ELEMENTS FONAMENTALS

When Havelock described writing as producing the distinction between the knower and the known that pitted mousikē and philosophy against each other, we said, he was following the program of the debasement of writing inaugurated by Plato’s text itself. But, at the same time, he allows us to see a multitude of means by which the Greeks were

The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 97 thoroughly familiar with writing before the letter. Havelock was, in a way, advancing a similar thesis as Derrida, his 1960s contemporary. In the first part of Of Grammatology,

Derrida distinguishes between writing “in a restricted sense,” which is spatially and geographically—Eurocentrically—located, and a more general writing which comprises, in addition to the traditional writing, “all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical,

sculptural ‘writing … All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities

themselves.”51 _{In fact, Derrida says, one might even speak of military or political writing.}

With this sense of writing as general inscription, an archi-writing defined as the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for permanence and spatialization as such, we may easily invert the thesis of orality and literacy: the multitude of practices

performative enactments of mousikē, is already a general assemblage of inscription. The contents of mousikē are not simply “memorized” by the performer and then repeated. Rather, a heterogenous collation of material means, dances, temples, figures, instruments, modes, metrical feet, and so on, serves to preserve and transmit, in short to re-compose, the customs, mores, and laws of the community, its ethos and nomoi.52

What allows for the permanence of these mores and laws across such a heterogeneous medium is what Derrida calls iteration, namely the possibility for any mark to be removed from its context and still necessarily preserve the possibility to be read and deciphered as a mark of any sorts.53 _{Understood as iteration, the repetition that}

takes place in mousikēdoes not consist so much in the ritualized movements and practices that are bound to specific times and places, as it does in the fact that this

51 _{Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9.}

52 _{On the “ethos theory,” see Warren Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of} Poetry and Philosophy, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Wallace, “Damon of Oa,” and Peter Wilson, “Athenian Strings” in Murray and Wilson, eds., 259, 292.

53 _{Derrida discusses the notion of iteration in “Signature Event Context,” published in Writing and}

Difference, a close reading of J.L Austin’s theory of the performative, and further elaborated it in Limited Inc. and other places. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

repeatability is in fact possible, given that no place and time are ever identical. What the performative accomplishes, understood as iteration, is not so much to produce a

transformation in the world, but to demonstrate that language and all marks have a certain permanence that exceeds their immediate location and time (their context), without this excess constituting any sort of ideality.

Rather, what we call repetition is precisely the necessary transformation of these presumably context-bound units into marks that have the possibility of being everywhere “iterated,” presented as the same and different at the same time, altered in its repetition. For Derrida, what is crucial about this is that marks do not retain any intentionality or “original” semantic meaning, they can be break with every given context and “engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.”54

When the performative assemblage of mousikē exploits this necessary possibility, on the other hand, what is at stake is not the dissemination they engender but rather that these units, exemplary the musical modes, cease to be strictly bound to a musical context and attain a reproducibility that links their simultaneous identity and alterity across media and across time.

An account mousikē as archi-writing can, in fact, be read directly in book 3 of the

Republic, in a passage that we already examined. The first site of inscription is the body: “Or haven’t you observed that imitations (mimeseis), if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established (kathisthantai) as habits (ethe) and nature (phusis), in body (soma) and sounds (phonas) and in thought (dianoian)?” (395c). In this passage, Plato neatly summarizes the roles of mimesis and repetition in making the body a site of affective inscriptions for habits and mores. Mimesis performs a double task: on the one hand, it ensures the identity of what makes the imprint and what is imprinted in the body—this is covered under the sustantive “mimeseis.” On the other hand, it affirms repetition as a mode of producing the identity between the two.

The task of the legislators in the Republic is not only to make sure its citizens are good and virtuous, but to preserve the state apparatus, the means of reproduction of the

The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 99 conditions of production. This occurs, I argue, through the famous “ancient quarrel

between philosophy and poetry” (Rep. 607b5-6).55

Much ink has flowed upon this quarrel, which is arguably longer after Plato mentioned than it was before him, but here we can suggest seeing it by placing the body as an inscribable medium—as the object of an onto-typology—at the center of Plato’s “quarrel” with mousikē. The body must be shown to be plastic and susceptible to the imprint of the legislator, hence the emphasis on education both in music and gymnastics. Likewise, the mimetic mechanism of its

inscription, mousikē also must be preserved, wrested away from its current holders, the poets and the sophists. The difference between immediacy and mediation, which

produces (alphabetical) writing as secondary, serves to accomplish this displacement just as much as the indictment to poets and sophists that they “do not know what they say.”

