Rhetoric, Culture, and Technology
James P. Zappen
Orality and Literacy: From Homer to Plato
A. Homer's Iliad
1. [Agamemnon:] "Never let me find you again, old sir, near our
hollow
ships, neither lingering now nor coming again hereafter,
for fear your staff and the god's ribbons help you no longer.
The girl I will not give back; sooner will old age come upon her
in my own house, in Argos, far from her own land, going
up and down by the loom and being in my bed as my companion." (I. 25-31)
2. [Chryses:] "Over and over the old man prayed as he walked in
solitude
to King Apollo, whom Leto of the lovely hair bore: 'Hear me,
lord of the silver bow who set your power about Chryse
and Killa the sacrosanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos,
Smintheus, if ever it pleased your heart that I built your temple,
if ever it pleased you that I burned all the rich thigh pieces
of bulls, of goats, then bring to pass this wish I pray for:
let your arrows make the Danaans pay for my tears shed.'" (I. 35-42)
3. [Achilleus:] "For a king when he is angry with a man beneath him is
too strong,
and suppose even for the day itself he swallow down his anger,
he still keeps bitterness that remains until its fulfilment
deep in his chest." (I. 80-83)
4. [Achilleus:] "Son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all
men,
how shall the great-hearted Achaians give you a prize now?
There is no great store of things lying about I know of.
But what we took from the cities by storm has been distributed;
it is unbecoming [i.e., it is not proper] for the people to call back
things once given." (I. 122-26)
5. [Achilleus:] "But I will tell you this and swear a great oath upon
it:
in the name of this sceptre, which never again will bear leaf nor
branth, now that it has left behind the cut stump in the mountains,
nor shall it ever blossom again, since the bronze blade stripped
bark and leafage, and now at last the sons of the Achaians
carry it in their hands in state when they administer
the justice of Zeus. And this shall be a great oath before you:
some day longing for Achilleus will come to the sons of the Achaians,
all of them. Then stricken at heart though you be, you will be able
to do nothing, when in their numbers before man-slaughtering Hektor
they drop and die. And then you will eat out the heart within you
in sorrow, that you did no honour to the best of the
Achaians." (I. 233-44)
6. "These when they were inside the many-hollowed harbour
took down and gathered together the sails and stowed them in the black
ship,
let down mast by the forestays, and settled it into the mast crutch
easily, and rowed her in with oars to the mooring.
They threw over the anchor stones and made fast the stern cables
and themselves stepped out on to the break of the sea beach,
and led forth the hecatomb to the archer Apollo,
and Chryseis herself stepped forth from the sea-going vessel." (I. 432-39)
7. [Hektor:] "'This is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest
fighter
of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought about
Ilion.'
So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief,
to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your
slavery.
But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive." (VI. 460-65)
The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1951), I. 25-31, 35-42, 80-83, 122-26, 233-44, 432-39;
VI. 460-65.
B. Plato's Republic
1. "Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those
who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired
with a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political
power and philosophy meet together, while the many natures who now go
their several ways in the one or the other direction are forcibly
debarred from doing so, there can be no rest from troubles, my dear
Glaucon, for states, nor yet, as I believe, for all mankind; nor can
this commonwealth which we have imagined ever till then see the light
of day and grow to its full stature." (178-79)
2. "That since beauty and ugliness are opposite, they are two things;
and consequently each of them is one. The same holds of justice and
injustice, good and bad, and all the essential Forms: each in itself is
one; but they manifest themselves in a great variety of combinations,
with actions, with material things, and with one another, and so each
seems to be many." (183)
3. "If it is of the nature of a different faculty to have a different
field, and if both knowledge and belief are faculties and, as we
assert, different ones, it follows that the same things cannot be
possible objects of both. So if the real is the object of knowledge,
the object of belief must be something other than the real." (186)
4. "Since the philosophers are those who can apprehend the eternal and
unchanging, while those who cannot do so, but are lost in the mazes of
multiplicity and change, are not philosophers, which of the two ought
to be in control of a state? . . . . It would be
absurd not to choose the philosophers, whose knowledge is perhaps their
greatest point of superiority, provided they do not lack those other
qualifications." (190)
5. "I see that you mean to distinguish the field of intelligible
reality studied by dialectic as having a greater certainty and truth
than the subject matter of the 'arts,' as they are called, which treat
their assumptions as first principles. The students of these arts are,
it is true, compelled to exercise thought in contemplating objects
which the senses cannot perceive; but because they start from
assumptions without going back to a first principle, you do not regard
them as gaining true understanding about those objects, although the
objects themselves, when connected with a first principle, are
intelligible. And I think you would call the state of mind of the
students of geometry and other such arts, not intelligence, but
thinking, as being something between intelligence and mere acceptance
of appearances." (226)
6. "And now you may take, as corresponding to the four sections, these
