PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA

Author(s): Alexander Nehamas

Source: The Monist, Vol. 71, No. 2, Aesthetics and the Histories of the Arts (APRIL 1988),
pp. 214-234
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA

Book X of the Republic contains a scathing attack on poetry which is

still, by turns, both incomprehensible and disturbing.1 Plato's banishment
of the poets from his model city has always been a cause of interpretative dif
ficulties and philosophical embarrassments, even for some of his greatest
admirers. But I am now beginning to believe that the difficulties are not real
and that the embarrassments are only apparent, and my purpose in what
follows is to offer an outline?I cannot do more than that on this occa
sion?of my reasons for thinking so. I am convinced that close attention to
the philosophical assumptions which underlie Plato's criticisms reveals that
his attack on poetry is better understood as a specific social and historical
gesture than as an attack on poetry, and especially on art, as such. But
placed within their original context, Plato's criticisms, perhaps paradoxical
ly, become immediately relevant to a serious contemporary debate.

The interpretative difficulties of Book X are relatively easy to dispose of.

The first is that this book seems to return to a subject which Plato, as we
know, had already discussed extensively in Books II and III. But the fact is
that the subject of Book X is different. The earlier books concern the func
tion of poetry in the education of the young Guardians, in which it plays an
absolutely central, if rigidly censored and controlled role. Book X, however,
concerns the almost total exclusion of poetry, with the exception of a few
"hymns to the gods and praises of noble people" (607a4), from the life of
the adult citizens?an exclusion which must have been absolutely shocking
to Plato's Athenian audience, accustomed as it was to a large variety of
dramatic festivals and poetic contests throughout each year.2 Moreover,
Book X addresses this new subject by new means, on the basis, namely, of
the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology developed in books IV-IX
and unavailable to Plato (595a5-bl) on the earlier occasion.
The second difficulty, which has bothered many commentators, con
cerns a conflict between Plato's first discussion of poetry and his return to it
in Book X. The latter notoriously begins with the statement that all mimetic
poetry has already been excluded from the city, while Book III has actually

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 215

encouraged the young to engage in the imitation of good characters

(397d4-7). I once tried to eliminate this conflict, without ultimate success,
on the basis of the distinction drawn in the previous paragraph.3 But the
conflict can in fact be eliminated on the basis of another distinction. This is
the contrast between being an imitator (mimet?s) on the one hand and being
imitative (often expressed by the term mim?tikos) on the other.
Plato clearly allows the young Guardians to be imitators of good
characters. But actually he allows them to imitate bad characters, if it is
necessary and if they do so not seriously (spond?i) and only in play (paidias
chariri)?that is, in order to satirize and ridicule them (396c5-e8). Plato for
bids not imitation, which he considers essential to education, but im
itativeness, the desire and ability to imitate anything independently of its
moral quality and without the proper attitude of praise or blame toward it
(395a2-5, 397al-b2, 398al-b4). When Socrates says in Book X that "all
mimetic poetry" (poi?se?s hos? mim?tik?) has been excluded from the city,
he does not refer to all imitation but only, as his own word shows, to poetry
which involves and encourages imitativeness: the conflict disappears.4
The elimination of these interpretative difficulties may help to show that
Book X is an integral part of the Republic.5 But this only adds to the
philosophical embarrassments it creates. Why, after all, does a work of
moral and political philosophy end with a discussion of aesthetics? The ob
vious answer is that Plato simply does not distinguish aesthetics from ethics.
His argument against poetry depends on ontological principles regarding
the status of its objects and on epistemological views about the poets'
understanding of their subject-matter, but his concern with poetry is ethical
through and through. It is expressed in just such terms both at the very
beginning of the argument, when Socrates claims that tragedy and all im
itative poetry constitute "a harm to the mind of its audience" (595b5-6)
and at its very end, when he condludes that if we allow poetry in the city
"pleasure and pain will rule as monarchs . . . instead of the law and that ra
tional principle which is always and by all thought to be the best"
(607a5-8).6
It is just this obvious answer, however, that causes the greatest
philosophical embarrasment by far because it suggests that Plato is utterly
blind to the real value of art, that he is unable to see that there is much more
than an ethical dimension to art, and that even in its ethical dimension art is
by no means as harmful as he is convinced it is.
It is against this embarrassment that I want to defend Plato, though I
do not want to have to decide whether he was right or wrong in his denun
ciation of Homer and Aeschylus. I believe, and hope to convince you as
well, that the issue is much too complicated for this sort of easy judgment.