The bulk of book 3 is concerned with a “purging” of the words, harmonies, and rhythms which have turned the “city of sows” into a “city of luxuriousness.” The passage offers several complications. As we have seen, the fact that mousikē was composed of logos, harmonic mode, and rhythm entailed that two different legislations had to be undertaken. One for logos, which worked undisturbed insofar as it was possible to distinguish between true models—the gods—and the things the poets said about them as true or false appearances. But in the case of modes and rhythms, which correspond to modes of life to an extent that they confuse themselves with them, the regulation not only has to be repeated, but reaches an aporetic point, expressed by Glaucon: “as to which sort [of rhythms] are imitations of which sort of life, I can’t say” (400a).

Picking up in our discussion of economimesis, it now becomes more evident that the problem with modes and rhythms is not simply that these fail to conform to a model- copy system, but rather that they introduce a sort of multifariousness and ambiguity that threatens what I called the “theory of labor” that upholds the entire system. Matters of ontology—and this is a general thesis that will accompany in the next chapters—depend on matters of economimesis.

55 _{For a broad overview of the issues see the essays in Pierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, Plato and}

What Socrates finds most problematic in this confusion is that the practices of the poets and musicians are panharmonic and many-stringed, that they do not keep to their own job but instead they aim to “imitate” everything, “a polytechnics of uncontrollable polyvalence” in Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, that turns the city of sows into a luxurious city. There is no room for “‘double man among us, nor a manifold one, since each man does one thing’. ‘No, he doesn’t harmonize’” (397e).

Out of this multitude, only those corresponding to the two ideal temperaments for the guardians, a violent one and a moderate one, are to be preserved in the city. The founders don’t innovate in preferring the music and instruments of Apollo over those of Marsyas (399e). But how to choose them is not as easy. First, the modes are discussed as being something, e.g “the wailing modes,” (tines oun threnodeis harmoniai, 399d). Then, Socrates—who doesn’t know them—asks Glaucon “what modes are soft and suitable for symposia,” and so on (398e). Only later he asks about a mode “which would

appropriately imitate the sounds and accents of a man who is courageous.” We see, then, in the course of the legislation itself, the ambiguity of musical mimesis and the

challenges it poses: modes are, or are appropriate for, or lastly imitate, different types of life and activity, but how this is so, is not clear.

This ignorance—to employ a hermeneutical commonplace—is strategically ironic. Its main purpose is concealing the way in which an identity between musical modes and modes of life, already established as part of Greek culture, is adopted and integrated into the ideal State. It is not by coincidence that the harmonic modes are named with geographical names: Dorian, Ionian, Lydian. It matters little to know which mode corresponds to which ethos—it can be left to Glaucon and even to Damon (in absentia) to decide—insofar as their identity is announced and taken up as subject of legislation. This is the second type of inscription, of what Derrida calls writing avant la lettre (very literally “before the letter”), advanced by Plato. A harmonic mode is not simply a collection of pitches. It is, in addition or concomitantly, a set of regulations about the employment of these pitches, their hierarchy and tendencies, the instruments

The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 101 that may or may not employ it, and in the Damonian theory appropriated by Plato, the codification of social customs.56

These modes are everywhere inscribed: in the instruments but also in the

mathematical proportions by which they come to be conceptualized; that one of them is “material” and the other one is “ideal” does not negate that they are different means of inscription—it is only the difference between them that creates this “metaphysical” distinction. Before Aristoxenus and the latter tradition, there was no fully “abstract” conceptualization of independent pitches and their mathematical relations.57

The modes existed nowhere outside of their inscriptions, and in them they are already “identical” with the customs they are supposed to correspond to. Their codification, undertaken years later, would complicate this identification and produce further problems for the tradition of mimesis in music, which will be explored in Parts II and III of this dissertation.

Crucially, then, the text invokes and affirms a series of identifications: the Lydian and “tight” Lydian are wailing; the Ionian and some Lydian are soft—presumably for being “slack,” i.e. not tight in the lyre. The Dorian and the Phrygian are the ones that “would appropriately imitate the sounds and accents of a man who is in courageous in warlike deeds… etc.” Thus, harmonic modes, codify, preserve, and transmit the ethē of the community that employs them, using mimesis in a diversity of senses: some are said to “imitate the sounds,” or to “be” soft since they are produced by lax strings, others simply for conventional associations which in the end correspond to their geographical origins. The main mimetic operation, however, is to produce an ideal entity, “a harmonic mode,” out of empirical practices, stabilize the ambiguity it entails—make it natural— and legislate its usage. When, in what was later taken up as the “ethos theory” of musical modes, a certain mode was said to move a listener towards one disposition or another, the

56 _{This is attested further, for example, in Aristotle’s Politics. In this account we see the inseparability of} instruments, genres, and mode. When attempting to compose a dithyramb, which “is by general consent held to be a Phrygian thing,” on the dorian mode, Philoxenus was forced to abandon the attempt since “the nature of the genre forced him back into the proper mode, the Phrygian” (Pol. 1342a32–b12). What links them is their foreign provenance, which further delineates the conflict between the national and the foreign prompted by the New Music. cf. Csapo 2004, 232–35; and Steiner 2013, 197.

