Author: castoreum

“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.

I heard from Abu Reza bin Abdislam an-Nishapuri, who was speaking in the year 510, at Nishapur, in the Grand Mosque: “We were headed to Timghaj, and the caravan was about a thousand camels long.  One day, when we were stopped at a hot spring, we saw a woman standing at the top of a gravel heap, naked as to her head and naked as to her body, and rather well-formed, with a stature like cedar and a face like the moon and long, straight hair.  She was looking right at us.  Whatever we said to her, she gave no answer, but when we approached her she cried out and fled at a run, so fast that no horse could be faster.  Our guides were Turks, and they said: ‘this person is a monster, which they call a nesnas.'”  But let it be known that this is the noblest of animals, because of the three things that were mentioned before (namely, its upright stature, the width of its fingernails, and the hair on its head).

[regarding the second of these criteria, compare Diogenes Laertius’ story about Diogenes, Socrates, and the definition of man.  One day, Diogenes  of Sinope overheard a lecture in which Socrates claimed that man was a bipedal animal, without feathers.  The next day, Diogenes showed up in Socrates’ classroom holding a plucked chicken.  “Ecce Homo,” he said, but Socrates was quick on his feet and just added a third criterion to the previous day’s definition: man was a bipedal animal, without feathers, having broad fingernails (onukhoi, cognate with Nezami’s nakhen).]

When the brigantine had sailed away, we headed back inland along the same route that we’d followed before, but with a few extra men.  We followed the coast of the bay that we had discovered, and, after we’d traveled four leagues, we took four Indians captive, and we showed them corn to see if they recognized it, since up to that point we hadn’t found any sign of it.  They said they would take us to where there was some; and thus they took us to their village, which was at the head of the bay, not very far from where we were, and there they showed us a little bit of corn which wasn’t ready to be picked yet.  There we found many merchandise crates from Spin, and in each of them there was the body of a dead man, and the bodies were covered with animal hides that had been painted.  To the quartermaster it seemed that this was some kind of idolatry, and he burned the box with the bodies.  We also found pieces of canvas and woolen cloth, rags that seemed to have come from New Spain; we also found traces of gold.

Herodotus says that the highest ethical principle recognized by the Persians is not to lie.  This is in the nature of a local custom and forms part of every Persian child’s education.  As so often in his treatment of Persia, it seems like he’s onto something here: one would like to draw a line connecting Herodotus’ remark to the hatred of the lie (Avestan drug) so thoroughly attested in the oldest texts of Zoroastrianism.  Of course, hating “the lie” isn’t quite the same thing as hating lying; the Zoroastrian drug sometimes takes the form of a cosmological principle, sometimes that of a hypostasis of evil, rather rarely a form that fits the Merriam-Webster definition of english lie: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”

One also observes that drug is far from the only, and perhaps not even the most important, ethical concept toward which Zoroastrianism manifests hostility: rage, for instance (Avestan aeshma), plays the villain’s part in plenty of Avestan hymns.  But Herodotus mentions no customary aversion to rage among the Persians.  What forces have compressed Zoroastrianism’s diverse field of ethical-emotional concepts down to Herodotus’ monotonic focus on the lie?

Our approach to this question depends on whether we see Herodotus’ remark as a true descriptive statement about Persian nomos or, rather, as part of an ethnography that structures the people of the inhabited world by defining them against one another, or against the Greeks who would have made up Herodotus’ first audience.  I think there’s value in both hypotheses; I’ll follow up the first one today, and the second one tomorrow.

As I’ve suggested, there’s a gap that separates Herodotus’ remark from the texts of Zoroastrianism: Herodotus both literalizes the lie and makes it the prime ethical enemy of the Persians.  Another text that makes these same maneuvers is the inscription placed by Darius the Great on the cliff-face at Bisutun in present-day Iran.  The inscription narrates Darius’ rise to power and his suppression of a number of nationalist-nativist revolts among the peoples then subject to Persian rule.  Naturally, this narrative involves a measure of propaganda.  Take, for instance, this summary passage that appears near the end of the inscription:

(52) King Darius says: This is what I have done. By the grace of Ahuramazda have I always acted. After I became king, I fought nineteen battles in a single year and by the grace of Ahuramazda I overthrew nine kings and I made them captive.

One was named Gaumâta, the Magian; he lied, saying ‘I am Smerdis [Bardiya], the son of Cyrus [Kûruš].’ He made Persia to revolt.

Another was named ššina, the Elamite [Ûvjiya]; he lied, saying: ‘I am king the king of Elam.’ He made Elam to revolt.

[similar formulaic entries follow for the other 7 kings]

(53) King Darius says: These nine king did I capture in these wars.

(54) King Darius says: As to these provinces which revolted, lies made them revolt, so that they deceived the people. Then Ahuramazda delivered them into my hand; and I did unto them according to my will.

(55) King Darius says: You who shall be king hereafter, protect yourself vigorously from lies; punish the liars well, if thus you shall think, ‘May my country be secure!’

