BMCR 2009.04.54: Henderson on Giavatto, Interlocutore di se stesso: la dialettica di Marco Aurelio. Europaea memoria. Reihe 1, Studien. 58

Angelo Giavatto, Interlocutore di se stesso: la dialettica di Marco
Aurelio. Europaea memoria. Reihe 1, Studien. 58.  Hildesheim/New York:
Olms, 2008.  Pp. vi, 269.  ISBN 9783487136417.  [euro  ]34.80 (pb).

Reviewed by John Henderson, King's College, Cambridge
([email protected])
Word count:  1890 words
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This polished Bologna thesis book executes a well-planned investigation
into the discursive dynamics of the Meditations (aka Pensieri,
Selbstbetrachtungen, Ethika, ...).[[1]] A neat introduction takes 3.11
to bits, term by term, to prompt enquiry into cognition as engine of
ethics in the practice of this performance of writing. G takes the
twelve volumes of memos to be essentially 'unpublished', and embraces
the perturbation to author function that their serial inscription as
instrument of moral self-patrol must dictate: the sole candidate for
unitary composition can only be the whole graphematic praxis.
Sub-divisions of text are interpretative impositions, not excluding the
booking and capitulation filled out and introduced by Gataker's edition
(p.18 n.107); hence, as M[arcus] might put it, either thematic analysis
across the web of loci similes extending between the thinking displayed
across all these crammed pages and their cues in the Stoic universe, or
else -- no damn themes at all. (This sort of thing, G will show, or at
any rate argue, is bound to make any one feel better.)

Setting out a modus operandi which will treat patches of
self-admonition as interactively clustering 'families' of thought
within the ever-expanding corpus, rather than in terms of self-standing
itemic loci similes, G will present an autodiegetic idiolect of
intrasystemic glosses, where appropriate supplying 'proto-' or
'arche-types' from doctrine formulated in Stoic teachings such as
Epictetus (the main hypotext: p.26 n.132). Start from 9.9, immerse
yourself in M, and you'll hypertext to 9.23 with links to 2.16, 4.29,
8.34, 11.8; in the process, you'll be engrossed by an ever more
cohesive meshing of doctrine to description to formal argument as the
differentially weighted and angled formulations weld together as
instances of morphing between reality and realization and
re-registration, while each move reinculcates the necessity of
subscription to the law that variations (plural) must vary on
uni-versality (unicum). G is intent on exploring relations demonstrated
or posited between epistemology and deontics (Part I, 'Theory') and
their formulation in shifts of writing instrumental to moral progress
(Part II: 'Structure'). That is, he means to orient his account to
Marcus' solo adventure as if from within.[[2]]

Chapter 1 explores the epistemological hook-up between perception and
thought, concentrating on phantasia as a double-sided process of
reception-through-deliberate focussing in which assent can prescind
sensory fallibility and intellectual derailment. However a thought
comes to me, I can, if I'm minded, tell it to scram (p.45 on 7.17). Get
the thinking straight and you have the baseline for philosophically
enabled ethical realism; for M, perceptions are text messages from
reality, propositions that evince demonstrative intent on the part of
the cosmos, constantly broadcasting thoughts that reinforce the dogmata
by keeping the thoughts going that lead to them (p.53). To keep right
thoughts active, work to stay in the present (p.54). Patrolling your
thoughts, you control what the world does to you. Chapter 2 squares a
gazetteer of Stoic fragments on dialectic (FDS87-98 Huelser) with
relatives from M's family. Understanding turns on self-referential
exercise in and on the exercise of reason, which praxis takes the form
of constant re-working of the terms for handling the thought-arguments,
especially the terms for discussing this process (esp. pp.77-83).
Chapter 3 passes on to espouse 'truth', across moral (persons), logical
(propositions), ontological (what is/is real). Here G points out (p.94)
that this word-universe opens to discourse between speaking selves, and
so to 'rhetorico-expressive' formulations used in talking to and with
others (cf. pp.20-5: but this writing approaches minuscule degree
sociality). For now, however, emphasis is on secure conformity between
faithful perception given correct expression and world-structure
embodying the idea of the good: the [unconscionable] shunt from
epistemology direct to nature, finessing deontology and reserving it
for post-solution reinsertion.

'Part I' has expertly necklaced a wealth of nuggets from M; 'Part II'
will explore no less crafted a mosaic of loci to map the main
expressive/communicative forms favoured by M's writing -- beyond
included gobbets of straight gnome, dogma and cited precept.

