Month: December 2016

“Moreover, it is surprising that anyone takes for granted that those stars, observed by the Chaldeans and the Babylonians and the Egyptians, which the general run of people call “wandering” but which Nigidius [Figulus] calls “wanderers,” are not greater in number that is commonly thought.  Favorinus believed it could be the case that there were other planets with powers identical [to those already known]; without [accounting for] these, a correct and constant observation [of the heavens] could never come to fruition, but men might not be able to spot them because of their extreme dimness or altitude.  ‘For,’ he said, ‘there are certain stars that are only visible on certain tracts of the earth, and only known to the denizens of those tracts, but are not seen elsewhere and not known to all.'”

Even though Euripides gives the impression of superficiality at every point, the Andromache is really a bottomless play.  Even the clothes have depth.

When I was teaching this text, I said in an offhand way something very stupid, which was that Andromache shows every sign of suffering from PTSD.  I said this in part to make comprehensible to my students a real phenomenon in the text, which is that Andromache never stops repeating an account of her enslavement which is consistent itself, between iterations, and which closely resembles the prospective version she delivers in Trojan Women.  This kind of obsessive repetition is supposed to be characteristic of PTSD (although avoidance is, as well).  Andromache even at one point confesses that it delights her to “have her troubles on her tongue,” a confession that seems to ground the chain of repetition on a psychological and not a rhetorical level.

Then why was this stupid of me to say?  Well, consider: does Andromache ever get to a position at which she might be said to be “post-trauma?”  The nightmare, for her, is ongoing: her husband dies, her city burns, she’s enslaved, she’s raped by her husband’s murderer, she’s besieged by her rapist’s murderous wife.  There’s no perspective from which any of this might be fixed as past trauma by comparison with present safety.  Whatever the reason for Andromache’s repetition, it can’t be compared with what happens to modern-day people who suffer from PTSD.

All this raises a problem with the PTSD diagnosis which I’m not the first one to have noticed.  What such a diagnosis presupposes is precisely some moment after trauma, when the patient may objectively be “safe” enough that responses conditioned by trauma start to seem inappropriate.  For much of history, and indeed in much of the world even now, this condition is not satisfied.  We imagine that others are like us, but our everyday experience of “safety” is as incomprehensible to the majority of people as shamanistic trance is to us.  Far from representing an insight into the mind of humankind generally, PTSD may actually be a culturally-specified disorder of the modern-day first world.

Does it follow that much of history, in this respect, remains a closed door for us?  Andromache’s repetition, for instance: why repeat, within a nightmare, the opening movements of that same nightmare?  Because these seem to open out onto happier times?  Nothing in the play gives us license to think so; this is only a guess, and probably not the most interesting possible guess.  But  the next four years may give us access to how Andromache felt.

I was thinking of apologizing for a gap of some months in my posting here, and for having failed to complete certain multi-part projects even after my hiatus.  This would be an apology directed towards my readers, all of whom are bots.  Would it therefore be meaningless?  Surely not, since, despite appearances, every apology is really for the ego of whoever makes it.  Or rather, in a more qualified way, an apology delivered to an audience of bots would be no more meaningless than any other.

The word itself, “apology,” comes from a field of litigation and criminal justice where its ego orientation is all too clear.  It’s in our way, as English speakers, to forget etymologies – and all too often, as in this case, to replace them with sentiment.  Socrates’ Apology was however certainly no heartfelt plea for forgiveness.  It was a defense speech, pure and simple, an example of a genre well-known to the citizens of Athens and, it might be added, therefore the only Platonic dialogue of which we can say that it shares at least a title with one of Socrates’ own “works.”  The generic framing of Plato’s version of the Apology is subtle enough to be almost invisible; Xenophon’s version is more “realistic” to our eyes, more obviously a defense speech in a courtroom setting, although the chronology forces us to admit that this text is a revision of and response Plato’s – therefore only closer to how things actually happened by coincidence, if at all.

In both these works, Socrates is represented as offering an account of his life and conduct that attempts to justify these despite their divergence from Athenian norms.  The charges leveled against him amount to a claim by his prosecutors that Socrates’ behavior has corrupted those norms, either insidiously (Plato) or quite openly, by encouraging tyrants (Xenophon).  Socrates only seems to contest these charges; what he actually argues, in both texts, is that his own life-practices are of sufficiently high value to justify whatever harm they might do to the fabric of the city in which he lives.

