Misreadings
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The End Is at Hand reducing it to an advertising slogan: "Our arrows will hide the sun. Good! We will fight in the shade!" The echolalic Herodotus had done his duty to that tyrant, the crowd with a hundred ears. And thus the so-called historians, who are nothing but eager reporters of the present, seem to be exactly where they belong. Efficient chief PR man for Peri- cles, Herodotus can find nothing better to write about than the Persian wars. (A pure and simple news report, in other words. We could hardly hope, these days, for a Homer, one who possesses the poetic lucidity required to write about things he has neither seen nor heard, endowing them with the dimension of fable.) Herodotus only has to read three or four Ionic logographs and he can claim to know everything. He talks about everything. And, as if that were not enough, he then begat an even more pompous and arid Thucydides, who, after the shame- ful debacle of the fall of Amphipolis (which he failed to prevent, a failure both of arms and of administra- tion), forgot his Peloponnesian misadventures and created a new persona as a chronicler, agreeing to describe the events of the war as they were occurring. Had we thus finally scoured the lowest depths of gutter journalism? No, because after him came Xen- ophon, master of an-art capable of making even a laundry list a historical document; Xenophon, who whimpers over a commonplace eye ailment. (Char- acteristic of the cultural industry is its vulgarity, the insistence on the coarse but striking detail. Is a river crossed? Then the crosser will be "wet to the navel." 99
MISREADINGS Do the men eat rotten food? They will "flow from behind.") 8 But in Thucydides there is more than this; we find in him the desire, common, to write literature, to become a candidate for the literary prizes the culture industry provides for those able to follow the fashion. Thucydides does not hesitate to dot his prose with naturalistic decorations, imitating the nouveau roman: "The surface of the body did not reveal excessive warmth to the touch, nor pallor to the sight; it was reddish, livid, covered with little sores and ulcers . ,,9 Subject? The plague in Athens. Thus, having reduced the human dimension to the objective styleme, up-to-date reporting and the avant- garde dominate our new literature. For anyone with a glimmer of intelligence the only reply to the distress of Bobtoweridas, who complains that the language of the younger writers is incomprehensible, must be: There is nothing to comprehend, nor does mass-man wish it otherwise. The eclipse of Attic man is now total. But if there is a decline of the West, mass-man does not let it bother him. Does he not live in the best of all possible worlds? Read again the speech of Pericles to a content and enthusiastic Athenian crowd: We live in a meritocratic society, where the dialectic of status is exalted with blithe optimism ("If a man is useful to the city, neither poverty nor an obscure social position will be any hindrance to him"), and 8 Anabasis, passim. 9peloponnesian War, II, 48-54. 100
The End Is at Hand so the criterion of discrimination, whereby the aristos was precisely that, the best, is submerged in the leveling frenzy. Attic man is now happy to live as a face in the crowd, a white-chlamys worker, slave to conformist behavior ("We have an incredible fear of falling into illegality: we are obedient to those who follow one another in the government, obsequious to the laws, particularly those laws that arouse the universal scorn of those who fail to follow them"). Attic man now lives happily as the representative of a leisure class ("To refresh us after our toil we have found many diversions for our spirit, celebrating according to ancient custom games and feasts that continue throughout the year, while we live in houses supplied with every comfort, where daily pleasure dispels all sadness"). In other words, Attic man is the inhabitant of a prosperous state, an affluent so- ciety ("Goods of every kind flow into our city, and so we can enjoy not only all the fruits and products of this country, but with equal pleasure and ease those of other countries, as if they were ours"). � Can we stir this mass-man, content in his Attic village, from his mindless, smug sloth? No, for he is held there by,those very games that Pericles men- tions. Consider the crowds that flock to Olympia and argue about the -last meta as if their very souls were at stake; or that the Olympic Games now serve for numbering the years! Life seems to be measured by the feats of a victor in the throwing of the javelin, or by him who runs a certain course ten times. The � Peloponnesian War, II, 37-41. 101