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 216 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

But I do think that Plato's view deserves to be reexamined and that it is

directly relevant to many contemporary concerns. Plato's attitude toward
epic and tragic poetry is in fact embodied in our current thinking about the
arts, though not specifically in our thinking about epic and tragedy. Though
his views often appear incomprehensible, or reprehensible, or both, we
often duplicate them, though without being aware of them as his. If this is
right, then either Book X of the Republic is more reasonble and more nearly
correct than we are ever tempted to suppose or we must ourselves reevaluate
our own assumptions and attitudes regarding the arts.
First, a preliminary point. Plato is not in any way concerned with art as
such. This is not only because, if Paul Kristeller is correct, the very concept
of the fine arts did not emerge in Europe until the eighteenth century.7 The
main reason is quite specific: Plato does not even include painting in his
denunciation. His argument does in fact depend on a series of analogies be
tween painting and poetry, and he introduces all the major ideas through
which he will eventually banish the poets by means of these analogies. This
has led a number of scholars to conclude, and to feel they should explain
why, Plato banished the artists from his model city. But a careful reading
shows that neither painting nor sculpture is outlawed by Plato.8 This sug
gests, as we shall see in more detail below, that no general account of
Plato's attitude toward the arts is required. It also implies that we must
determine which specific feature of imitative poetry makes it so dangerous
that, in contrast to the other arts, it cannot be tolerated in Plato's city.
This feature, on which Plato's argument against poetry crucially
depends is that poetry (in telling contrast to painting and, particularly, to
sculpture) is as a medium inherently suited to the representation, or imita
tion, of vulgar subjects and shameful behavior:9
The irritable part of the soul gives many opportunities for all sorts of imitations,
while the wise and quiet character which always remains the same is neither easy
to imitate nor easy to understand when imitated, especially for a festival crowd,
people of all sorts gathered in the theaters. (604el-5)

Plato makes his "greatest" objection to poetry on the basis of this idea. Not
only average people but good people as well, even "the best among us," are
vulnerable to its harmful influence (605c6-10). Socrates speaks for these
select individuals when he says that, confronted with the excessive and
unseemly lamentation that is the staple of tragic and epic poetry, "we enjoy
it, surrender ourselves, share [the heroes'] feelings, and earnestly praise as a
good poet whoever affects us most in this way" (605d3-5; cf. Phil. 48a,
Ion 535a, Lg. 800d). And yet, at least in the case of the best among us if not
also among the rest of the people as well, this sort of behavior is exactly

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 217

what we try to avoid when we meet with misfortunes of our own: in life,
Plato claims, we praise the control and not the indulgence of our feelings of
sorrow. How is it then that we admire in poetry just the kind of person we
would be ashamed to resemble in life (605d7-e6)?
Socrates tries to account for this absurdity by means of the psy
chological terms provided by the tripartition of the soul in Book IV of the
Republic. The lowest, appetitive, part of the soul, which is only concerned
with immediate gratification and not with the good of the whole agent,
delights in shameful behavior as it delights in anything that is not measured.
Now poetry depicts the sufferings of others, not our own. The rational part
of the soul, accordingly, is in this case indulgent toward the appetite, and
allows it free expression. The whole agent, therefore, in the belief that such
indulgence is harmless, enjoys the pleasure with which poetry provides the
appetite (606a3-b5).
What we fail to realize is that enjoying the expression of sorrow in the
case of others is directly transferred to the sorrows of our own. Cultivating
our feelings of pity in spectacles disposes us to express them in similar ways
in our own case and to enjoy (or at least to find no shame in) doing so: thus
it ultimately leads us to make a spectacle of ourselves (606a3-b8). Plato now
generalizes his conclusion from sorrow in particular to all the passions:
So too with sex, anger, and all the desires, pleasures, and pains which we say
follow us in every activity. Poetic imitation fosters these in us. It nurtures and
waters them when they ought to wither; it places them in command in our soul
when they ought to obey in order that we might become better and happier . . .
instead of worse and more miserable. (606dl-7)

In short, Plato accuses poetry of perverting its audience. Poetry is

essentially suited to the representation of inferior characters and vulgar sub
jects: these are easy to imitate and what the crowd, which is already
perverted to begin with, wants to see and enjoys. But the trouble is that all
of us have an analogue to the crowd within our own soul (cf. 580d2-581al).
This is the appetitive part (the counterpart to the third and largest class, the
money-lovers, in Plato's analogy between city and soul), to the desires and
pleasures of which we are all more or less sensitive. And since?this is a
most crucial assumption to which we shall have to return?our reactions to
poetry are transferred directly to, and in fact often determine, our reactions to
life, poetry is likely to make us behave in ways of which we should be, and
often are, ashamed. Poetry "introduces a bad government in the soul of
each individual citizen" (605b7-8). But this is to destroy the soul and to
destroy the city. It is precisely the opposite of everything the Republic is
designed to accomplish. This is why poetry is intolerable.

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218 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

