Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Sunday, October 09, 2016
Fifteen Minutes of One Of My Lectures
Recuperating and feeling a bit better today, still coughing and sore and trying to take it easy before embarking on the rigors of mass transit and public performance looming ahead. The following transcibes the first fifteen minutes or so from my lecture Thursday at Berkeley in my Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Greek and Roman Antiquity course. Sometimes readers express curiosity about my teacherly practice compared to my bloggity practice. I don't read from notes, but expound from bullet points I usually scribble in the hour before lecture just detailed enough to remind me of my key points and the order I think I should make them. These remarks were spun from nine bullets:
Since we met last I have caught some kind of bug,
so you will forgive me if I am not my usual effervescent self. In my
lecture in the City earlier today my voice gave out a couple of times,
so fingers crossed that doesn't happen today. We have a lot to cover today, in fact I would say
today is one of three key turning points in our course. You'll remember
from the first lecture that this course is making a semester-long
argument or telling a semester-long story, and today
we turn a page in that story.
In any of our Department's four Core classes,
whatever else the course is doing, the course will always be
interrogating a set of basic questions: What is rhetoric? What is
rhetoric good for? In our course, a related question is why exactly
are texts from Greek and Roman antiquity especially illuminative of
those questions?
We are reading many texts in this course that are
best described as philosophy, or history, or literary texts -- and I
think it may seem very reassuring to fall back on familiar categories
like these, especially when the texts we are reading
seem at once so alien and yet so resonant and so freighted with
canonical authority. But I have to insist that rhetoric is not
philosophy, history, or literature, and reading these texts rhetorically
is something rather different as well. In part, in our course
we are telling the story of the emergence of this difference and in
part, in our course we are modeling and provoking forms of reading that
materialize this difference.
This is a course that takes place in a Rhetoric
Department. The substance of rhetoric -- what I have called interested,
occasional, figurative practices of persuasion -- heck, ever the TERM
rhetoric derive in a crucial sense from the Platonic
project of philosophy. Forming the backdrop against which Platonic
philosophy elaborated its anti-rhetorical project we engaged first with a
Homeric agentic imaginary of public words and deeds -- and we went on
to observe the way that Homeric agentic field was
further elaborated and even subverted by figures like Sappho and
Thucydides. That Homeric agency, I have repeatedly reminded you, is
indicatively patriarchal, at once assertive and insertive.
Now, for the last few weeks, we have focused on a
trilogy of key anti-sophistical dialogues by Plato, each staging a
contest between between Socrates and a famous sophist -- Protagoras,
Gorgias, Lysias -- and used by Plato to define his
own philosophical outlook as well as market his method in competition
with rival schools and intellectual movements to his own Academy.
The Socratic or Platonic aspiration to form a
community of True Friends, fellow inquirers into Virtue and Truth,
affirming a True Politics that doesn't seem very much like actual
practices of politics and a True Rhetoric (Philosophy) that
doesn't seem very much like actual practices of rhetoric may seem like
an inspiring and abstract vision but I have insisted that it served
competitive interests in the thriving and contentious world of Athenian
intellectual life, and I have also emphasized
that it was fueled by specific and ferociously critical position on and
within the contemporary Athenian political scene between the Persian
Wars and the Alexandrian conquests, the period of the Peloponnesian
civil wars and the norms and forms of Periclean
Athens.
I have drawn your attention to the recurrence of
the figure of Pericles in Plato's philosophical critiques, the
foreigners and rhetoricians Pericles welcomed into the city (many of
whom are Socrates chief interlocutors), his children, his
partner Aspasia (Plato lampooned her, you will remember, quite
egregiously in the early dialogue Menexenus which included a clumsy
parody of Pericles' famous funeral oration, a portrait that intriguingly
seems to have been a dress rehearsal for Socrates tale
of Diotima in the Symposium we read for today), and so on:
Glimpsed in
the fragments of surviving sophistical texts and in the speeches of
Socrates' opponents in Plato's texts we elaborated a sophistical
worldview of openness to outsiders, of celebration of
provisional compromise and collaboration, of resignation to the
inevitable contingency of human affairs, of recognition of the partial
and fragmentary character of truths communicated by the imperfect but
still beautiful instruments of public words and deeds.
We are about to turn our attention next week to the
ambivalent embrace by Plato's most famous student, Aristotle, of the
politics and rhetoric of Periclean public life which sets the stage, in
turn, for Cicero's adaptation and glorification
of that vision in his failed alternative to Caesar's revolution in the
dying days of the Roman Republic. But first, let's talk a bit about one
last Platonic dialogue, my personal favorite, The Symposium, and put it
in coversation with an extraordinary comedy
by Aristophanes called Wasps….
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2 comments:
Do you always write them out? I always got the sense you worked off of outlines and riffed quite a bit.
I never write them out. Reading a script sounds potted when I do it and risks putting everybody to sleep (me included). This was a retroactive reconstruction for the benefit of an absent GSI that I posted for want of anything else to put up yesterday.
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