four states of mind: intelligence for the highest,
thinking for the second, belief for the third, and for
the last imagining. These you may arrange as the terms in a
proportion, assigning to each a degree of clearness and certainty
corresponding to the measure in which their objects possess truth and
reality." (226)
7. "Every feature in this parable, my dear Glaucon, is meant to fit our
earlier analysis. The prison dwelling corresponds to the region
revealed to us through the sense of sight, and the fire-light within it
to the power of the Sun. The ascent to see the things in the upper
world you may take as standing for the upward journey of the soul into
the region of the intelligible . . . . In the
world of knowledge, the last thing to be perceived and only with great
difficulty is the essential Form of Goodness." (231)
8. "We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by
some, who profess to put knowledge into a soul which does not possess
it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our
own account signifies that the soul of every man does possess the power
of learning the truth and the organ to see it with; and that, just as
one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye
should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned
away from this changing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate
reality and that supreme splendour which we have called the Good. Hence
there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing,
the conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not to put the power
of sight into the soul's eye, which already has it, but to ensure that,
instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it
ought to be." (232)
9. "Now shall we make use of this example to throw light on our
question as to the true nature of this artist who represents things?
We have here three sorts of bed: one which exists in the nature of
things and which, I imagine, we could only describe as a product of
divine workmanship; another made by the carpenter; and a third by the
painter. So the three kinds of bed belong respectively to the domains
of these three: painter, carpenter, and god . . . .
I think it would be fairest to describe him [the painter] as the artist
who represents the things which the other two make. Very well, said I;
so the work of the artist is at the third remove from the essential
nature of the thing?" (326-27)
10. "We may conclude, then, that all poetry, from Homer onwards,
consists in representing a semblance of its subject, whatever it may
be, including any kind of human excellence, with no grasp of the
reality. We were speaking just now of the painter who can produce what
looks like a shoemaker to the spectator who, being as ignorant of
shoemaking as he is himself, judges only by form and colour. In the
same way the poet, knowing nothing more than how to represent
appearances, can paint in words his picture of any craftsman so as to
impress an audience which is equally ignorant and judges only by the
form of expression; the inherent charm of metre, rhythm, and musical
setting is enough to make them think he has discoursed admirably about
generalship or shoemaking or any other technical subject. Strip what
the poet has to say of its poetical colouring, and I think you must
have seen what it comes to in plain prose. It is like a face which was
never really handsome, when it has lost the fresh bloom of youth."
(331)
Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 178-79, 183, 186, 190, 226,
231-32, 326-27, 331.
C. Plato on Rhetoric, Speech, and Writing
1. "Actually if one went to any of the orators about these same matters
[which Protagoras has been discussing], one might perhaps hear just
such speeches as this from Pericles or any other able speaker. But
if they're asked a question, they're like books which can neither
answer nor put questions themselves; on the contrary, if someone asks
some little question about what's been said, it's like a gong that
continues—unless one takes hold of it—to sound long after
it's struck; in the same way these orators, asked a short question,
stretch out a lengthy speech."
Plato, Protagoras, in Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches,
Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen, 87-223 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996), 188.
2. "You know, Phaedrus, that's the strange thing about writing, which
makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products stand
before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they
maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words:
they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you
ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed,
they go on telling you just the same thing for ever." (158)
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1952), 158.
3. "Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus,
is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in
reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured
product . . . . Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges,
writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful,
relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources.
Writing weakens the mind . . . . Thirdly, a written
text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or
her statement, you can get an explanation; If you ask a text, you get
back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your
question in the first place . . . . Fourthly, in
keeping with the agonistic mentality of oral cultures, Plato's Socrates
also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself
as the natural spoken word can: real speech and thought always exist
essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons. Writing
is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world."
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. 1982 (New Accents. London: Routledge, 1988), 79.