This is, as I’ve said, a defense speech delivered in court.  It differs from most such defense speeches (as far as what survives permits us to make such a judgment) insofar as Socrates explicitly or in an underhanded way rejects Athenian norms.  Most defendants in Athens begin their speeches by recognizing the claims that social norms have upon them and by conceding the authority of these norms to judge.  In this respect, conventional defense speeches seem to have something in common with “apology” as we understand it – since to apologize is to put ourselves under the judgment of the norm we admit to having broken.  But Athenian defendants also typically disavow the antisocial act of which they stand accused – whereas, for us, part of any apology is the confession of just such an act.

This confessional character leads us back to Socrates, and points us towards the essentially egotistical orientation of modern apology.  In both Plato’s and Xenophon’s versions of his defense speech, Socrates misemploys an Athenian ritual assertion of sameness – “I’m just like you, and I’d never do what both you and I recognize as a crime” – as an idiosyncratic assertion of difference.  In a courtroom setting, where life and death are at stake, such an assertion of difference can’t help but entail some decision about superiority or inferiority.  Socrates describes as a habit of living what his prosecutors have identified as a crime; he must then show that this way of living is not criminal or inferior to Athenian norms, but rather better than these.  In this legal setting, what emerges is a “narcissism of small differences” in the original, Freudian sense.  Both Socrates and the court treat the mere existence of alternative life-ways as an attack on their own egos, to which aggression is the only possible response.

Of this kind of confrontation, our apologies can only be described as a degenerate form.  We confess, we admit that some particular case of abnormal behavior really “belongs” to us, and we ask to be treated as normal anyway.  The muted and ritualized character of such interactions suppresses those argumentative dimensions of narcissism that bulk so large in Socrates’ apologies while nonetheless still ais a llowing us to recapture the act we’ve avowed as part of our own egos.  We may call it a “lapse;” what we’re really defending, without admitting it to ourselves, is some kind of alternative lifestyle.

The truth of this only appears in exceptional cases.  Here’s a fake one.

Bojack Horseman is the best thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time.  The title character is a kind of man that we all know, from fiction and life.  He manipulates and abuses and takes advantage of everyone around him, then apologizes; every apology turns the misdeed for which it compensates into an episode in a history of poor judgment and lack of self-control (Bojack’s terms, not mine) that predicts, and even comes to justify, future transgressions.  Bojack constitutes himself as a serial apologizer, someone prone to catastrophic lapses who can still believe, at moments, that he’s a good person.  The remarkable thing about Bojack is that it follows this trajectory through to its conclusion.  Most of what Bojack has to apologize for are the sort of things for which we’ve gotten used to forgiving men on television: sexual pecadillos, laziness, selfishness, neurotic failure to perform.  Bojack began his career as a sitcom star, and the movement from such transgressions toward apology is a sitcom trope.  When Bojack gets involved in a sexual encounter with the seventeen-year-old daughter of an old friend, this goes beyond what sitcom scripts would be willing to forgive – but we can see that what’s led Bojack to this extreme is his history of making apologies that his friends, and the script, eventually accept.  Here too, when he’s caught, he attempts the old tactic.  The teen’s mother cuts him off, threatens to call the police, and promises to kill him if he ever contacts her family again.  This, we see, is where apologies lead: to perversion, in the fullest sense of the word.

Apology is part of the art of self-constitution.  Do I apologize, in order to see myself as the kind of person who writes consistently but sometimes lapses?  Or is it better to make the other confession, that I’m not a consistent writer and never will be?

“Every legitimate power always rests, as does any kind of power, on the symbol.  And the police, like all powers, also rest on the symbol.  In troubled times, as you have found out, you would let yourselves be arrested like sheep if some guy had said Police to you and shown you a card, otherwise you would have started beating him up as soon as he laid a hand on you.  Except there’s a small difference between police and power, namely that the police have been persuaded that their efficacity rests on force – not so as to put trust in them, but on the contrary to curb their functions.  And thanks to the fact that the police think that they are able to exercise their functions through force, they are as powerless as one could wish.”

“His major trips began when he voluntarily enlisted in the 127th Infantry Regiment, where he served as a cook.  He encouraged a childhood friend to join up, but the friend was posted to the 16th Dragoons.  Since the two chums could not billet together, both deserted, and then Albert led the march through bitterest winter, Belgium, Holland.  Very early on the friend died from cold, hunger, but especially exhaustion.”

It should be taken as a general principle that neurotics never do anything unintentionally.