We must now turn to Plato's deeply controversial assumption that our

reactions to life follow on the lines of our reactions to poetry: the whole
issue of the sense of Plato's charges against poetry and of their contem
porary importance depends just on this idea. On its face, of course, this
assumption can be easily dismissed. Enjoying (if that is the proper word)
Euripides' Medea is not likely to dispose us to admire mothers who murder
their children for revenge nor to want to do so ourselves nor even to tend to
adopt as our own Medea's ways of lamenting her fate.10 But this quick reac
tion misses precisely what is deep and important in Plato's attitude.
To begin to see what that is, we should note that Plato's assumption
does not seem so unreasonable in connection with children. Almost everyone
today would find something plausible in Plato's prohibition that children
imitate bad models "lest from enjoying the imitation they come to enjoy the
reality" and something accurate in his suspicion that "imitations, if they
last from youth for some time, become part of one's nature and settle into
habits of gesture, voice, and thought" (395c7-d3). On this issue, Aristotle,
who disagrees on so many issues regarding poetry with Plato, is in complete
agreement: "We should also banish pictures and speeches from the stage
which are indecent... the legislator should not allow youth to be spectators
of iambi or of comedy" (Pol. VII, 1336b14-21).n But, also like Plato,
Aristotle does not confine his view to children only: "As we know from our
own experience ... the habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representa
tions (ta homoid) is not far removed from the same feelings about realities"
(Pol. VIII, 1340*21-25).
To a great extent, in fact, Aristotle's vindication of tragedy against
Plato involves the argument that poetry is actually morally beneficial. And
the reason for this is that katharsis both excites and purifies emotions
which, in Stephen HalliwelPs words, "although potent, are properly and
justifiably evoked by a portrayal of events which, if encountered in reality,
would call for the same emotional response."12 The assumption that there is
some direct connection between our reactions to poetry and our reactions to
life is common to both philosophers. The main difference is that Aristotle
argues, against Plato, that this parallel tends to benefit rather than to harm
the conduct of our life.
The Platonic argument seems plausible in the case of children because
many of us think (though this view is itself debatable) that, unclear about
the difference between them, children often treat representations simply as
parts of and not also as symbols for reality. They don't always seem able, for
example, to distinguish a fictional danger from a real one. But Plato, as we
have seen, believed that the case is similar with adults. Their reactions to
poetry, too, determine their reactions to life because, to put the point blunt

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 219

ly, they are exactly the same kind of reactions. And the reason for this is
that, as he believed, the representations of poetry are, at least superficially,
exactly the same kind of objects as the real things they represent. The ex
pression of sorrow in the theater is superficially identical with?exactly the
same in appearance as?the expression of sorrow in life. Though actors do
not, or need not, feel the sorrow they express on the stage, this underlying
difference is necessarily imperceptible and allows the surface behavior of
actors and real grievers to be exactly the same.
"Paradoxically," Jonas Barish has written, "Plato makes much of the
ontological difference between an actual thing and its mimetic copy (or the
dream of it) yet allows little psychological difference."13 On the account I
have just given, however, Plato's view is not at all paradoxical. It is precise
ly because the difference between imitations and their objects is ontological,
a difference which cannot be perceived, that our reactions to both, which
are based on our perception, are so similar. Plato's view is that the pleasure
we feel at the representation of an expression of sorrow in poetry is pleasure
at that expression itself, and for that reason likely to dispose us to enjoy
such behavior in life. He does not consider the possibility that the pleasure
may be directed not at the expression of sorrow but at its representation,
and that this representation is an independent object, having features in its
own right and subject to specific principles which determine its quality.14
What I mean by this is that for Plato representation is transparent. It
derives all its relevant features, the features that make it the particular
representation it is, solely from the object it represents, and which we can
see directly through its representation (we shall have to return to this
"directly"). The imitation of an expression of sorrow is simply sorrow ex
pressed, identical in appearance to the real expression of sorrow, though
not actually felt.
All imitations are treated in Book X of the Republic simply as apparent
objects, as appearances of their subjects, and not as objects with a status of
their own (597e7-601b8). God, carpenter, and painter all produce a bed
(596b5), though the painter's bed is only "apparent" (598b4). The painter
does not primarily produce a painting, a physical object with a symbolic
dimension; the portrait of a cobbler is simply "a cobbler who seems to be"
(600e7-601a7). The clear implication is that the poets produce apparent
crafts and apparent virtues in their imitations of what people say and do;
they duplicate the appearance of people engaged in the practice of a craft or
of virtuous activity (600e3-601bl). Even more frequently, of course, they
duplicate the appearance of vicious activity?this is the seductive, and ap
propriate, subject-matter of poetry. Imitators, for Plato, lack a craft of
their own (and are, in this respect at least, like sophists and rhetoricians).

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 220 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

They therefore do not know the nature of what they imitate, and simply
transcribe the appearance of various things and actions by means of colors
and words.15
This metaphysical view is reflected in Plato's ambivalent language.16
Painters, he writes, are both imitators and makers of appearances (598b3-4,
599a2-3); Homer is a producer of images, though poets in general are im
itators of images (599d3, 600e5). In the latter case, the image is the object
of imitation, something that exists before imitation begins. In the former, it is
the product of imitation, and comes into being only as imitation proceeds.
This ambivalence suggests that for Plato the object and the product of im
itation are identical in kind, that is, totally similar; it is almost as if the im
itator lifts the surface of the imitated object and transfers it into another
medium. What is different in each case is the depth?physical in the case of
painting and psychological in the case of poetry?which imitation necessari
ly leaves untouched. If it were in some way possible to add to the imitation
this missing dimension, we could produce a duplicate of its subject or, if no
antecedent subject exists, a new real thing. The real object is the limiting
case of the representation: this is exactly Plato's argument at Cratylus
432a-c; it is the metaphysical version of the myth of Pygmalion.