D. Oral Culture: The Homeric Encyclopedia
1. "Once it is accepted that the oral situation had persisted through
the fifth century, one faces the conclusion that there would also
persist what one may call an oral state of mind as well; a mode of
consciousness so to speak, and, as we shall see, a vocabulary and
syntax, which were not that of a literate bookish culture. And once one
admits this and admits that the oral state of mind would show a time
lag so that it persisted into a new epoch when the technology of
communication had changed, it becomes understandable that the oral
state of mind is still for Plato the main enemy." (41)
2. "In a preliterate society, how is this statement [of communal
procedures and practices] preserved? The answer inescapably is: in the
living memories of successive living people who are young and then old
and then die. Somehow, a collective social memory, tenacious and
reliable, is an absolute social prerequisite for maintaining the
apparatus of any civilisation . . . . The only
possible verbal technology available to guarantee the preservation and
fixity of transmission was that of the rhythmic word organised
cunningly in verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough to
retain their shape." (42-43)
2. "If Plato could deal with poetry as though it were a kind of
reference library or as a vast tractate in ethics and politics and
warfare and the like, he is reporting its immemorial function in an
oral culture and testifying to the fact that this remained its function
in Greek society down to his own day. It is first and last a didactic
instrument for transmitting the tradition." (43)
3. "In short, Plato is describing a total technology of the preserved
word which has since his day in Europe ceased to exist. Nor have we yet
exhausted all the facets of that technology which were peculiar to an
oral culture. There remains to consider the personal situation of an
individual boy or man [or girl or woman] who is urgently required to
memorise and to keep green in his [or her] memory the verbal tradition
on which his [or her] culture depends . . . . Its
character can be summed up if we describe it as a state of total personal
involvement and therefore of emotional identification with the substance
of the poetised statement . . . ." (44)
4. "You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified
with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did
the reciter to whom you listened . . . . This then
is the master clue to Plato's choice of the word mimesis to
describe the poetic experience. It focuses initially not on the
artist's creative act but on his [or her] power to make his [or her]
audience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically
with the content of what he [or she] is saying." (45)
5. "Nomos in fact represents both the force of usage and
custom before it was written down, and also the statuary law of
advanced Greek societies which was written down. But the word in this
sense is not Homeric . . . . What then are the
ethea? Originally the word may have signified the 'lair' or
'haunt' of an animal; in later Greek it develops into the meaning of
personal behaviour-pattern or even personal character and so in Aristotle
supplied the basis for the term 'ethics.'" (63)
6. "At any rate, the two terms of the definition [nomos,
nomoi; ethos, ethea], corresponding as they do to
what we might roughly term the public and the private, or the political
and the familial law of Hellenic society, can be applied rather aptly
to describe the encyclopedic contents of the Homeric epic." (64)
7. "As one examines Homer's text in search of items of the public law,
one is continually led on to discern also items of the personal code as
these are interwoven with the public. The epic idiom becomes a
preservative at once of familiar and proper customs and of acceptable
and worthy habits and attitudes." (76)
8. "We should first notice how usage as it is recorded in the political,
religious, or family sphere can itself often turn into a kind of
technique [techne]. The boundary between moral behaviour and
skilled behaviour in an oral culture is rather thin." (80)
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1963), 41, 42-45, 63-64, 76, 80.
E. Literate Culture: The Knower and the Known
1. "The psyche which slowly asserts itself in independence of
the poetic performance and the poetised tradition had to be the
reflective, thoughtful, critical psyche, or it could be nothing. Along
with the discovery of the soul, Greece in Plato's day and just before
Plato had to discover something else—the activity of sheer
thinking . . . . Something novel is in the air, not
later than the last quarter of the fifth century before Christ, and
this novelty might be described as a discovery of intellection."
(200-1)
2. "We are now in a position more clearly to understand one reason for
Plato's opposition to the poetic experience. It was his self-imposed
task, building to be sure upon the work of predecessors, to establish
two main postulates: that of the personality which thinks and knows,
and that of a body of knowledge which is thought about and known."
(201)
3. "He [Plato] has expressed in full the doctrine of the autonomous
personality and identified the essence of the personality with the
processes of reflection and cogitation. He is now therefore in a
position totally to reject the whole mimetic process as such. He has
to propose that the Greek mind find an entirely new basis for its
education." (206)
4. "One is entitled to ask however, given the immemorial grip of the
oral method of preserving group tradition, how a self-consciousness
could ever have been created . . . . The fundamental
answer must lie in the changing technology of communication. Refreshment
of memory through written signs enabled a reader to dispense with most
of that emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was
sure of recall." (208)
5. "And this separation of yourself from the remembered word may in
turn lie behind the growing use in the fifth century of a device often
accepted as peculiar to Socrates but which may well have been a general
device for challenging the habit of poetic identification and getting
people to break with it. This was the method of dialectic, not
necessarily that developed form of chain-reasoning found in Plato's
dialogues, but the original device in its simplest form, which
consisted in asking a speaker to repeat himself [or herself] and
explain what he [or she] had meant." (208)
6. "That is, the original function of the dialectical question was
simply to force the speaker to repeat a statement already made, with
the underlying assumption that there was something unsatisfactory about
the statement, and it had better be rephrased. Now, the statement in
question, if it concerned important matters of cultural tradition and
morals, would be a poetised one, using the imagery and often the
rhythms of poetry. It was one which invited you to identify with some
emotively effective example, and to repeat it over again. But to say,
'What do you mean! Say that again,' abruptly disturbed the pleasurable
complacency felt in the poetic formula or the
image . . . . In short, the dialectic, a weapon we
suspect to have been employed in this form by a whole group of
intellectuals in the last half of the fifth century, was a weapon for
arousing the consciousness from its dream language and stimulating it
to think abstractly. As it did this, the conception of 'me thinking
about Achilles' rather than 'me identifying with Achilles' was born."
