding it, and all of this through a signification that results from difference – from oppositions and endless interrelationships rather than static individual positivisms?

Tackling these questions is what Jacques Derrida is up to; or at least, this is my own way of putting Derrida himself in context, of making/finding meaning in Derrida’s texts, particularly in Limited Inc., the text with which I struggled. Limited Inc. is a key text in Derrida’s general program of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence upon which western thought is founded (according to Derrida). By “presence,” I am referring to what Derrida also calls logocentrism, which Jonathan Culler describes as “the orientation of philosophy toward an order of meaning – thought, truth, reason, logic, the Word – conceived as existing in itself, as foundation” (92). Derrida believes that these principles (thought, reason, the Word, etc.) are assumptions or constructs that lead to an entire edifice of oppositions through which western philosophy philosophizes. Derrida seeks to displace this foundational hierarchical opposition of presence-absence and in its place reveal the notion of differance (a Derrida-ism that encompasses difference, differing, and deferral). For Derrida, meaning results from the play of differential relations, and signification is possible because any act of language contains a kind of split self-identity that allows it to signify in a variety of contexts: language is iterable, as Derrida terms it, meaning that any act of language can be cited, parodied, imitated, in short, placed in an illimitable number of contexts regardless of the intention of the writer/speaker or the position of the reader/listener. Derrida’s somewhat paradoxical assertion is that a given instance of language is able to mean something in a particular context only because it carries within itself, due to its nature as an iterable grapheme, the possibility of additional meanings in different contexts: in other words, a multiplicity of meaning does not contradict the possibility of a particular meaning but is the very ground of this possibility. To place this idea itself in context (and Jonathan Culler again helps me here), Derrida seems to be exploring with the greatest possible rigor the structuralist principle that in the linguistic system there are only differences, without positive individual terms.

In “Signature, Event, Context,” the first essay collected in Limited Inc., this mind-bending thrust of deconstruction is brought to bear upon Austin’s theory of speech acts. Derrida uses Austin – and later Searle – as a foil through which to deconstruct intentionality as the determinative agent in the communicative act (intentionality being the present-to-itself intention of a human being to communicate a meaning). Because deconstruction involves working within the terms of a given argument and revealing the manner in which those terms contain contradictions in the very places where they confer meaning, Derrida uses Austin’s own distinction between performative and constantive utterances to demonstrate the way in which Austin ostensibly limits the role of human intentionality only to let it slip back in and retain its place as the final arbiter of meaning in communication. For Derrida, the communicative power of language results not only from the human intent to communicate but from the inherent iterability of language, the ability of any act of language to be repeated in innumerable contexts. Context thus comes largely to determine meaning, an idea that Austin also espouses. However, whereas Austin would make a given context fully knowable and manipulatable vis-à-vis human intentionality, and therefore construe the meaning of a speech act as unequivocal, Derrida views context as boundless, as incapable of being fully manipulated or mastered by human consciousness; the meaning of a communication is thus inevitably equivocal, though this should not prevent efforts to discover what Derrida calls the “differential typology of forms of iteration” – in other words, the many-sided approximations of meaning involved in a communicative act.

This engagement with speech-act theory leads Derrida to undermine the traditional distinction between written and spoken discourse, a distinction at the root of logocentrism. Derrida construes all communication (written and spoken), and indeed all experience, as reducible to iterable graphemes of experience:

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written… can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that… without which a mark could not even have a function called “normal.” (12)

Communication communicates because of language’s self-differentiating identity, not because humans have a firm grasp of fully constituted meanings existing outside of language.