Chapter 4. Descriptive passages and demonstrative syllogisms (often
elliptical, embryonic or partial) sporting their present tenses, where
'must's and gerunds and intensifying modifiers are brandished to
'realise' cognitive acts: think right now, don't let it fade, keep it
real by [anythinging] 'constantly' (i.e. 'don't stop!) and (not
remembering but) re-minding yourself that [whatever, it is]. From this
core, G forages further for commands, esp. prohibitive ('don't be
irrational'), and self-editing (diorthosis, or autocorrection), esp. in
double-privative style ('don't make the mistake involved in being
un-X'). As G incisively notes, M makes his 'Go right' come out less of
a 'Don't go wrong' and more of a 'Put it right, stop going wrong'
(p.124). The full texture of lambasting through denial comes with
characteristic 'supernegative' formulations where M thinks up a
Shibboleth term to negate in the form of the negation of correct ethos:
the a-kibdelon ('non-adulterated') conjures up particularly arresting
positive moral protreptic (p.125). And crucially, in these
dichotomizing gymnastics on polarized vice-virtue apparatus, the
privative has it over the negative because it specifies what it
excludes (p.131: I would add that you can barely think of doing
anything like this in Latin, so here's an unavowed language game with
bicultural reality based in flight from, i.e. repression of, Rome). As
Part I piloted, G's M means his array of para-literary, or sophistic,
modalities to collapse into given equivalence, as whatever is verified
is also necessary and necessarily opportune: since all description must
convert to prescription for the moral subject, any lapse, weakening, or
reneging serves ipso facto -- and you wouldn't want to go doing this,
now would you? -- TO WRECK THE UNIVERSE (pp.132-40, the nub of the
book).

Chapter 5 similarly moves beyond diatribe's legacy of demonstrative,
non-ornamental, metaphorics, to chart improvisational impacting of
imagery on doctrinal comprehension, in line with Fronto's pedagogy
recovered from a string of letters to M (pp.151-60) and with Stoic
theorizing of the utility of similitude (pp.160-1). The function of the
metaphoric axis is to connect the thinking mind with the world; the
discontinuity apparently ensconced in imagery evanesces as the
favourite scenario of the universe in all its globality,
structuredness, and regulated systematicity maps onto M as individual
experiencing the oneness of self and cosmos: all comparison, in fact,
follows, as it must, the defining and definitive coherence of the
cosmos, sure as exx. (G provides a fittingly peremptory tabulation of
the drift across his spreadsheet from 'naturalistic' ignorance and
moral error through similitude to cognitive re-presentation and --
result! -- 'naturalistic' understanding and 'ethical' understanding
relayed and realized as correct action, p.175). If the procedure would
ultimately reduce all persuasive use of image or analogy to a divinely
beauteous singular coding of the totality, nevertheless we are stuck in
the middest, where separate 'steps' on the ladder of nature and sundry
manifold versions of analogizing prevail, to the point where unexpected
relations can shock us, para prosdokian, toward realization of the
implosive 'transversality' that runs the world together along the seams
of all 'whole-part' ratios. Our reason makes us more like, more part
of, the cosmos than animals (p.182). Braced, we can face and face down
any similitudes -- and the 'pessimistic' tradition supplying
schetliastic catachresis for all aspects of humanity can be recuperated
as prompt for defiance in in-difference, commandeered to save us from
deviant and deflecting words come unstuck from the truth of reality:
'How long do you want to live, then?'.

After this heave, Chapter 6 tracks down further, superficially calmer,
'argumentative strategies'. Chief among them is the disjunctive
formulation -- especially attaching to the live topic of mortality, and
in its most succinct doctrinal formulation, the 'Either Atoms or
Providence' routine. Here alternatives lead to the same clincher,
seeing off weakness, fear, those voices in the cranium, rather than
giving the benighted forces of Epicurean unreason house room. Straight
thinking is bolstered by exhausting -- by sealing up -- the so-called
possibilities, as the self sees that death can't matter to itself as
itself, 'either way'. Similarly, and more soundly, trichotomizing
dishes up a fortiori reinforcement for right reason, and when M
operates with per absurdum or parades wrong-headed fictional
disputants, he would sooner be pumping up the volume by jeering at
aberration than entertaining a moment's or hairsbreadth quantum of
pregnability for Armour-plated Reason. G vindicates the animated
palette M paints from -- before toppling into hero worship in the last
sentence: 'The sketch in this section demonstrates the honesty of
Marcus Aurelius in confronting his own interlocutor, namely his self in
his own progress in philosophy: not only an entity subject to error to
communicate do's and don't's to and draw up the commandments of dogma
for, but a mind for persuading and setting on the road towards right
action over the terrain of reason' (p.234). Like, yea-uh!

G adds to 'General Conclusions' a full bibliography, and a set of
useful indices, especially of Rerum (listing categories from aphorism
to language, dialogue to death, plus a dozen or more Greek termini);
but why five pages of Nominum bothering to list moderns cited from
Alesse to Zuntz? In the course of the argument, G confronts and
suggests ways to treat several cruces: chapter division for 8.30
(pp.99-101); the text of 4.27 (sumpephoremenos [men]: alla, with
Theiler against Dalfen etc: pp.221-2) and of 7.75 (e alogista, with the
paradosis, against e oligista, Zuntz: pp.223-4).