57 _{For the role of Aristoxenus in this context see Andrew Barker “Aristoxène et les critères du jugement} musical” in Malhomme and Wersinger, eds. Mousikè et Aretè, 68.

means of production of this ideality was concealed by affirming the mode to be first and to “cause” affections in their listener. The structure was inverted, the copy produced the paradigm.

Inscription is always a form of power, which does not mean that it is a violent irruption but simply the expression of and means for the exercise of power. It is not because there is writing that there is violence; rather, inscription always bears the trace of the powers that be, while these powers are in rigor nothing without the inscription that they effectuate. Inscription less writes the decrees of power than inscribes the will of power itself. Inscribed with this power, the violence of music appears then through its regulations and rationalizations.

The third element advanced by Plato is the theory of the soul, presented as a theory of forms of musical inscription in the Timaeus and the Laws, in addition to the

Republic. Here, and not in the regulation of modes, we find the importance of mathematics as ensuring stability and identity over the multifariousness of musical experience.58

The soul is presented as the ultimate site for inscription. As with the other inversions by which the secondary takes the place of the primary—the paradigm taking the place of the copy—the soul comes to be the model for all other types of inscription, taking the place of the body. In the Republic, the things said to be imitated come to be more and more “abstract,” and “ideal”: Grace and gracelessness, harmony and lack of it: these are affectively communicated to the body of the infant, of the being without logos so that, “when reasonable speech (logos) comes, the man who’s reared in this way would take most delight in it, recognizing it on account of its being akin” (402a.). This affective familiarity with grace and gracelessness before the advent of logos is “the most sovereign rearing,” which repeats the idea of ethical education as a stamping of the soul mentioned before, “because rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite” (401e).

58 _{Anne Gabrièle Wersinger, Platon et La Dysharmonie: Recherches Sur La Forme Musicale. (Paris: J.} Vrin, 2001).

The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 103 Most importantly, the soul and the city are identified. The city is just if each part performs their own function with respect to affections and habits that correspond to the forms [eidoi] of sobriety, courage and wisdom, (435b); therefore “we shall thus expect the individual also to have these same forms in his soul, and by reason of identical affections of these with those in the city to receive properly the same appellations” (435c). Thus the analysis of the parts of the soul into the appetitive, the spirited and the rational corresponds to the three classes found in the State, “the moneymakers, the helpers, the counsellors” (441c). Music—and gymnastics—ensure that the rational rules over the irrational, “to render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one with fair words and teachings and relaxing and soothing and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm” (442a). We find a musical definition of justice, to attain “self- mastery and beautiful order within himself, and ... [harmonize] these three principles, the notes or intervals of three terms quite literally the lowest, the highest, and the mean, and all others there may be between them, and [bound] all three together and [make] of himself a unit, one man instead of many, self-controlled and in unison…” (433e).59

Plato thus draws the modes of inscription of ethēfrom the body, through the soul, and into the city. All of these come to be regulated by the transcendent paradigm of

mathematical order called the “world-soul” in the Timaeus, famously—and obscurely—

organized according to the musical proportions associated with the Pythagoreans.60

The “perfection” of these musical harmonies and the correspondences they preserve counter the multiple displacements operated in the social field. The ethēmust become regulated, they must become or turn into law, nomoi. For this reason, the guardians are to be trained to be watchful of transformations or changes in the musical order,

59 _{Csapo also emphasizes the musical origin of the negative adjectives used to criticize political regimes,} namely polueidos and poikilos. Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” 239.

60 _{For the relation between music and the Timaeus, see Sergio Zedda, “How to Build a World Soul: A} Practical Guide” and Andrew Barker “Timaeus on music and the liver” in Wright, M. R. (ed.) Reason and Necessity: Essays on Plato’s Timaeus, (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2000) and Wersinger, Platon et La Dysharmonie. See also Gretchen Reydams-Schils, “Myth and Poetry in the Timaeus” in Destrée and Hermann, (eds.) Plato and the Poets, 358.

“they must beware of change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole. For never are the modes of music (mousikēs tropon) moved

(kinountai) without the greatest political laws (politikon nomon) being moved, as Damon says, and I am persuaded.”

“Include me too,” said Adeimantus, “among those who are persuaded.”

So it’s surely here in music, as it seems,” I said, “that the guardians must build the guardhouse.”

“At least, he said, “this kind of lawlessness (paronomia) easily creeps in unawares.

“Yes,” I said, “since it’s considered to be a kind of play (paideian) and to do no harm.”

“It doesn’t do any, either,” he said, “except that, establishing itself bit by bit, it flows gently beneath the surface into the dispositions (ethē) and practices, and from there it emerges bigger in men’s contracts with one another; and it’s from