At first glance, the project attempted in Limited Inc. may appear gleefully to undermine the entire western rhetorical tradition. By proposing the existence of mechanisms influencing meaning that go beyond the human intention to communicate meaning, Derrida certainly complicates an art of rhetoric that, in Aristotle’s terms, involves “the faculty of discovering in the particular case the available means of persuasion.” If rhetoric seeks to understand the persuasive communication of meaning, how proceed when meaning is construed as context-bound, as forever evading the attempts of human consciousness to master it? Derrida’s insights indeed demand a radical re-visioning of the art of rhetoric. However, the death of the rhetorical tradition at Derrida’s hands has been greatly exaggerated. Derrida attempts a collapsing of sorts between the “faculty of discovering” and “the particular case.” This requires intentionality to move away from the human and become located in the art of rhetoric itself as it acts through (persuades) both rhetor(s) and audience(s). The means of meaningful persuasion reside in language; and human consciousness itself is embedded in language, from which it can never escape, even when it attempts to reflect upon itself.

Rather than being antithetical to the rhetorical tradition, Derrida’s focus in Limited Inc. can be seen as building upon Aristotle’s effort to move the art of rhetoric away from a rhetor-driven cultivation of persuasive means (seen by both Plato and Aristotle as the aim of the Sophists) to a systematic study of the manner in which persuasive means work. To the reflective, ethical endeavor initiated by Aristotle, Derrida adds a subtle analysis of the assumptions by which the western tradition communicates about communication, in other words, the means by which the field of rhetoric theorizes about the means of persuasion. To put it most strikingly: if Aristotle does not so much examine the means of persuasion as the means of the means of persuasion, Derrida opens up an investigation of the means of the means of the means of persuasion. This move adds to the art of rhetoric the importance of accounting for the differance that complicates any given event of communication and makes meaning an in-flux rather than a fixed phenomenon. For Derrida, the focus of the rhetorical enterprise shifts from a self-consciously constructing orator to a deconstructing reader-writer/listener-speaker embracing the twists and turns of language as it plays through human communication and creates ever-shifting meanings.

In reading Derrida, one can’t help but feel a bit like Lou Costello, who, upon finally grasping that who’s on first, what’s on second, and I-don’t-know’s on third, throws up his hands and admits: “I don’t even know what I’m talkin’ about!” Though we laugh at this, part of Derrida’s project is to highlight an inevitable amount of unknowingness tied to one’s discourse, and indeed tied to the very qualities of one’s discourse that persuade. By deconstructing the oppositions at the basis of western thought, Derrida seeks to shine light on the structural unconsciousness of any act of language – even as he realizes that such a deconstructive light relies on its own dark places and hidden assumptions for its illuminating power.

A New Poem

VISITING THE OLD BUDDHIST TEACHER

Tracing the stone steps’
dream of the depths
of the moon,

I tucked myself in
to the warmth
of an ancient mystery:

The World.

Asleep in solitude
I awoke
to a community
of sounds
rippling with the music
of the senses:
the body’s
electric, tingling,
ineffable home.

Let the breath go,
he said.
Dissolve into open space.
Become the becoming
that you are
when you stop
trying to become.

Sacrifice is the
ultimate truth,
he said. But truth itself
must be sacrificed…

We drank tea and talked about women.

Tall and short
and young and old,
women of the sea
and women of the rose.

He confessed
a ferocious passion,
during his younger years,
for a woman
with a delicate
mole on her
lower right buttock:
like a warm chocolate flake,
he said, resting on a small hill
of silken snow.

Tea over,
we studied the Flower Sermon,
and I pondered
the muddy roots
of the lotus.

Tathata, or Suchness:
Just so. Just so.

Lawrence Durrell's "Echo"

Below is one of my favorite Durrell poems, the fragile and gorgeous "Echo," which opens the 1956 edition of Durrell's Selected Poems. Read the poem out loud and notice its use of echo (rhyme), which builds to a crescendo in the final line, especially in the exquisite "unbeckonable," which overtly echoes "echo" in the very spine of the word, and in the final "bird," which nicely re-sounds the "b" from the prior word at the same time that it picks up the "word-heard" rhyme from lines 3 and 4, respectively. The poem manages to echo the ultimately inaudible ground from which language arises and to which it beautifully strains to return.