II

The metaphysics of Pygmalion is still in the center of our thinking

about the arts. To see that this is so, and why, we must change subjects
abruptly and recall Newton Minnow's famous address to the National
Association of Broadcasters in 1961. Though Minnow admitted that some
television was of high quality, he insisted that if his audience were to watch,
from beginning to end, a full day's programming,

I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession
of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies
about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence,
sadism, murder, western badmen, western goodmen, private eyes, gangsters,
more violence, and cartoons.17

This general view of the vulgarity of television has been given a less extreme
expression, and a rationale, by George Gerbner and Larry Gross:

Unlike the real world, where personalities are complex, motives unclear, and
outcomes ambiguous, television presents a world of clarity and simplicity. . . .
In order to complete a story entertainingly in only an hour or even half an hour
conflicts on TV are usually personal and solved by action. Since violence is
dramatic and relatively simple to produce, much of the action tends to be
violent.18

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 221

An extraordinary, almost hysterical version of such a view, but nevertheless

a version that is uncannily close to Plato's attitude that the lowest part of
the soul is the subject-matter of poetry, is given by Jerry Mander. Televi
sion, he writes, is inherently suited for

expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting, and violence . . . hysteria or

ebullience of the kind of one-dimensional joy fulness usually associated with
some objective victory?the facial expressions and bodily movements of an
tisocial behavior.19

Mander also duplicates, in connection with television, Plato's view that

poetry directly influences our life for the worse: "We slowly evolve into the
images we carry, we become what we see."20 This, of course, is the guiding
premise of the almost universal debate concerning the portrayal of sex,
violence, and other disapproved or antisocial behavior on television on the
grounds that it tends to encourage television's audience to engage in such
behavior in life.21 And a very sophisticated version of this Platonic point,
making use of the distinction between form and content, has been accepted
by Wayne Booth:
The effects of the medium in shaping the primary experience of the viewer, and
thus the quality of the self during the viewing, are radically resistant to any
elevation of quality in the program content: as viewer, I become how I view,
more than what I view.... Unless we change their characteristic forms, the new
media will surely corrupt whatever global village they create; you cannot build a
world community out of misshapen souls.22

We have seen that Plato's reason for thinking that our reactions to life
duplicate our reactions to poetry is that imitations are superficially identical
with the objects of which they are imitations. Exactly this explanation is
also given by Rudolph Arnheim, who wrote that television "is a mere in
strument of transmission, which does not offer any new means for the ar
tistic interpretation of reality."23 Television, that is, presents us the world
just as it is or, rather, it simply duplicates its appearance. Imitations are
substitutes for reality. In Mander's words,

people were believing that an image of nature was equal... to the experience of
nature . . . that images of historical events or news events were equal to the
events ... the confusion of . . . information with a wider, direct mode of ex
perience was advancing rapidly.24

Plato's argument against poetry is repeated in summary form, and

without an awareness of its provenance, in connection with television by
Neil Postman: "Television," he writes, "offers viewers a variety of subject
matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at
emotional gratification."25 The inevitable result, strictly parallel to "the

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 222 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

bad government in the soul" which Plato would go to all lengths to avert,
is, according to Postman, an equally dangerous "spiritual devastation."26
Parallels between Plato's view and contemporary attitudes such as that
expressed in the statement that "daily consumption of 'Three's Company'
is not likely to produce a citizenry concerned about, much less committed
to, Madisonian self-government," are to be found wherever you look.27
Simply put, the greatest part of contemporary criticisms of television
depends on a moral disapproval which is identical to Plato's attack on epic
and tragic poetry in the fourth century B.c. In this respect, at least, we are
most of us Platonists. We must therefore reexamine both our grounds for
disapproving of Plato's attack on poetry and our reasons for disapproving
of television.
It is true that television is also the target of another criticism, a purer
aesthetic criticism concerned with the artistic quality of television works. This
is not a criticism which Socrates, who confesses to "a love and respect for
Homer since childhood" (595b9-10) and who describes his love of poetry in
explicit sexual terms (607e4-608b2), would ever have made. We will discuss
this criticism in the last section of this essay.

Ill

My effort to establish a parallel between Plato's deep, complex, and

suspicious hostility toward Homer and Aeschylus on the ond hand and the
obviously well-deserved contempt with which many today regard Dynasty
or Dallas may well appear simply ridiculous. Though classical Greek poetry
still determines many of the criteria that underlie the literary canon of our
culture, most of television hardly qualifies as entertainment. Yet my posi
tion does not amount to a trivialization of Plato's views. On the contrary, I
believe, we are bound to miss (and have already missed) the real urgency of
Plato's approach if we persist in taking it as an attack against art as such.
Plato was neither insensitive to art nor inconsistent in his desire to produce,
as he did, artworks of his own in his dialogues; he neither discerned a deep
characteristic of art that pits it essentially against philosophy nor did he en
visage a higher form of art which he would have allowed in his city.28
Plato's argument with poetry concerns a practice which is today
paradigmatically a fine art, but it is not an argument directed at it as such a
fine art. At this point, the history of art becomes essential for an under
standing of its philosophy. Though Plato's attack against poetry in the
Republic may be the originating text of the philosophy of art, his argument,
without being any less profound or disturbing, dismisses poetry as what it
was in his time: and poetry then was popular entertainment.

