Great class last night. I never explained what that’s all about. Here’s the skinny version.
My advisor used to teach a highly influential course on the history of communication. It involves studying the great transformations that took place upon and cascading from the introduction of new communication technologies throughout history. The course begins, usually, in ancient Greece. We read the Iliad, and for many people it’s not their first time through. But in this course we read it not to learn about the characters or the myths or to study the literature itself. We read it in order to find some potentially helpful reference points that can help us understand some of the particularities of the culture and society from which the story comes. The Iliad is an example of what’s called an “Oral Epic”, or also “oral epic poetry”. The reason it’s a good starting point is because it comes from pre-literate society. It’s hard for us to imagine what communication between and amongst people was like prior to the invention of the alphabet. We can only surmise what some of the attributes of communication was like when every thought, idea and story was communicated orally.
In a pre-literate society, how do the individuals of that place know who they are? How do they make progress if every generation leaves nothing but example behaviors, and no descriptions of the value of those behaviors (and techniques and values and so on)? The role of the epic poem has been described as serving in part as a kind of cultural encyclopedia. When the story teller would come to your village, and everyone would gather around for three days to hear the epic tale of men and gods that explain why things are the way they are, it was in that moment that people got a sense of who they were. We are Athenian. We are Thebesian, we are “Greek”, etc. We value these things, and we don’t value those things. We respect these attributes of people, and not those. These are the things “we” believe in, etc.
So it’s interesting to read this transcribed version of the Iliad with orality in mind. There are reasons why certain things are included, and it has to do with that cultural preservation and storehouse of accumulated and collective knowledge necessary for advancement as a people. The epic oral poem was a device. It just happened to be one of the only modes available.
So we read it to identity those aspects of the poem that might serve a purpose, and what they imply for society at that time.
We then read the Greek Tragedies, or a couple of them anyway, usually The Oresteia. The reason to do this next is because these were amongst the first wholly written stories… ever. The plays in The Oresteia were born on paper by Aeschylus. If we read them carefully, we can again identify attributes of the story that might have some explanatory power about what the shift from oral to literate culture created out of society. In The Orestiea we start to see characters trying to figure out best solutions to difficult problems, and often by talking with each other (and with the gods). Contrasted to the Iliad where many of those decisions, such as what was right and what was wrong, or just and unjust, came directly either by the gods or by stories about things gods had said, in The Oresteia we begin to see people questioning “justice” and deliberating rather than merely mimicking.
Something happened when the written word was created. It’s impossible for us to really know in what ways this transformation impacted individuals of the time, but if we try to imagine what it was like, for the the first time, to have your inner dialogue– your thoughts– able to be taken out of your head and put on an object outside of you. Once your inner thoughts and understandings are outside of you, yet preserved, interesting possibilities arise. You can consider the thought you had in a more objective way– your thought is literally now a kind of object that can be studied. Your words can be rearranged and altered. You can pass your words along to others for consideration, and review. The impact had profound effects on society at that time and forevermore.
Next in the course we continue reading these plays, moving forward in time, and we look for evidences of other changes occurring in the styling and writing. New techniques for communicating various things are born. The use of a “chorus” in each play as a way of narrating what the characters might be feeling and thinking becomes a tool, and with each passing generation that tool gets used in slightly different ways. For example, originally the chorus was almost a god-like voice operating outside of the story, helping the audience really connect empathically with the story itself. But later plays have the chorus, sometimes representing society itself, actually interacting with the characters of the play, able to influence outcomes. This was the case when Creon decides against his original plan of burying Antigone to death because of her insistence on properly burying her warrior brother. It was the chorus, in part, who persuaded Creon that the family honor she was attempting to preserve was in itself an honorable thing, and punishing her for it was, in fact, the wrong thing. It was a representation of society challenging the ruler, influencing scenarios.
That’s about where we are now. The next texts are different completely. They’re no longer plays and stories at all, but rather narrations and descriptions being written for that purpose– to narrate and describe (rather than to entertain as surely was the case for the tragedies). So we read Herodotus for next week, a writer credited with being the first historian. From there up to Plato and the introduction of “logic” in argument– again, all possible only because of the written word, and the progress that was made in using the written word in new and different ways after its inception.
So far, these transformations all have to do with the great transformation from oral to literate society. The next great transformation we look at is massive scale reproduction of texts, as occurred after the printing press was invented, which again permanently and severely altered just about everything in the human world forever, resulting in such unimaginable things as the invention of the “nation”, a construct we still have and use today, and something that simply couldn’t have happened without a common text, such as common news, to build a sense of shared identity amongst large groups of people– and that was only possible with the invention of printing.
The course then goes through the various more modern advancements– the telegraph and instantaneous transmission worldwide, then radio and TV, and finishes with our extended present, the age of the internet. We try to use our understandings and theories of prior great transformations to help us guide and stay wary of unintended negative consequences of our new instantaneities in information production and consumption.
So it’s fun. I might teach this course in a year or two (I have taken it twice and TA’d it once).
Last night after class we had some drinks with the professor, my advisor’s advisor, and then I headed home. One of the other TA’s, a brilliant young writer and drummer in our jam band, crashed. We talked for a bit before turning in and it was great.
Today I’ve had my hands full, but it’s been a good day. I will train in about 5 minutes and then head home to clean up my place. One of my close friends and his mom are flying in from Africa tomorrow and the two will stay over Friday night. Saturday morning his mom flies back to Kentucky, and my friend will stay until Tuesday. When he leaves, my professional metal guitarist friend will come and stay for a couple weeks so we can write some kick ass shit and put the demo together for our new project, tentatively named “Sunken”.
I’ll have to tread carefully while writing music while he’s around because I do have my hands too full already. But there’s just no way I can pass this opportunity up to collaborate like this and hopefully play some live, ultra heavy, epic shows later next Spring.
That’s all for now. Best to my monkeyholes.
Duck
