Picking up right where I left off:
The insubstantiality of shadows in Plato is his metaphor for the fundamental unreality of the phenomenal world.
For Charles Reece their insubstantiality is the metaphor for the unreality of commodified art.
In real life, however, though shadows are insubstantial, they are not unreal, any more than they correlate only with the bodies whose images they replicate.
In real life, there are no shadows without bodies to cast them--
And there are also no shadows if there is no light. Darkness, yes, but not shadows as such.
What Plato's cave-prisoners see when they behold a shadow is the result of these two real-world phenomena, as it is for anyone else. Plato represents the light's presence as a given, but of course it is not. Every shadow ever formed of the phenomenal world is the result of the interaction between a thing we can see, which blocks the passage of light, and an event we cannot see: the deflection of perhaps millions of light-particles rebounding from the seen thing, thus creating the rough outline of the seen thing.
The shadow thus is what I choose to call an indirect indicator of both the seen thing and the light being blocked by the seen thing.
Does this neglect of a second correlate for shadow-phenomena affect Plato's argument? Not really. From my brief research of the subject it seems Plato had a theory of the visual not entirely removed from ours, though of course he would not been responsible for associating the phenomenon of light with anything like Democritus' particles.
Charles Reece, however, knows of the association, and so he unquestionably knows that any shadow is the product of both light and a body blocking the light. So, whether he would call a shadow an "indirect indicator" or not, he knows that a shadow isn't technically "unreal." He would be on solid ground if he claimed that it was only a poetic metaphor, that he *feels* that commodified artforms are unreal. But given that he's locating the etiology of these artforms as stemming from a "socio-epistemlogical" phenomenon of material "market forces," poetry doesn't solve the problem.
I said earlier that I would rewrite Charles' rewriting, and for that I'll draw on my essay GATE OF THE GODS 4, where I quoted Richard Slotkin's quotation of J.L. Henderson:
"..Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension [of archetypal myths] as a conflict between "Moira" and "Themis"-- between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility"
For Plato and Reece, the things they compare with shadows-- a range of phenomena, a range of artworks-- are rated as insubstantial reflections of something with substance. The irony of the comparison in Reece's case is that one of the two factors necessary for a shadow-- that of light's operations at the particle level-- is itself invisible and insubstantial to common human perception.
I suggest, going along Jungian lines, that what he calls "commodified art," and what I call simply "popular art," only appears as insubstantial as a shadow from the standpoint of "rational ideas," of "Themis." The truth is that for humanity there would be no "rational ideas" without the world of "dream and impulse," the world of Moira, no more easily tracked than the naked eye can track the rebounding of light particles, or, for that matter, see the hurricane wind that bends or breaks the tree.
I suppose I can see some of the appeal of an ideology like that of Marx and his kindred. Marxism gives one the structure that all "rational ideas" seem to impart, but doesn't seem to be dependent on metaempirical entities or principles.
Unfortunately, just as Plato's rational principles undermined his intutions of art, the same applies to Marxism, metaempirical entities or no.
And both, in thinking they have triumphed over shadows, simply become lost in a self-referential fog.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE (1961)
2 hours ago
8 comments:
The problem in the cave analogy is taking the shadows as constitutive of reality, rather than an effect. For example, one shouldn't worry about being hit by a shadow, but by what's causing that shadow. The shadows, of course, are really there. Similarly, taking a stick as actually being bent, because that's how it (really) appears in water is a mistake.
Commodification isn't necessarily a problem with the art itself being commodified (there is, of course, plenty of art created with nothing more in mind than existing as commodity). The problem of commodification lies, as Marx argued, in the reduction of everything to the same homogeneous substance, that of an abstract exchange value (this is worth 2 units of that, etc.). When the Lomaxes were touring Leadbelly around, they required him to dress down, not play "white" songs, etc., to sell his role as a savage black man playing his authentic black music to adventurous white audiences. I don't see this as a comment on Leadbelly's music (which is some of the best ever produced in America), but the way art is treated in order to get distribution. Authentic or not, art has to be packaged in a market economy -- it has to be commodified. And in terms of (shadowy) exchange value, Leadbelly isn't worth as much as Carrie Underwood. What's false about this picture? Not that more people desire Underwood, which is certainly true, but rather the way art's status as a commodity has taken over its status as art. Both artists have been commodified, but the latter lends herself to the process better than the former (she's a young, pretty blonde, for example).