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 223

The audience of Attic drama, as far as we now know, was "a 'popular'
audience in the sense that it was a body fully representative of the great
mass of the Athenian people"29 and included a great number of foreign
visitors as well.30 During the Greater Dionysia in classical times no fewer
than 17,000 people,31 perhaps more,32 were packed into the god's theater.
Pericles, according to Plutarch, established the the?rikon, a subsidy to
cover the price of admission and something more, which ended up being
distributed to rich and poor alike, and made of the theater a free entertain
ment.33
The plays were not produced in front of a well-behaved audience. The
dense crowd was given to whistling (syringx) and the theater resounded with
its "uneducated noise" (amousoi boaipl?thous, Lg. 700c3). Plato expresses
profound distaste for the tumult with which audiences, in the theater and
elsewhere, voiced their approval or dissatisfaction (Rep. 492c). Their
preferences were definitely pronounced if not often sophisticated. Since
four plays were produced within a single day, the audience arrived at the
theater with large quantities of food. Some of it they consumed
themselves?hardly a silent activity in its own right, unlikely to produce the
quasi-religious attention required of a fine-art audience today and more
reminiscent of other sorts of mass entertainments. Some of their food was
used to pelt those actors whom they did not like,34 and whom they often
literally shouted off the stage.35 In particular, and though this may be dif
ficult to imagine today, the drama was considered a realistic representation
of the world: we are told, for example, that a number of women were
frightened into having miscarriages or into giving premature birth by the en
trance of the Furies in Aeschylus' Eumenides.36
The realistic interpretation of Attic drama is crucial for our purposes.
Simon Goldhill, expressing the recent suspiciousness toward certain naive
understandings of realism, has written that Electra's entrance as a peasant
in the play Euripides named after her "is upsetting not because it represents
reality but because it represents reality in a way which transgresses the con
ventions of dramatic representations, indeed the representations of reality
constructed elsewhere in the play." In fact, he continues, "Euripides con
stantly forces awareness of theatre as theatre."37 This, along with the
general contemporary claim that all art necessarily contains hints pointing
toward its artificial nature and undermining whatever naturalistic preten
sions it makes, may well be true. But it doesn't alter the fact that it is of the
essence of popular entertainment that these hints are not, while the enter
tainment still remains popular, consciously perceived. Popular entertain
ment, in theory and practice, is generally taken to be inherently realistic.
To be inherently realistic is to seem to represent reality without artifice,
without mediation and convention. Realistic art is, just in the sense in which

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224 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

Plato thought of imitation, transparent. This transparency, I believe, is not

real. It is only the result of our often not being aware of the mediated and
conventional nature of the representations to which we are most commonly
exposed. As Barish writes in regard to the theater, "it has an unsettling way
of being received by its audiences, at least for the moment and with
whatever necessary mental reserves, as reality pure and simple."38 Whether
or not we are aware of it, however, mediation and convention are absolutely
essential to all representation. But since, in such cases, they cannot be at
tributed to the representation itself, which, transparent as it is, cannot be
seen as an object with its own status and in its own right, they are instead at
tributed to the represented subject-matter: the slow-moving speech and ac
tion patterns of soap operas, for example, are considered (and criticized) as
representations of a slow-moving world.
Attributed to subject-matter, mediation and convention appear,
almost by necessity, as distortions. And accordingly (from the fifth century
B.c. through Renaissance and Puritan England as well as Jansenist France
in connection with the theatre, through the eighteenth- and nineteenth
century attacks on the novel, to contemporary denunciations of the cinema
and of television) the reality the popular media are supposed to represent
has always been considered, while the media in question are still popular, as
a distorted, perverted, and dismal reality. And it has regularly involved
campaigns to abolish or reform the popular arts or efforts on the part of the
few to distance themselves from the arts as far as possible. And insofar as
the audience of these media has been supposed, and has often supposed
itself, to react directly to that reality, the audience's undisputed enjoyment
of the popular arts has been interpreted as the enjoyment of this distorted,
perverted, and dismal reality. It has therefore also been believed that this
enjoyment both reflects and contributes to a distorted, perverted, and
dismal life?a vast wasteland accurately reflected in the medium which mir
rors it.
This is the essence of Plato's attack against poetry and, I believe, the
essential idea behind a number of attacks against television today. Nothing
in Plato's time answered to our concept of the fine arts, especially to the
idea that the arts are a province of a small and enlightened part of the
population (which may or may be not be interested in attracting the rest of
the people to them), and Plato holds no views about them. His quarrel with
poetry is not disturbing because anyone seriously believes that Plato could
have been right about Homer's pernicious influence. Plato's view is disturb
ing because we are still agreed with him that representation is
transparent?at least in the case of those media which, like television, have
not yet acquired the status of art and whose own nature, as opposed to what

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 225

they depict, has not yet become in serious terms a subject in its own right.39
And because of this view, we may indeed react to life, or think that we do,
as we react to its representations: what is often necessary for a similarity
between our reactions to life and our reactions to art is not so much the fact
that the two are actually similar but only the view that they are. Many do in
fact enjoy things on television which, as Plato wrote in regard to poetry,
some at least would be ashamed, even horrified, to enjoy in life.
The problem here is with the single word 'things', which applies both to
the contents of television shows and to the situations those represent. What
this suggests is that what is presented on television is a duplicate of what oc
curs in the world. No interpretation seems to be needed in order to reveal
and to understand the complex relations that actually obtain between them.
By contrast, no one believes that the fine arts produce such duplica
tions. Though we are perfectly willing to learn about life from literature and
painting (a willingness which, in my opinion, requires close scrutiny in its
own right), no one would ever project directly the content of a work of fine
art onto the world. The fine arts, we believe, bear an indirect, interpretative
relationship to the world, and further interpretation on the part of audience
and critics is necessary in order to understand it. It is precisely for this sort
of interpretation that the popular arts do not seem to call.