MISREADINGS outcome of the pentathlon is the gauge of arete. Some will commission a poet to compose an anthem for such "hero'es," and the crown they receive enhances the glory of the city. Pericles's oratory has truly given us the idea of a civilization in which everything is beautiful. Provided you have renounced your own humanity. As Montlides warned, "the universal hu- man community will be an aggregate of cellular ag- gregates, a bank of madrepores in which each individual will be inserted and catalogued not according to his mind but according to his productive possibilities or his greater or lesser integration into the pattern of total leveling. "11 We look back at the Pharaoh's solitude and isolation as a lost paradise, but Attic man feels no nostalgia for it, because he has never tasted its flavor: on the ramparts of Olympia he celebrates his melancholy apocalypse unawares. De- cision is not expected of him, in any case. The culture industry has provided him now with the virtually electronic contortions of Pythia of Delphi, who in epileptic spasms gives him advice about future action. All in sentence fragments deliberately incom- prehensible, language regressed to the irrational, for the consumption of the awed and democratic crowds. In the past, culture could be asked to offer a word of salvation; today salvation has been reduced to a game of words. Attic man is possessed by an appetite for public debate, as if it were necessary to discuss every problem and obtain general agreement. But "Ma6pez'ope ovtxa ,," Koopprepl glhha Z lpa, 14 IV 1963. 102
The End Is at Hand sophistry has debased truth to public consensus, and public debate seems the ultimate refuge for this mass of talkers. We can only underline the bitter reflections of Bloomides, which cleverly reproduce the conversa- tion that preceded the unseemly rush to debate. "Hey, would you come to the agora tomorrow for a round- table discussion of truth?" "No, but why not ask Gorgias? He'd be ideal for a eulogy of Helen, too. And you might try Protagoras, his theory of man as the measure of all things is the latest fashion, you know?" But Bloomides' appeal against debate re- mains unheard, and the polemicist labors in vain to refute the pernicious ideology that lies behind the impassioned wranglings before a lazy, corrupted public. Iffstead, the culture industry will offer Attic mass- man, if debate does not satisfy him, a wisdom even more immediate, diluted, moreover, in attractive di- gests, as his taste demands. And the master of that art is the abovementioned Plato, who has a real gift for presenting the harshest truth of ancient philos- ophy in the most digestible form: dialogue. Plato doesn't hesitate to turn concepts into pleasant and superficial examples (the white horse and the black horse, the shadows in the cave, and so on), bowing to the demands of mass-culture. So what was deep (and what Heraclitus was careful not to bring into the light) is raised to the surface, up to the level of comprehension of the most idle listener. The final infamy: Plato does not hesitate to use the sublime problem of the One and the Many as a subject for 103
MISREADINGS the conversation of men who withdraw into the shop of a smith (none of them able to think except in "noise"!), while he takes care to make the debate appetizing through the clever use of suspense and the game of nine hypotheses, which have all the capti- vating charm of quiz programs with cash prizes. Eristics and Maieutics (these are the names given by the reporters, happy to conceal their emptiness by employing the latest terms) still have the familiar function: Attic man need make no effort to under- stand; the experts of the culture industry will give him the illusion that his mind is achieving a compre- hension that is in fact ready-made. The game begins with the magic tricks (skillful, we must admit) of that old satyr Socrates, who even managed to transform his well-deserved death sentence into a monstrous advertising campaign. Socrates remained to the end a faithful servant of the culture industry, providing the pharmaceutical firms with that slogan: "Hemlock is good for you." O
r: "What's all this about corrupting kids? I don't know what you're talking about. After a hard day in the agora, what I need is a nice glass of hemlock!" End of the farce: a cock to Aesculapius, the final hypocrisy. We have to agree with the learned Zolla- phontes when he says, "The more the mass-media offer spectacles that are removed from humanity, from true dialogue, the more they assume a false tone of private conversation, of jovial cordiality, as we can see (if our spirit can bear it) by beholding their productions, which obey a secret rule: Interest man in what has no interest for him, aesthetic, economic, 104