ECHO

Nothing is lost, sweet self,

Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

A Review of Ekaterina Haskins's 'Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle'

[Note: the following essay was presented some years ago for a graduate course in classical rhetoric. Overcome this evening by an acute sense of nostalgia for the relatively carefree pre-dissertation days of graduate work, I've decided to post the essay on this blog. I don't have the time or energy to revise it, so it should be kept in mind that the essay was written specifically for the purpose of a class presentation, and it thus retains certain rhetorical strategies perhaps more appropriate to oral delivery than to a written essay.]  

Tonight I am going to introduce to our discussion of Isocrates and of the rhetorical tradition in general some words about a chapter from Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle by Ekaterina Haskins.  Now, being myself an avowed Gorgianic believer in the sensual power of language, I must admit that, for me, this author’s name – Ekaterina Haskins – irresistibly conjures visions of a glamorous tennis star or perhaps even a Nabokovian nymphet.  Despite this, though, Ekaterina Haskins is in fact a professor at Boston College and is one of a group of scholars whose work has facilitated what has been called a “social turn” in rhetorical studies.  So, I think it is important at the outset to characterize, however broadly and imperfectly, some of the basic assumptions, the first principles, of scholars who, starting in the ‘70s and up to the present day, embrace a rhetoric of social constructionism both in their methodology and in the content of their work – the content being the view that they offer of some of the ancient rhetoricians.  I turn to another scholar, Bruce McComiskey, who sums up the basic assumptions of what he calls the “new sophistic rhetoric”: “first, knowledge can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments.” [notice, by the way, that last part, which is important: invention of ethical arguments, not the discovery of so-called moral truths].  For scholars accepting such basic assumptions, writing about figures from the ancient world is an activity in which the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation not only is blurred but is in fact theoretically untenable.  So, I place Haskins in this post-modern tradition in that she very self-consciously is attempting in her book to rehabilitate Isocrates and debilitate Aristotle and Plato, because she believes that re-visioning the rhetorical tradition in such a way benefits our contemporary cultural and pedagogical discourse.  Like many of these scholars, she wants to have her cake (or her fruit, to be consistent with Isocrates’s metaphor for his own discourse) and eat it too in that she argues that Isocrates himself would agree that the art of rhetoric is a self-conscious process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourses carried out in an effort to affect public, political discourse (Haskins will argue that what I’ve just called a process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourse is, for Isocrates, an activity that is simultaneously taught and carried out by means of mimetic imitation, but I’m getting ahead of myself).  I should allow Haskins to speak in her own words as to her overall purpose in the book.  On page 3 of her introduction she writes:

My purpose… is not simply to reevaluate Isocrates’ contribution to the history of rhetoric.  I provide a reading that compares and contrasts the texts of Isocrates and Aristotle in order to describe a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric than can be supported by Aristotle’s writings alone.  My argument, then, promotes a historically grounded yet noncanonical conception of human agency and rhetorical performance more associated with Isocrates than Aristotle.

 

Now, hopefully to help us grasp what on earth this actually means – “a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric” – I am going to talk about the book’s second chapter, entitled “Between Poetics and Rhetoric.”  I selected this chapter because, for one thing, it offers a detailed account of Antidosis, and also it deals with Plato quite extensively, and not just Aristotle (since we haven’t yet started with Aristotle, I thought that was important); also, of course, I am interested in thinking about poetics and the nature of mimesis.