This reader assents to this valuable moneidograph's dovetailing of
doctrinal and rhetorical armature, and yet can't help feeling that G's
held himself on too taut a rein to see the license that M's project
grants his thinking good thoughts self -- to play bad writer. All the
cancelled wrongnesses, absurdities, bogies, and harum scarums in the
book lend their liveliness to the wholly unmissable proliferating
pluralities of this veritable kukeon of stop-start non sequiturs in
collage drag; or if this is a simulacrum of Providence, she has us
beat, since no one has a clue where M's aleatory next entry is going to
head, or land, us; not even in hindsight. Anything goes, if it throws
this nothing-to-lose emperor off his stroke, both momentarily and,
irrepressibly, through the eternal return of the repressed, for good.
Everything that makes this unruly All Greek To Me a one-off stream of
conscienceness. The naughtiness of writing a nasty word down then
jabbing through another and to heck with syntax I am the Walrus; the
fun of making up new 'words', especially the sous rature noncer that
names some unlikely unquality just to exorcise it from Planet Ban It.
Sticking in sticker slogans, sermons in sound-bites, now for something
completely similar topic hopping. Rupture of polite norming, rapture of
p'licing your self. Was it the sage or the rascal who told us something
about the insistence of the letter? What it is, what it would be, to
know the answers await on cue, the game seriousness itself, all there
is, but played well (one I has to keep telling the other I) because
played at all, some more. Making a mess with the pieces instead of
doing the jigsaw, again, but knowing all along that all goes to show
that nothing can go wrong (as wrong as this here now I and I), period,
whatever. Because. Everything follows, writing or written. Because it
does, and is ... feelbad feelgood e/criture. Ocean-oasis of
solecipsedixitism. Only One Can Play.


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Notes:


1.   P. Hadot The Inner Citadel, 1992; English translation, 1998) still
dominates the scholarship; Jim Hankinson, Stoic epistemology, in B.
Inwood (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, 2002, 59-84 is
important for Part I here; R. B. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, 1989, deals at length with the style/thought tandem of G's
Part II, besides effectively foregrounding the challenge of Book 1 as
gatekeeper to the rest. G draws attention to D. Karadimas,  Marcus
Aurelius' Meditations and its rhetoric, in J. Akujaervi etc. For
Particular Reasons. Studies in Honour of Jerker Blomqvist, 2003,
165-89. Close reading of passages and globs depends fair and square on
the vastness of A. S. L. Farquharson, The Meditations of the Emperor
Marcus Antoninus, 1944.

2.   The Sitz im Leben for these globs of Ethika will be, not the
emperor's historicality, but his self-enrolment as one more
practitioner among the keepers of the faith, doing his spiritual
keep-fit exercises in moral vigilance in the stripped-down writing
booth of the inner citadel: we're to buy the proposition that
understanding Marcus (sc. in these terms) is good -- and dutiful. As in
any feat of analysis that supplies structure to handle a phenomenon of
structuration, the enterprise circumscribed by fidelity writes what
doesn't suit out of the picture and so putatively out of the equation.
Thus 3.11 provided the starting-point as a 'representative' passage
(pp.3-15); and yet M's 'closing' entry, 12.36.3-4, appears -- fittingly
-- at head of G's last, post-liminary section (on p.229, of 234 of main
text). M's own 'Book I' notoriously attracts a dedicated scholarship
of/on its own because it provides M's own 'introduction', or
self-reflexively self-contained pre-liminary, and as such will receive
special treatment from M, for its peculiar formula 'para X toY'
(pp.41-2: viz. 'from some luminary in the prince's past he came into
contact lasting through the present with the problematic summed up in
the category term and objective correlate here/hereby/herewith
specified'), for its explicit recommendation of dialectical rigour
(pp.76-7 on 1.7), and -- paratextually as 'Appendix' to its chapter --
as paradigmatic model for the graphic intensification of moral
application through concrete envisioning (pp140-7: to use G's term,
'supplemento macrostrutturale', p.142). Linearity will not be taken out
of the reckoning by whoever's will-power: on it is founded, for a
start, any invocation of 'progress'. Again, either it matters whether
'families of chapters' have or had, for real or for the sake of
argument, 'prototypes', or archetypes, or else priorities aren't an
issue, for the reader faced with the dilemma whether to become, or to
behold, the writing 'I' in the written 'I'. In autodiegesis, G knows
perfectly well, there is the ineliminable jeu by which the text extends
rather than expands, so that, besides morphing within ever more
explicit matrices and ever more complex textual economies, its returns
stake (out) a trajectory: in the fiction of the writing we shadow in
reading, what occurs 'next' risks the lot -- the whole lot, if any such
thing has survived the previous 'Pensiero'. One more case of getting it
right must be another reminder that 'I' have it wrong -- again --
because for a start 'I' must need to tell myself -- again -- what's
what; and so remind myself why 'I' am making myself write it down.
Until I drop and (as if that matters) 'I' stops. G has hands too full
with explication for contestation: and yet an essential set, or step,
or stride, within Stoic [souci de soi] is startling, scaring, scarring.
And satirical self-awakening with a jab of the cross-nibb'd pen can
improve by being rude, too: the expressive strategies that catch G's
eye will include several varieties of importunate impromptus from M
once he has pegged out the dogma.