The End Is at Hand or moral." 12 What better definition for the Socratic- Platonic potpourri of the Symposium, where under the pretext of a philosophical dialogue we witness the spectacle of convivial incontinence, coarsened by clear, indecent sexual allusions. Similarly, in the Phaedrus we read that when a man looks (for the final phase is, inevitably, a civilization of voyeurs) at his beloved, "sweat bathes him, and an unusual heat invades him; thus desceriding in him, through the eyes, a flow of beauty, and a new warmth spreads Everything swells, everything grows, from its roots upward, and the growth extends under the whole soul and the wing begins to swell. "13 Thinly disguised obscenity: this is the final gift, mass- erotica peddled as philosophy. As for the relations between Socrates and Alcibiades, that is biography; and the culture industry exempts them from aesthetic criticism. Still too "natural" to become an industry, sex has, in any case, become commerce, as Aspasia tells us. Commerce and politics: sex is integrated into the system. Phryne's gesture reminds us sadly that even faith in uncorruptible judges is ill founded. To these contradictions and catastrophes of the human spirit the culture industry has a ready answer: such scandals are of ' use, they stipply the raw material for the authors of tragedies. This process confirms the final apocalyptic abyss of Attic man, the path of his irre- parable degeneration. 2Exhrre gVhh rrehkevahe, p. 60. 3 Phaedrus, 23- 30. 105
MISREADINGS You see the Athenians, still in broad daylight, take their places in the long tiers of seats in the amphi- theater, where with stupid, dazed expressions they will become caught up in events enacted by some poor mummers stripped of all humanity, since the mummers have concealed their faces behind the gro- tesque fiction of masks, and their elevated shoes and padded costumes mimic a greatness not their own. Like ghosts that display no nuance of feeling, no shifts of passion, exposed to the shameless attention of all, they offer you debate on the most awful mysteries of the human spirit: hatred, parricide, in- cest. Things that in the past people would have concealed from the eyes of the crowd now become the source of general entertainment. And here again the public must be entertained according to the dic- tates of mass-culture, which obliges you not to allow an emotion to be intuited but, rather, to present it ready-made to the consumer. Thus it will not be a poetic expression of lament but a stereotyped formula of grief that suddenly assaults you with studied vio- lence: "Alas, alas, alas! Ototbi totbi!" But what else can be expected of authors who hire out their art and know they must slap together a product that the archon will accept or reject as he chooses? It is common knowledge that sponsorships these days go to prolific citizens, and therefore the culture industry could not find more straightforward legislation. You offer the backer what he asks of you, and what he asks of you will be evaluated by weight and quantity. You know very well that if you want to see a play of yours staged, you can't submit it singly. No, you 106
The End Is at Hand must offer a whole tetralogy complete with satyr- drama. Hence there is creation on demand, poetry machine-made, by formula. And the poet, if he is to see his work performed, must also be composer and choreographer and dance master, forcing the chorus shamefully to kick their legs to the immodest whine of the flute. The ancient author of the dithyramb is now transformed into the producer of an Attic Broadway; and the askesis he has finally achieved is that of the pimp. Shall we analyze the course of this regression? It began with Aeschylus, who, naturally, is adored by mass-man. Aeschylus made poetry out of the latest headlines: take the battle of Salamis. Fine stuff for poetry! A military-industrial achievement whose technological details the author lists with a delight that no longer shocks our jaded sensibilities. The "oars striking loudly in unison to the cadence," the vessels with their "bronze prows," the "beaks" of the "massed ships pressed in a strait," the ships with their "bronze cheeks" that, clashing, "snapped all the aligned oars," the maneuvers that the Greek ships made around the Persians, "girding them"--all this with a heavy, arrogant taste for mechanical detail, a passion for including in the numbered verses snatches of everyday conversation, nomenclature worthy of some instruction manual, and in a secondhand style that, if we had any sense of discrimination left, would make us blush. 4 As Zollaphontes puts it, "The char- acter of the industrial mass is perfectly caught here: 4persians, cf. 386-432. 107