As a whole, chapter 2 can be said to compare and contrast Plato/Aristotle and Isocrates in terms of their respective attitudes toward mimesis, or, to put it another way, their respective attitudes toward the Greek poetic tradition and its role in philosophical education.  By making this comparison vis-à-vis mimesis, Haskins is ultimately comparing the differing views that these thinkers hold about philosophy and rhetoric.  Isocrates, Haskins points out, pointedly avoids the term rhetoric, and for him philosophia seems to be synonymous with rhetoric understood in the postmodern sense as the creation of discourse.  Regardless, Haskins begins with Plato, and outlines various descriptions of mimesis that Plato offers in the Republic.  First off, she claims, Plato refers to mimesis as a kind of dramatic impersonation: Plato mentions the way that a rhapsode, rather than simply narrating the words of a character within a poetic fiction, speaks the words as if he were the character; Plato also suggests that anyone, not just a rhapsode, who speaks in the voice of another person imitates that person and takes on his or her character in the act of imitation.  Later, in his discussion of the proper education for the guardians of the city, Plato describes mimesis as a kind of learning by imitation of behavior (so, imitation of behavior not just speech).  Lastly, in Book 10, Plato appears to conceive of mimesis as two distinct phenomena: on the one hand, he refers to mimesis as the act of poetic representation in general, so, mimesis in a broad sense as the fundamental representational activity of poetry; and on the other hand, he refers to mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance.  Haskins points out that this latter sense of mimesis – mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance – incorporates the earlier descriptions of mimesis as a kind of fundamental identification with the speech and behavior of another person.  Further, Haskins claims that by splitting mimesis into two different entities – poetic representation, on the one hand, and audience identification, on the other – Plato splits apart poetic content and poetic style.  The content, Plato implies, is presented through the poetic representation, which in theory can be apprehended purely intellectually; and the style – the use of meter and metaphor and music and dance – is solely responsible for the emotive power of poetry, poetry’s ability to put an audience in a spell so as to identify emotionally with characters.  Haskins will later argue that it is Aristotle who brings this Platonic splitting apart of mimesis to its quite literally logical conclusion.  Haskin claims that Aristotle, following Plato in rigidly separating poetry’s representational content from its emotive power, will both elevate the status of poetry – specifically tragedy – by making its content susceptible to purely rational apprehension, and lower the status of rhetoric by associating it with all the stylistic manipulation of human emotion formerly associated with poetry.  

All this may sound terribly complicated, but fundamentally what is at issue is the way that mimesis, the way that poetry, actually works – and related to this the way that education actually works.  Think of the difference between the predominantly logical apprehension and then logical re-articulation of the action imitated by a poetic work (in other words, a course taught by Dr. ------), and the act of emotionally entering into a poetic work and intellectually reflecting upon one’s own emotional involvement (a course taught by Dr. Cowan), and then, finally, consider the mimetic educational act in which I am now engaged (pretending, for not too much longer, I hope, to be a professor): in this course, we are learning what Haskins would describe as a basic Isocratean principle, the principle that teaching and learning take place not through studying some unchanging, pre-established “content” but through continual, rather unpredictable acts of imitation.  Haskins argues that Platonic and, later, Aristotelian philosophy strategically privilege the first, Dr. ------ sense of mimesis so as to make mimesis purely a contemplative act removed from practical ethical deliberation within a political community – the kind of deliberation that is irretrievably an emotional, give-and-take, performative process.  Haskins will argue that Isocrates does not split apart mimesis in this manner because he takes for granted the “mutually enriching relationship between nonrational identification and self-conscious reflection.”  For Isocrates, according to Haskins, the representation and imitative properties of mimesis are not separable but mutually dependent and even ultimately indistinguishable.  (I love Dr. ------ courses, by the way, but I think it’s undeniable that in his courses emotive response, even if it is of a fist-pounding variety, only occurs in the service of defending highly rational interpretations).

Turning finally, and before I get myself into severe trouble, to Haskins’ reading of Isocrates’s Antidosis: Haskins claims that Antidosis is a manifesto proclaiming Isocrates’s educational philosophy, an educational philosophy that views mimesis as the means and end of education, and therefore as constitutive of political identity.  As Haskins writes, “Antidosis is mimetic in itself: Isocrates sets up the account of his career and his pedagogical views as a speech of self-defense in the Athenian court.  Although the title and the procedure of this fictional ‘trial’ give an impression that litigation is over a property exchange, Isocrates deliberately resorts to the language of another well-publicized self-defense – Socratic Apology.”  According to Haskins, Isocrates intentionally invites comparisons with Plato because one of the central purposes of Antidosis is to espouse an alternative view of philosophia quite distinct from the philosophy taught at Plato’s Academy.  Isocrates not only turns the hierarchy of knowledge espoused by Plato and Aristotle on its head – for Isocrates, geometry and astrology do not constitute philosophical study but are a preparation for it – but also proposes a definition of philosophia that in effect makes it inseparable from rhetoric.  Haskins quotes this passage in detail:

[T]hose whose concern is philosophy pass on to their pupils all the structures which speech (logos) employs.  When they have given them experience and detailed knowledge of these, they again exercise the students and make them accustomed to hard work, and then force them to synthesize everything they have learned in order that they may have a more secure understanding and their views (doxai) may be better adapted to the right moments (kairoi).  It is not possible to learn this through study, since in all activities, these opportune moments elude exact knowledge (episteme), but in general those who are particularly attentive and can understand the consequences most often apprehend them.

