It came to me recently how completely and diametrically opposed Aristotle and McLuhan really are. By which I mean the ancient academic sensibility that still pervades academia and the (post)modern, new media one that wants to break free from the old forms associated with literacy.

In the Poetics Aristotle specifies two distinguishing features of tragic poetry: (1) the paramount importance of the plot, or sequencing of events in the play, and (2) the downgrading of the “spectacle” of the play — the scenery, special effects, etc. Here’s how he puts it (emphases mine):

The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.

So, the plot is the soul of tragedy while spectacle is the least artistic part of it. Spectacle is so low in Aristotle’s reckoning that he even suggests that drama doesn’t need actors and stages! Apparently, the script by itself will do fine to achieve the sublime effects of the art. (Here it is clear that what Aristotle means by poetry is writing, and that he strongly values the stand-alone written work of art with this hierarchy. Although the form of the novel emerges much later, it is hard not to notice a genealogical connection here.)

Notice how opposite this is of the new media. On the one hand, as McLuhan states over and over, the medium is the message — i.e. that spectacle is the most important dimension of art and communication. And, regarding plot, consider Lev Manovich’s idea that the database is the symbolic form of our time: the sortable, selectable, random-access, paradigmatic, and non-linear form of the database, broadly defined, is the precise opposite of writing, although both involve text. For writing is, above all, the construction of a specific and unique sequence of sentences into a work that has, the more artistic it is, what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Writing, in the sense of literary or philosophical or historical representation, is distinguished by the presense of an argument, a narrative, an unfolding of events and ideas in time, where the progression itself is as important as the content. Not so with databases, where content is decomposed into elemental units (records and fields) and then subject to endless growth and manipulation.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, classics, theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.