IV

Yet the case of the Republic suggests that the line between the popular
and the fine arts is much less settled than is often supposed. If my approach
has been right so far, Plato's quarrel with poetry is to a great extent, as
much of the disdain against television today is, a quarrel with a popular
form of entertainment. Greek drama, indeed, apart from the fact that it was
addressed to a very broad audience, exhibits a number of features common
ly associated with popular literature. One among them is the sheer volume
of output required from any popular genre. "Throughout the fifth century
B.c. and probably, apart from a few exceptional years, through the earlier
part of the fourth century also," Pickard-Cambridge writes, "three tragic
poets entered the contest for the prize in tragedy, and each presented four
plays."40 If we add to these the plays produced by the comic poets, the plays
produced at all the festivals other than the City Dionysia (with which
Pickard-Cambridge is exclusively concerned), and the plays of the poets
who were not chosen for the contest, we can see that the actual number of
dramas must have been immense. The three great tragedians alone account
for roughly three hundred works. And this is at least a partial explanation

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226 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

of the fact that so many plays were different treatments of the same stories.
This practice is imposed on popular authors by the demands of their craft
and is in itself a serious source of satisfaction for their audience.41
The most important feature of popular art, however, is the transparen
cy to which we have already referred. The idea is complex, and it is very dif
ficult to say in general terms which of a popular work's features are pro
jected directly onto reality since, obviously, not all are. A television au
dience knows very well that actors shot during a show are not really dead,
but other aspects of the behavior of such fictional characters are actually
considered as immediate transcriptions of reality. On a very simple level,
for example, it is difficult to explain otherwise the fact that the heroines of
Cagney and Lacey invariably buckle their seat belts when they enter their
car, whether to chase a murderer or to go to lunch. And many aspects of
their relationship are considered as perfectly accurate transcriptions of
reality. Popular art is commonly perceived as literally incorporating parts
of reality within it; hence the generally accepted, and mistaken, view that it
requires little or no interpretation.
Arthur Danto has recently drawn attention to art which aims to incor
porate reality directly within it, and has named it the "art of disturbation."
This is not art which represents, as art has always represented, disturbing
reality. It is art which aims to disturb precisely by eradicating the distance
between it and reality, by placing reality squarely within it.42 Disturbational
art aims to frustrate and unsettle its audience's aesthetic, distanced, and
contemplative expectations: "Reality," Danto writes, "must in some way
... be an actual component of disturbatory art and usually reality of a kind
itself disturbing. . . . And these as components in the art, not simply col
lateral with its production and appreciation."43 "Happenings" or Chris
Burden's viciously self-endangering projects fall within this category. And
so did, until relatively recently, obscenity in the cinema and the theatre.
The purpose of disturbational art, according to Danto, is atavistic. It
aims to reintroduce reality back into art, as was once supposedly the norm:
"Once we perceive statues as merely designating what they resemble . . .
rather than containing the reality through containing the form, a certain
power is lost to art."44 But contemporary disturbational art, which Danto
considers "pathetic and futile," utterly fails to recapture this lost
"magic."45
This failure is not an accident. The disturbational art with which Danto
is concerned consists mainly of paintings, sculptures, and "happenings"
that are essentially addresed to a sophisticated audience through the con
ventions of the fine arts: you dress to go see it. But part of what makes the
fine arts fine is precisely the distance they have managed, over time, to in

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 227

sert between representation and reality; this distance can no longer be

eliminated. Danto finds that disturbational art still poses some sort of vague
threat: "Perhaps it is for this reason that the spontaneous response to
disturbational art is to disarm it by cooptation, incorporating it instan
taneously into the cool institutions of the artworld where it will be rendered
harmless and distant from forms of life it meant to explode."46 My own ex
planation is that the cool institutions of the artworld are just where the art
of disturbation, which is necessarily a fine art, has always belonged.
Disturbational art aims to restore "to art some of the magic purified
out when art became art."47 This, I believe, is not a reasonable goal: once a
genre has become fine, it seldom if ever loses its status; too much is invested
in it. And yet, I want to suggest, "the magic purified out when art became
art" is all around us, and just for that reason almost totally invisible. The
distinction between representation and reality is constantly and interestingly
blurred by television?literally an art which has not yet become art?and
which truly disturbs its audience: consider, as one instance among in
numerably many, the intense debate over the influence on Soviet-American
relations of the absurd mini-series Amerika in the spring of 1987.48
As a medium, television is still highly transparent. Though, as I have
admitted, I don't yet have a general account of which of its features are pro
jected directly onto the world, television clearly convinces us on many occa
sions that what we see in it is precisely what we see through it. This is
precisely why it presents such a challenge to our moral sensibility. The
"magic" of television may be neither admirable nor even respectable. But it
is, I am arguing, structurally identical to the magic Plato saw and de
nounced in Greek poetry, which also, of course, was not art.
Plato's attack on poetry is duplicated today even by those who think of
him as their great enemy and the greatest opponent of art ever to have writ
ten. It is to be found not only in the various denunciations of television,
many of which are reasonable and well-supported, but even more impor
tantly in the total neglect of television on the part of our philosophy of art.
Aesthetics defends the arts which can no longer do harm and against which
Plato's strictures hardly make sense. His views are thus made incomprehen
sible and are not allowed to address their real target. Danto writes that every
acknowledged literary work is "about the that reads the text... in such
a way that each work becomes a metaphor for each reader."49 The key
word here is "metaphor": we do not literally emulate our literary heroes, in
the unfortunate manner of Don Quixote; we understand them through in
terpretation and transformation, finding their relevance to life, if
anywhere, on a more abstract level. But such literal emulation was just what
Plato was afraid of in the case of tragic poetry, and what so many today are