Obviously, one has to acknowledge a true difference in the quality of Leadbelly and Underwood's music to get to my point here. If one holds to the subjectivistic mumbo-jumbo about all aesthetic evaluation being a matter of individual taste, said commodification will present no problem. That's why subjectivists make such good capitalists, there is no inherent value in anything. That's why there was nothing particularly radical in postmodernism, as well. I can't much help you if you want to insist that the stick actually bends in the water.
"The problem in the cave analogy is taking the shadows as constitutive of reality, rather than an effect."
But that effect signifies a physical reality: part of which can be seen, part of which cannot be seen. Plato reads the bodies that form the shadows as the sole correlate, which is a technical error, though it doesn't necessarily destroy his logic. In the Platonic scheme both the fire and the forms that cast the shadows *might* be seen as participating in the world of Archetypal Forms, while the shadows align only with the sort of ordinary phenomena one is supposed to get beyond.
"Authentic or not, art has to be packaged in a market economy -- it has to be commodified."
I sometimes wonder if Marx's education went any further back than the 18th century. I can't see how anyone who had a classical education-- as I gather was given to almost everyone who got to the higher rungs of learning in his day-- could come up with this stuff.
I assume he knew, at least as a raw datum, that literature was oral before it became written, but possibly back then studies of oral literature were in their infancy. Today, however, we know that wherever you have traveling bards, they alter their stories to fit whatever audience they encounter.
I don't imagine the ancient bards had a word for it, but I'd call it "adaptation" sooner than "commodification."
And the practice hasn't died out, even in its oral manifestation. Here's a real-world example for you: in the 80s Harlan Ellison-- who had some background as a stand-up comic, BTW-- spoke before a packed auditorium at a Houston SF con I attended. I forget what led up to this bit, but at one point he said something like, "And I know you Houstonians will appreciate such-and-such, because everyone knows that Houston... is batshit crazy!"
Appreciate laughs and applause from the audience. Probably everyone there, contra Michael Fleischer, was pleased to hear Ellison call them crazy.
Did Ellison mean it? Probably not. He probably knew next to nothing about Houston.
Did he later go to Austin and use the same routine on Austinites? I'd bet the farm on it, because that's what traveling comics do. They tell jokes to suit one audience and then modify them to suit another one.
The same rule applies to traveling musicians like Leadbelly. Did his handlers "make" him conform to the image of a "savage black man" to play to white audiences? Maybe that was what the white audiences thought about the matter and maybe it wasn't. It's quite possible they viewed his authenticity as being tied up with his exoticism (in comparison with their own subculture), but that equation, even if it's foolish in the main, might not have sprung like Athena solely from their own brains. Many performers do trade on their perceived exoticism. This too is a form of adaptation that existed long before the rise of a supposed "abstract exchange value."
I'll probably do a piece to respond in greater detail to the racial aspects of the argument.
"That's why subjectivists make such good capitalists, there is no inherent value in anything. That's why there was nothing particularly radical in postmodernism, as well. I can't much help you if you want to insist that the stick actually bends in the water."
If citations of the Stoics don't get you off the idea that I'm a subjectivist, I guess nothing will.
The illusion of the stick bending in water is clearly of a different order than that of a shadow. You see a shadow, you are seeing an outline of a form through which light can't pass. The outline is indicative of what's happening at the quantum level, and that's as much a reality as seeing the form itself. That reality makes a good metaphor for the operations of what I've tentatively called "Moira," but I'll be writing more about that later.
Dunno where the postmodernism comment comes from, but I've pretty much have my say in the "Pomo and Pluralism" article.
Believing an illusion is the same in taking a stick as bent and the shadows as constitutive of reality. But, yeah, a shadow itself isn't an illusion.
And, yes, the Lomaxes required of Leadbelly to play up to white expectations. Was it slavery? No. But it was his best chance at getting heard. The Lomaxes had a certain definition of what constituted authentic folk music. They shaped their studies to fit that agenda. It produced a lot of good, important stuff, but one shouldn't ignore the bad aspects.
And I don't see the connection between traveling bards and mass reproducibility. Different arguments apply.
The first response-post is pretty unresponsive to the phenomenological question, so we'll have to leave it there.
To the second, the definition of "bad" homogeneity seems to fluctuate. Did Leadbelly play *no* part himself in articulating this image of the exotic (and perhaps *savage*) jazz musician?
I'll be responding to the third response elsewhere, while noting that you failed to respond to my example of adaptation.
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