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 happen to him, sprinkling the mixture with an appropriate amount of sudden reversals, agnmons, catastrophes; stir well, bring to a boil, and voila, 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 Choryphee of contemporary civilization. The culture industry is quick to circulate them, convinced that if not falsehood then sheer spiritual laziness will further its aims.
Ideology? If there is one: Accept what is given and use it as a tool of persuasive argumentation. The most recent, infamous handbook by this Aristotle, Rhetoric, is nothing less than a catechism of marketing, a motivational inquiry into what appeals and what doesn’t, what’s believed and what’s rejected. Now you know the irrational stimuli that govern the actions of your fellows, he says, and therefore your fellows are at your mercy. Push their buttons: they are yours. With this work, as Zollaphontes observes, «we have a fabrication that does not reflect the natural tendencies of the public but calculates its effects as far as salability goes, heightening the colors according to the laws of brute reaction to stimuli.» 20 The effect?
Delectatio morosa or, in other words, foreplay, the forge of every vice. Fantasy, daydream. Tragedy gives this the highly visible seal of social approval, raising a temple to a monster appearing from the shadows of a barbaric society.
But I don’t want to give the impression that the poor Boeotian victim is being defrauded only in the state amphitheater, on the day of the performance. Aristotle himself, in his Politics (Book 8), talks about music and «its sensible effect on our temperament.» Study the rules of songs as imitations of the stirrings of the soul, and you will learn how to «stir the emotions,» you will see that the Phrygian mode leads to orgiastic behavior, the Doric mode to «virility.» Need anything be added? Here you have a textbook for the emotional manipulation of the korai or, as
20 Έχλισσε, ρ. 42.
they say nowadays, teenagers. Enforced somnambulism is no longer a utopian dream, it is a reality. These days the flute is played everywhere, though the great Adornos inveighed at length against it. Thanks to Aristotle’s popularizing, musical skill is within everyone’s grasp, and it is taught to children in school. In no time a song of Tyrtaeus will become an air anybody can whistle in the baths or on the banks of the Ilissus. Music and tragedy now show us their true face: a manipulation of the emotions, which the crowd rushes blissfully to accept, welcoming this role of masochism.
It is from the lecterns of hidden persuaders that our young people are educated, transformed into a flock of sheep in the gymnasia. When they are adults, the same science of public opinion will teach them how to behave in communal life, reducing virtue, sentiment, and true talent to a mask. Hear what Hippocrates has to say: «For the doctor it is obviously an excellent testimonial to appear well fed and healthy; the public will believe that he who cannot take proper care of his own body will not be able to attend to the bodies of others . . . A doctor entering the room of a patient must be careful how he sits, how he acts; he must be well dressed, with serenity in his expression . . . » 21 Falsehood becomes a mask; the mask becomes the person. One day, in the not-too-distant future, to define man’s most profound being the only term left will be mask, persona, which denotes the most superficial appearance.
21 Corpus Hippocraticum, passim.
Enamored of his own appearance, mass-man will be able to enjoy only what appears real, he will take pleasure only in imitation, 22 that is to say the parody of what is not. You see this in the lust found in painting (where the highest praise is reserved for illustrators whose painted grapes birds would swarm to peck at) and in sculpture, supremely skilled now in reproducing naked bodies that seem real, or lizards scuttling tree trunks who lack only the power of speech, as the vulgar exclaim ecstatically. And in red figure vases they have begun to introduce forms seen frontally, as if the traditional profile did not suffice to suggest, through poetic allusion, the full object of the imaginative gaze.
But artistic production now bears the heavy yoke of industrial necessity, and crafty mass-man has slyly transformed that necessity into choice. Art bows to the laws of science: among the columns of temples you now see golden proportions established, which the architect hails with the enthusiasm of a surveyor; and Polycletus supplies you with a «canon» for the production of perfect, industrialized statuary, for his Doryphoros, as has been noted bitterly, is no longer a work but a poetics, a treatise in stone, a concrete example of a mechanical rule. 23 Art and industry now move in step; the cyde is achieved; the spirit cedes its place to the assembly line; cybernetic sculpture is perhaps already at the gate. The last stage of initiation
22 Poetics, IV, 55.
23 Cf. Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis V. Cf. also Pliny, Nat. Hist. XXXIV.
is the herd solution. Ephebes are lined up in regimenting exercises. Healthy revolt against the father is replaced by surrender to the group, against which the youth is incapable of defending himself. Egalitarianism undermines every difference between old and young, and the episode of Socrates and Alcibiades confirms this. With such leveling, the expression of personal feelings atrophies. Thus today’s model of Attic man will remain unchanged until death and beyond. The manufacturing of emotion, having pervaded everyday Iife , will be imposed also on the last breath. Not you but professional mourning women will mime a sorrow of which you are now incapable; as for the deceased, the great step will not suffice to make him give up the little sordid pleasures to which he clung in life. In his mouth you will place a coin (the pretext is an obol for Charon) and a cake for Cerberus. For the rich you will add toiletries, weapons, necklaces.
And this same undiscriminating mass will form the audience that flocks to enjoy the cheap pornography of Aristophanes. The mysterious connection between Love and Hate, which the pre-Socratic philosophers barely led us to suspect, already bores them. As for knowledge, all has now been reduced to a temporary learning; it is enough to memorize the theorem of Pythagoras (every Boeotian knows this dreary little trick with triangles), while Euclid has agreed to melt down all mathematical wisdom into a conventional and undemonstrable postulate. Before long, the schools doing their part, everyone will know how to read and do sums and will demand nothing further, except perhaps that the right to vote be extended to women and resident aliens. Is it worth resisting? Who can summon the strength to oppose the mounting tide of vulgarity?
Soon everyone will want to know everything. Euripides has already tried to make the Eleusinian mysteries common knowledge. For that matter, why retain any area of mystery now, when the democratic constitution gives everyone the leisure to idle away his time at the abacus and the alpha and beta? Reporters tell us that a certain Mesopotamian artisan has invented a thing called a water wheel, which turns on its own power and moves a grindstone thanks simply to the flow of a river. Thus the slave formerly in charge of the mill will have time to devote to the stylus and the waxed tablet.
But as a gardener from some distant Eastern country said when confronted with a similar device: «I once heard my master say: He who uses the machine becomes the machine. He who is a machine in his work has the heart of a machine . . . I do not know your invention, but I would be ashamed to use it.» Citing this pithy apologue, Zollaphontes asks: «How can a worker ever aspire to holiness?» But mass-man does not aspire to holiness; his symbol is the great beast depicted for us by Xenophon, the slave of his own thirst, who writhes on the ground like a crazed monkey, shouting: «Thalatta, thalatta.» Will we perhaps forget that nature «makes the bodies of free men different from those of slaves» and that «men are slaves or free by right of nature,» as Aristotle, in one of his more lucid moments, asserted?
Will we yet manage to elude, even a handful of us, the occupations that mass culture assigns to a race of slaves, attempting to involve also the free man? Then the free man’s only recourse is to retire, if