 

Philosophia for Isocrates does not involve learning timeless truths but rather learning the various structures that speech employs so that these structures can be applied to the always contingent moments that define political discourse.  Put another way: for Isocrates (as Haskins sees him) so-called timeless truths are created, not discovered, by the forms of logos.   Haskins argues that for Isocrates the various structures of logos are best learned through the kind of mimetic imitation that characterized traditional Greek poetic education: “A student coming to Isocrates for instruction should expect not only to memorize poetry and prose for the sake of gaining facility in speech but also to gradually become a public person whose actions are worthy of being praised in similar discourses.”  For Haskins, Isocrates accepts the basic assumption of traditional poetic education (mousike) that speaking well and acting well are inseparable – by the way, assumptions also shared by the Homeric characters within traditional Greek poetry.  In addition, Isocrates embraces the multiplicitous aspect of poetry, its ability to expose students to a variety of viewpoints, character types, and problematic human situations.  Haskins goes on to point out that Isocrates, unlike Plato and Aristotle, does not believe that self-control and justice can be taught to someone not already possessing such qualities.  However, the Isocratean mimetic practice of philosophia can foster the attempt to seek praise and honor (advantage, as Isocrates puts it) in the context of political discourse, logos politicos.  By speaking/acting in an honorable manner, students of Isocrates can promote pan-Hellenic unity, and, more specifically, ensure that Athens plays a leading role in the cultivation of such Greek unity.  For Isocrates, honorable or gentlemanly discourse is inherently more poetic than the kind of forensic oratory present in the courts and the assembly – thus, as Haskins puts it, Isocrates aestheticizes public address by drawing on older Greek cultural discourses (poetry and drama), and in doing so he promotes a version of philosophia in which education and civic life are inseparable.  In Antidosis, Isocrates offers samples of his own discourses, which he describes as fruits, simultaneously to fashion his own identity as a writer of political discourse and to reveal what promoting pan-hellenic unity through discourse actually looks like.  In sum, then, Haskins argues that unlike Plato and Aristotle, who split apart the representational and imitative aspects of mimesis so as to propagate a form of philosophical contemplation removed from the contingencies of public, political life, Isocrates reveals that the imitative aspect of mimesis is in effect the very content that is represented by mimesis in the first place: mimetic poetry involves the imitation of imitation, as it were, and thus the fostering of a knowledge of the inevitable “acting” (in both senses) involved in human life.

As someone who believes that poetry teaches us about human nature, in all its complexity, and that this knowledge is crucial for political life; and further, as someone who believes that the power of logos is not a neutral tool for cultural discourse but rather creates cultural discourse, I find Haskins’s portrayal of Isocrates compelling.  Nevertheless, and as paradoxical as it may seem, I find her reading of Plato and Aristotle, a reading that negatively establishes the positive identity of Haskins’s Isocrates, to be undeniably partial.  Plato’s supposed views about mimesis are entirely abstracted from the Republic.  What would happen if Haskins took into account the Phaedrus, for example, where it is after all a glorious act of mythic, poetic mimesis that allows Plato to define a philosophical rhetoric?  Regardless, it does seem that the view Haskins offers of Plato and Aristotle is at the very least accurate vis-à-vis the way that Plato and Aristotle are frequently interpreted.  As such, her rehabilitation of the so-called Isocratean philosophia over the so-called Platonic/Aristotelian approach perhaps also pushes readers to discover the inherent Isocrateanism in Plato and Aristotle themselves.