MISREADINGS it vacillates between hysteria and gloom. Sentiment has no place among the worshipers of Baal." 5 Sen- timent? And when he has to describe a scene of majesty and death, what does he fall back on? The vocabulary, the slang of a butcher. "And they still, like tuna caught in a net, with stubs of oars, with broken carcasses, slammed down, crushed backs, to moans and howls, and on all sides the expanse of sea was smoking . . ,,6 In its desperate attempt to refaire Doeblin sur nature, the culture industry foists on us a language that has been made into a mere thing, an artisan's tool, a mechanism, a shipyard's terminology. But do not think that with Aeschylus we reached the nadir. The scandal goes deeper. With Sophocles we have finally the perfect example of enforced som- nambulism mass-produced for the crowd. While Sophocles has renounced Aeschylus's religious neu- roses, and distanced himself also from the elegant boulevardier skepticism of Euripides, the practice of sophrosyne in his work becomes the alchemy of moral compromise. He turns out all-purpose situations, and thus has no true purpose. Take Antigone. Here you have the whole shebang. The girl devoted to her brother, barbarously slain. The wicked and insensi- tive tyrant. The principles sacrosanct even at the price of death. Haemon, son of the tyrant, a suicide be- cause of the girl's sad fate. Haemon's mother, follow- ing him to the grave. Creon aghast at all the deaths SExherre , p. 25. 6 persians, 386ff. 108
The End Is at Hand caused by his insane Philistinism. Soap opera, thanks to the Attic culture industry, has reached its climax, its abyss. And as if that wasn't enough, Sophocles seals his work with moral commentary. In the first stasimon we have the glorification of technological productivity: "Many are the wondrous things in the world, but none is more wonderful than man . He wears out the Earth, supreme divinity, y. ear after year following his young horses, driving his plow and turning the soil . Tribes of wild beasts, of marine creatures, he snares in his woven nets..." 17 So we have the ethic of productiyity, praise for the stupid work of the mechanic, the allusion to prole- tarian genius. "We must be pleased," Zollaphontes observes ironically, speaking of the relationship be- tween literature and industry, "with the victory of the genius who now slays monsters with technology, and we must hope that that victory is put to good use for man." 18 Such is the ideology of mass culture. And Sophocles, a master of this, does not hesitate to add to protagonist and deuteragonist. . we have a triagonist, too, and decoration of the scene, 19 since, obviously, to impose ready-made emotions the clas- sic stage was not enough for him. Before long we shall see the introduction of a fourth interlocutor, one completely durr/b, and then tragedy will have taken the final step, which is the comedy of super- fetation, achieving total incommunicability in servile 7Antigone, I, first stasimon. SExerre, p. 19. 9Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, IV, 15. 109
MISREADINGS obedience to the rules of the avant-garde theater, en attendant its God6tes. And now, for Euripides, the time is ripe. He is just innocent and radical enough to win the favor of the masses, able to reduce drama to pochades, as can be seen from the insistent plaisanteries of Admetus and Hercules, which neutralize what's left of the power of tragedy in Alcestis. As for Medea, here mass culture performs its star turn, entertaining us with the priva
te neuroses of a bloodthirsty hysteric and a plethora of Freudian analysis, offering a perfect ex- ample of how to be the Tennessee Williams des pauvres. You're given the full dose: how is it possible not to weep and to feel terror and pity? Because this is what tragedy requires. You must feel terror and pity, and feel them on command, on cue. Just read what Aristotle, that peerless master of hidden persuasion, has to say on the subject. Here is the whole recipe: Take one protagonist endowed with such qualities that the public both admires him and deplores him; make terrible and pathetic things hap- pen to him, sprinkling the mixture with an appro- priate amount of sudden reversals, agnitions, catastrophes; stir well, bring to a boil, and voil& you have cooked up what is called catharsis, and you will see the audience tear its hair and groan with fear and sympathy, crying out for relief. You shudder at these details? It's all written down; read the texts of this Choryphe of contemporary civilization. The culture industry is quick to circulate them, convinced that if not falsehood then sheer spiritual laziness will further its aims. 110