Part of the inscription’s propagandistic force is its assertion that each rebellious king defeated by Darius lied (old Persian adurujiya) to the people of his province in articulating the proposition, “I am king of such-and-such.”  This is contrasted, implicitly, with the truth that a claim of that nature has in Darius’ mouth; in fact, the inscription as a whole (for whose own truth it repeatedly vouches) is just such a claim.

Adurujiya and related lexemes form the Bisutun inscription’s main, and perhaps only, vocabulary of ethical condemnation.  For the most part, this vocabulary passes judgment on the propositional content of statements made by Darius’ rivals.  Whatever Herodotus’ motivation for placing the lie at the center of Persian ethical culture, he seems to be following in Darius’ footsteps.

Tomorrow: more Herodotus.  What  it means.

“Who knows if there might not have been several worlds before this one?  That hypothesis would give a very natural origin to the good and evil angels; it would be appropriate to add to each world a universal judgment; the destructions of these worlds would then not at all be annihilations, but rather derangements.”

Toward the end of Psychiatric Power, a series of lectures delivered at the College de France in 1973 and 1974, Foucault says something like this:

“Now I think there has been a completely different standpoint of truth in our civilization. This completely different standpoint of truth, no doubt more archaic than the one I am talking about, was gradually pushed aside or covered over by the demonstrative technology of truth. This other standpoint of truth, which is, I think absolutely crucial in the history of our civilization by virtue of it being covered over and colonized by the other, is that of a truth which, precisely, will not be everywhere and at all times waiting for us whose task is to watch out for it and grasp it wherever it happens to be. It will be the standpoint of a dispersed, discontinuous, interrupted truth which will only speak or appear from time to time, where it wishes to, in certain places; a truth which does not appear everywhere, at all times, or for everyone; a truth which is not waiting for us, because it is a truth which has its favorable moments, its propitious places, its privileged agents and bearers. It is a truth which has its geography. The oracle who speaks the truth at Delphi does not express it anywhere else, and does not say the same thing as the oracle in another place; the god who cures at Epidaurus, and who tells those who come to consult him what their illness is and what remedy they must apply, only cures and expresses the truth of the illness at Epidaurus and nowhere else. A truth, then, which has its geography, and which has its calendar as well, or, at least, its own chronology.”

Or, exactly this.

“Truth” as we think of it–whether descriptive, deductive, demonstrative, or what have you–is something that holds, in the same way, everywhere.  Gravity is the same everywhere on Earth, a failure of the Pancreas will lead to diabetes as surely in Mexico as in Taiwan, and the capital of Mexico is Mexico City as surely on Mars as on the Moon.  Fine, says Foucault, that’s one way of thinking about truth, but certainly not the only one.  We could just as easily imagine truth to be local.  Foucault’s immediate point in saying so is to put a theoretical framework behind his claim that the mad are (or were, in the 19th century) insane in the clinic, by contrast with e.g. diabetics who are diabetic everywhere.  This follows from methodological divergences between psychiatrists, who demonstrate the truth of madness by provoking a crisis according to an irregular technique, and other doctors, who can demonstrate, etc.

The classics are evidently playing a background role here (although in a sense Foucault is elaborating on conclusions he drew in the previous year’s lectures) and so Foucault is perhaps under no obligation to “get things right.”  With reference to ancient medicine, I think, he’s got things partly wrong; take for instance the explanation of epilepsy offered in the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease.  Epilepsy is the immediate result of a wet south wind, so one’s liability to an attack depends on one’s location and even on the topography of the land around one’s house.  What seems like an eminently “local” ailment, though, turns out to have purchase only on victims who suffer from an insufficient (in-utero) purgation of cerebral phlegm; so epilepsy does have a “general” truth, independent of any particular place or climate.

On the other hand, the author of Sacred Disease also refers contemptuously to several types of itinerant folk-healers whose methodology does seem to have more to do with Foucault’s oracles than with the universalist truth-claims of (some strands of) Hippocratic medicine.  These–as far as the text lets us reconstruct–make a cure of epilepsy by intuiting or in some other inspired way discovering a “sin” on the part of the sufferer that needs to be purged.  And Foucault himself goes on to make reference to the so-called “critical days,” localized sectors of time in which the truth about a patient’s disease or prognosis would reveal itself to the learned eye.  So, within one field, a double regime of truth, local and universal both at once.  And, as any unbiased reader of a text like On the Sacred Disease will see, universal claims have no particularly good claim to rightness or rationality over local ones.

To say something similar about classical politics would be difficult, not least because politics as a field doesn’t really come together in Ancient Greek thought until the last decades of the classical period.  That is to say, there aren’t really “political facts” until figures like Plato and Aristotle introduce them under the heading of universal claims, either about the nature of the “best state” or, in a more diagnostic mode that reminds us, rightly, of the authorial voice of Sacred Disease, about how things “generally go” with various forms of actually existing state.

Buried beneath this discourse, which is familiar to us because its dead hand still directs our own political conversations, is another, earlier way of talking about rule, and one in which Foucault’s two modes of truth production assume a very different configuration.  This one also undergirds our thinking about politics, but in a much more pervasive way, so that trying to recover it from a modern point of view is a little bit like staring at the sun.

Tomorrow: Herodotus, Bisutun, and the drugs.