(209)
7. "What was Greece, or rather the Greek intellectual leadership,
revolting from? Plato has supplied the answer; it was the immemorial
habit of self-identification with the poem . . . . If
therefore the habit was to be given up, if the knowing self was to be
isolated as subject, it would follow that the object known by the subject
became the content of the tribal encyclopedia." (216)
8. "What we require to think about and to know is 'the law itself.' So
it must be somehow isolated from its setting in the great story and set
'itself by itself' and identified 'per se.' It must be abstracted in
the literal sense of that word." (217)
9. "Once the abstracted integration, the law or principle, has come
into being, nothing can happen to it. It just is. It can be expressed
in language the syntax of which is analytic; that is, terms and
propositions are organised in relationships which are
timeless . . . . And finally, this abstracted
object, divorced from concrete situation, no longer needs to be
visualized; in fact it cannot be. For visual experience is of colour
and shape which occur only as they are pluralised and made specific and
so concretely visible in their sharp differentiations from their
neighbours" (219)
10. "Why did he [Plato] have to shun any term which would approximate
to our 'concept'? The answer is probably very simple. A concept, at
least at this stage of Greek speculative development, would mean any
and every thought devised and put into words by the psyche of
the aroused intelligence. The possibilities of abstraction are
limitless, and of meaningful abstraction hardly less so. But in the
sphere of morals, which is always for Plato the primary illustration of
the need for conceptual thinking, he was completely devoted to the
thesis that the principles of morality are fixed and finite and do not
form an endless series and are not framed in terms of empirical
adjustment to temporal circumstances. Here his fervent opposition to
relativism surely warned him that to propose justice and goodness as
abstract conceptions which we have to refine upon by our own
intelligence would open the way to the endless invention of new
formulas and new conceptions of what morality might
be . . . . Probably it should be admitted that
social background and class prejudice committed him very early in life
to the proposition that social relations between men [and women] should
be not only stable but also authoritarian. And if so, the principles of
justice which describe these relations must themselves be independent
of human invention or improvement." (263)
11. "At any rate, the need to symbolise moral abstractions as final was
the primary motive, we suggest, for calling them Forms. For the Forms,
in order to be such, have to enjoy a kind of independent existence; they
are permanent shapes imposed upon the flux of action, and shapes which,
while they can be viewed and understood by my psyche, cannot be
invented by it." (263)
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1963), 200-1, 206, 208-9, 216-17, 219, 263.
F. Orality and Literacy
1. "I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge
of writing or print 'primary orality.' It is 'primary' by contrast with
the 'secondary orality' of present-day high-technology culture, in
which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and
other electronic devices that depend for their existence and
functioning on writing and print." (11)
2. "The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood
universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in,
at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily
spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven." (32)
3. "In an oral culture, restriction of words to sounds determines not
only modes of expression but also thought
processes . . . . In an oral culture, to think
through something in non-formulaic, non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms,
even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought,
once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness,
as it could be with the aid of writing." (33, 35)
4. "In a primary oral culture, thought and expression tend to be of the
following sorts.
(i) Additive rather than
subordinative . . . .
(ii) Aggregative rather than
analytic . . . .
(iii) Redundant or 'copious' . . . .
(iv) Conservative or
traditionalist . . . .
(v) Close to the human lifeworld . . . .
(vi) Agonistically toned . . . .
(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively
distanced . . . .
(viii) Homeostatic [living in the
present] . . . .
(ix) Situational rather than
abstract . . . ." (37-57)
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. 1982 (New Accents. London: Routledge, 1988), 11, 32-33, 35,
37-57.
G. Plato and Walter Benjamin
1. "The uniqueness of a work of art is identical to its embeddedness in
the context of tradition . . . . In other words:
the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art [its aura]
always has its basis in ritual . . . . No
investigation of the work of art in the age of its technological
reproducibility can overlook these connections. They lead to a crucial
insight: for the first time in world history, technological
reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic
subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work
reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for
reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make
any number of prints: to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no
sense. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be
applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is
revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a
different practice: politics."