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228 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

afraid of in regard to television: "we become what we see." Plato's attack

on "art" is still very much alive.

A reasonable reaction to these speculations is that wha

similarities between Plato's attack on poetry and contemporar
toward television, the difference between the media themselves is i
Not only did Greek poetry have its Homer and its Aeschylus, b
acutely, even painfully aware of its beauty. Toward such beau
says, "we shall behave like lovers who see their passion is disa
violently force themselves away from the object of their love
But television, almost everyone seems to agree, has no aesthetic
not only harmful but ugly; why bother?
This issue is extremely complicated, and I can only touch on
here. The common view that television is aesthetically worthl
me profoundly flawed. This is not because I think that t
aesthetically valuable, but because this sort of statement is the wro
statement to make. Television is a vast medium which includes a
ty of genres, some of which have no connection of any kind with
similar statement would be something like "Writing is goo
which wears its absurdity on its face. Even a more specific view
fect, say, that "Literature is valuable" seems obviously untena
consider the huge numbers of absolutely horrible literary wo
which are, mercifully, totally forgotten.
We must therefore gradually develop principles and criteria
the criticism of television. We need to articulate classes and c
help us organize its various species and genres?the kind of pro
which, for example, the serious study of poetry first began. W
ciples which will be more than mechanical applications of the
developed already for other arts and which, naturally, televis
miserably fails to satisfy.50 We need, for example, especially in
with broadcast television, to face the fact that the unit of
significance is not the individual episode?though individual ep
we ever see?but the serial as a whole.51 The fact that the serial
heres in its episodes raises radically new aesthetic question
venerably old metaphysical ones. As Aristotle remarked w
dismissing Parmenides and Melissus as physical thinke
significance, he nevertheless proceeded to discuss their views
"there is philosophy in the investigation" (Phys. A, 185a20).

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 229

We finally need, as Stanley Cavell has correctly pointed out, to think

seriously about the fact?and it is a fact?that "television has conquered."
Two questions need to be asked: "first how it has happened; and second
how we [intellectuals] have apparently remained uninterested in accounting
for its conquering."52 The first question can only be answered through the
development of television criticism. The second also requires such criticism,
but also an explanation of why the criticism has been so slow in developing.
Cavell attributes this to the fear of

the fact that a commodity has conquered, an appliance that is a monitor, and
yet what it monitors ... are so often settings of the shut-in, a reference line of
normality or banality so insistent as to suggest that what is shut out, that suspi
cion whose entry we would at all costs guard against, must be as monstrous as,
let me say, the death of the normal, of the familiar as such.53

But, I think, there is another aspect to this fear, another?connected?

reason for it. It is a reason provided directly not by what television shuts out
but precisely by what it lets in, by what it shows and by the conditions under
which we look at it.
Broadcast television, which until recently was practically identical with
the medium itself, works primarily through the serial. Each episode,
precisely because it instantiates the serial of which it is a member, is essen
tially repetitive, however novel a story-line it may exploit on a particular oc
casion. The set is always the same. The characters' personalities are usually
the same.54 Their habits, their facial and verbal expressions, their
peculiarities are the same. The surroundings in which conversations occur
are the same. The groupings in which those conversations occur are the
same. Membership in the serial is established through this sameness, which
is therefore essential to the genre. And the serial is repetitive in another
dimension as well: it is broadcast at exactly the same time each week.
Watching a particular show?and to come to appreciate a show at all re
quires watching a number of episodes: the features they share as members
of a species cannot be otherwise noticed and interpreted as such?imposes a
rigorous routine on the viewer. Unless one owns a recording machine, one
must arrange one's life, one must establish a routine, in order to accom
modate the show. And what one sees then, with or without a recording
machine, is nothing other than the representation of routine itself.
Routinization, however, is either something we want to avoid or
something we want to forget. Television brings it, as it were, home to us. It
imposes a routine on its viewers, it portrays routine for them, and it sug
gests that their own life mirrors what it portrays. Television will be resisted
as long as routine remains, in the absence of criticism and interpretation, its

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 230 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

most salient feature. Interpretation is necessary in order to determine

whether there are other features there to be noticed and, perhaps, ap
preciated. In the meantime, of course, the critics may themselves be trapped
in routine: this danger is endemic to the enterprise. But nothing, in princi
ple, deprives the depiction of routine of aesthetic value just as nothing, in
principle, prevents the depiction of foolishness, cruelty, murder, incest, ig
norance, arrogance, suicide, and self-mutilation from constituting, as it has
on at least one occasion, an unparalleled work of art.

