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 understand; the experts of the culture industry will give him the illusion that his mind is achieving a comprehension 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.» Or: «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 Zollaphontes 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, or moral.» What better definition for the SocraticPlatonic 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 descending in him, through the eyes, a flow of beauty, and a new warmth spreads . . . E verything swells, everything grows, from its roots upward, and the growth extends under the whole soul . . . and the wing begins to swell.» Thinly disguised obscenity: this is the final gift, masserotica 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 supply the raw material for the authors of tragedies. This process confirms the final apocalyptic abyss of Attic man, the path of his irreparable degeneration.
You see the Athenians, still in broad daylight, take their places in the long tiers of seats in the amphitheater, 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 grotesque 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 offe r you debate on the most awful mysteries of the human spirit: hatred, parricide, incest. 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 dictates of mass-culture, which obliges you not to allow an emotion to be intuited but, rather, to present it ready-made to the consunier.
Thus it will not be a poetic expression of lament but a stereotyped formula of grief that suddenly assaults you with studied violence: «Alas, alas, alas! Ototoi totoi!» 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 iegislation. 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, yo must offer a whole tetralogy complete with satyrdrama.
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.
As Zollaphontes puts it, «The character of the industrial mass is perfectly caught here: it vacillates between hysteria and gloom. Sentiment has no place among the worshipers of Baal.,, 15 Sentiment? 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 . . . » 16 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 somnambulism mass-produced for the crowd. While Sophocles has renounced Aeschylus’s religious neuroses, 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 insensitive tyrant. The principles sacrosanct even at the price of death. Haemon, son of the tyrant, a suicide because of the girl’s sad fate. Haemon’s mother, following him to the grave. Creon aghast at all the deaths
15 Έχλισσε, ρ. 25.
16 Persians, 386ff.
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, year 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 proletarian genius. «We must be pleased,» Zollaphontes observes ironically, speaking of the relationship between 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.» 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, since, obviously, to impose ready-made emotions the classic stage was not enough for him. Before long we shall see the introduction of a fourth interlocutor, one completely dumb, and then tragedy will have taken the final step, which is the comedy of superfe tation, achieving total incommunicability in servile obedience to the rules of the avant-garde theater, en attendant its Godotes.
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