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility: Second Version." In The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans.
Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, 19-65
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2008), 24-25.
2. "[In his later work,] not only did Benjamin expand the scope of
mimesis to the point where it acquired ontological dimensions, spelling
a primeval, enchanted state of natural correspondences in which even
objects were endowed with mimetic power; he also thoroughly revised
his own initial negative appraisal of mimesis as an inauthentic mode
of being, whose falseness formed the foil against which the purity
of language earlier had acquired shape. Such earlier, sometimes
covert, references to 'bad' mimesis may have been informed by the
Judaic prohibition against idolatry as well as the Platonic critique
of mimesis in The Republic . . . . Freed of
its negative" Platonic connotations, the memetic faculty was modeled on
Aristotle's Poetics, which had isolated mimesis as a fundamental
human activity."
Beatrice Hanssen, "Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin's Work," in
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris,
54-72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66.
H. Plato and Jean Baudrillard
1. "Such would be the successive stages of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure
simulacrum."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria
Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6.
2. "The history of the simulacrum is the history of the image and its
power. Anthropological evidence suggests that a different attitude to
images exists in 'primitive,' tribal, traditional and many non-western
societies, where images and imitation are commonly seen as efficacious:
as powerful forms affecting the original from
afar . . . [becoming] the real, 'however
temporarily or fleetingly,' possessing a power of transformation that
implicitly erases the distinction of original and image. The rejection
of this power of imagic transformation stands at the heart of the
western culture. Hence in Judeo-Christianity the sacred was purified
and placed outside of a now desacralized and deficient world. This
world now became the mere image of the true reality, being reduced to
and approved of as its powerless reflection and mediation, in a process
of domestication that would recur throughout the western tradition.
Platonism developed a similar conception of the image and of this world
as a mere reflection of a higher, originary reality, the world of
forms. For Plato, in The Republic, this imagic realm is a
deceptive one, tempting our bodies and minds away from the intellectual
ascension to the intelligible world. Hence his hostility to art, to
man-made images compounding our errors in standing 'at third remove
from the throne of truth.' and containing 'a terrible power to corrupt
the best of characters.'"
William Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2005), 34.
3. "Overall, it seems that there is a move to an increased emphasis on
the 'real' as it slips away. This occurs at the cultural level, and is
mirrored in Baudrillard's texts; the irony being that the writer most
hostile to reality is the one who uses (requires) it most ([Richard
J.] Levin calls Baudrillard a 'perverse Platonist,' for, as he sees
it, echoing Plato's critique of imitation). For Baudrillard, these
different orders or phases are entwined levels of simulation rather
than a succession, and would seem to follow on from the (retrospective)
lack of symbolic exchange that drives our culture to real-ize, i.e.,
all of the above phases are 'strategies of the real,' our attempts
to constrain ambiguity. Although not explicitly stated, our culture
has not known (could it have?) a real free of any system of
simulacra. Baudrillard's use of phases of the image suggests that
we are not dealing with a knowable reality lost in the schemings of bad
representations (i.e. reality hidden by ideology) as all that we have
ever looked at was already an image, not the real world via an
image, and that at a certain point (the first phrase), the simulacra
were seen to coincide with their reality, the essence of something and
its appearance being inseparable." (50-51)
4. "Baudrillard's model for 'genuine reality,' beyond constructed reality,
is symbolic exchange, which cannot be represented, or reflected in
the image that is the necessary moment of real-ization (symbolic exchange
is to a certain extent outside of the constrcution of the real, and in
general, it is symbolic exchange, if anything, that haunts simulation
as a term free of mediation)." (51)
Paul Hegarty, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (London: Continuum,
2004), 50-51.
I. Plato, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard
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Plato
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Abstractions, Forms
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Appearances (Shadows)
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Representations (e.g., Painting, Poetry)
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Walter Benjamin
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Works of Art
(Authenticity, "Aura")
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Reproductions (e.g., Photographs)
(Politics, "Participation")
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Jean Baudrillard
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"Reality"
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Symbolic Exchanges (e.g., a wedding ring)
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Images, Signs, Simulacra (e.g., an ordinary ring, a refrigerator or a toaster)
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J. Illustrations: The Allegory of the Cave
The Cave: An Adaptation of Plato's Allegory in Clay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
Plato—The Allegory of the Cave—(The Matrix) Animated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQfRdl3GTw4
Latest Update: 2012-02-01
