SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS, PART 1

"...nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole."-- Marcus Aurelius.

"Nothing unreal exists."-- Mister Spock (among others).

As I've always considered the term "realistic literature" to be an oxymoron, I've naturally taken exception to Charles Reece's overly-simple opposition of the real and the image. I critiqued that GHOST WORLD essay here, and now here's the next (and probably last) sentence from the essay with which I'll concern myself.

"There are plenty who’ve given up the fight, claiming that the shadows on Plato’s cave are reality."

In this sentence Reece rewrites Plato's famous "cave metaphor" in order to illustrate the condundrum of anyone finding "real" meaning in a commodified and hence "unreal" world, and how this paradox leads GHOST WORLD's central characters to affect a pose of ironic detachment. It's unclear from the essay as to whether Reece is criticizing Dan Clowes' characters for purportedly giving up the fight to know Reality from Unreality, but I'm less interested in his interpretation of Clowes than in his rewriting of Plato for the purpose of Marxist dialectics.

There's a certain irony (though not a hypocrisy) in Reece rewriting Plato, particularly part of a Platonic dialogue focused on demonstrating the logically-deduced existence of Archetypal Forms. Whatever Reece's take on Plato generally, his postings on that infamous messboard GoneDowntheTubes.com make clear that he rejects Plato's concept of the Forms, such as this post, where he explicitly claims that the early structuralists "solved Plato's problem" by translating hypothetical metaphysical structures into structures within a "socio-epistemological realm." In short, Charlie don't play those Plato Forms.

The reason this rewriting *isn't* a hypocrisy is simple: every philosopher good or bad rewrites his forbears, and Plato himself was no exception to that rule. However, that rule means Reece's rewrite is equally open to further re-inscription, to wit:

Shadows-- though perfectly workable as a metaphor for "illusion" in poetry-- make a poor metaphor when used in concert with that bloated mass of preconceptions known as Marxist dialectic. According to Stoics like Marcus Aurelius (and possibly Mister Spock as well), one should be open to examining "methodicially and truly" every object one meets in reality, even that which may seem to be an insubstantial phenomenon, like a shadow.

For the fact of the matter comes down to this: shadows exist, and therefore are not unreal.

Certainly one can *feel* that shadows are unreal (within the context of poetry) because shadows are liminal phenomena that have not one but two correlates in the world of consensual experience: one correlate that is easily seen and one that is not. I'll address the one that is not easily seen after analyzing how Reece, following Plato, sticks to a one-correlate system.

In THE REPUBLIC Plato's cave-shadows-- created when creatures or objects pass in front of a fire outside the sightlines of some chained-up prisoners-- have but one correlate: those selfsame creatures or objects. In Plato's schema these shadows align with the ordinary consensual phenomena which all humans experience, while the objects/creatures that create the shadows are a deeper reality behind that apparent reality. That "deeper reality" comes down to Plato's theory of Archetypal Forms.

How does Charles Reece rewrite this metaphor to support his earlier notion that modern society has become a "Society of the Spectacle?" First off, Reece's essay is not concerned with philosophy or phenomenology, but with art. But what kinds of art? Well, "commodified art" is the only kind about which Reece theorizes in this essay, and he directly compares its works to "the shadows on Plato's cave." Again, it's a short essay, so there's not going to be any attempt to define whatever art is contrary to the commodified kind, though the existence of such non-commodified art is certainly implied. Still, even in the absence of such a definition, I feel justified in assuming a parallel:

For Plato, the shadows are the apparently real "things" with which all humans live, and the bodies that cast the shadows are the Archetypal Forms behind those things.

For Reece, the shadows are the insubstantial artworks that support "mass culture," and the bodies that cast the shadows are what Adorno calls "serious art."

More on shadows and the second correlate in Part 2.