Alexander Nehamas
University of Pennsylvania

NOTES

1. Poetry is also discussed in Books II and III (376e-403c) of the Republic.

Plato's negative attitude, of course, is not confined to this work. The Ion, one of his
early works, is devoted to the issue whether rhapsodes, and poets, possess a techn?,
or rational craft, and to the proof that they do not. The heavy censorship of poetry is
brought up on a number of occasions in the Laws, his last work, e.g., at 659b-662a,
700a-701b, 802a-c, 829a-e. The case of the Phaedrus is more complicated and am
biguous for the following reason. Though it is true that Socrates, in his "Great
Speech," praises poetry as a "divine madness" and puts it in the same group as
medicine, prophecy, and?of all things?philosophy (243e-245c), this statement is
made within a rhetorical context. And Socrates, in his later discussion of rhetoric
claims that an orator must always make use of what his audience, in this case
Phaedrus, is likely to find persuasive, not necessarily and strictly speaking the truth
(271c-272b). Cf. John M. Cooper, "Plato, Isocrates, and Cicero on the In
dependence of Oratory from Philosophy," in John J. Cleary, ed., Proceedings of
the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, vol. I (Washington, DC:
University Press of America, 1986), pp. 77-96, esp. pp. 80-81.
2. Four major festivals were held in Athens and its vicinity: the Anthesteria, the
Lenaia, the Rural Dionysia, and the Great or City Dionysia. Each involved a variety
of dramatic and poetic performances. The major study of these festivals is Arthur
Pickard-Cambridge's The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Claren
don Press, 1968). Ion's recitations of Homer may have occurred as part of such
festivals, but they may have also taken place independently; we know (530a2-3) that
he had participated in a festival at Epidaurus.
3. "Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10," in Julius Moravcsik and
Philip Temko, eds., Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts (Totowa, NJ: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1982), pp. 47-78, esp. pp. 48-51. In what follows, I will rely on the
analysis of Plato's argument in Book X offered in this article, to which I will refer as
"Plato on Imitation." The most forceful earlier effort to resolve the conflict in
Plato's favor had been that of J. Tate, who, in a series of articles, tried to distinguish
between a good and a bad sense of "imitation" and to limit Plato's exclusion to the

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 231

latter; cf. "Plato on Imitation," pp. 48-49 and nn. for references to Tate's wo
for criticism of his position.
4. This resolution of the conflict follows the view of G. R. F. Ferrari's "
and Poetry," which will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge History of L
Criticism.
5. This has been most forcefully denied by Gerald F. Else, The Structure and
Date of Book 10 of Plato's "Republic" (Heidelberg, 1972: Abhandlungen der
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. KL, Jg. 1972, Abh. 3) as
well as in his posthumously published Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). A number of commentators on
the Republic have found it difficult to see how Book X fits with the work's overall
argument; cf. "Plato on Imitation," p. 54 and nn. for references. Most recently,
Julia Annas has described the book as an "excrescence" in her Introduction to
Plato's "Republic" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 335.
6. I have generally, though not always, relied on the translation of the Republic
by George Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974).
7. Paul O. Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts," Journal of the History
of Ideas, XII (1951), pp. 496-527, XIII (1952), pp. 17-46.
8. A detailed defense of this claim can be found in "Plato on Imitation," pp.
54-64.
9. Plato has many reservations in connection with painting and sculpture. He
argues in this book, for example, that painting produces only imitations of things,
that it can fool simple people, and that it confuses the mind. In the Sophist, he at
tacks at least one species of sculpture because it essentially misrepresents the propor
tions of its original (235c8-236a7). This is only a sample, but a fair sample of the
sorts of objections he raises against these two art forms. He does not attack them on
moral grounds. It is interesting in this connection to note that Aristotle claims that
painting does represent people "who are worse than we are" (Poet. 2,1448a5-6). But
Aristotle did not consider this as an objection either to painting or, of course, to
poetry.
10. There is a crucial problem here concerning the way in which the action
depicted in an artwork is described. Are we to be moved by Medea's murder of her
children or by the impossible situation in which this stranger, a woman in a man's
country, is placed? These are questions of interpretation, which I shall have to avoid
here.
11. I have used Jonathan Barnes's revision of the Oxford Translation of The
Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
12. Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle's "Poetics" (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 200.
Halliwell's book is extremely valuable in its demonstration of the common ethical
and psychological ground between Plato and Aristotle on poetry.
13. Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1981), p. 29. Barish makes a similar point in connection with Ter
tulliano view, which is even more extreme than Plato's: "In the world of Tertullian's
polemic," he writes, "the difference between art and life has no status... . For Ter
tullian [to witness a spectacle] is to approve it in the most literal sense: to perceive it
as raw fact and to rejoice in it as fact. 'The calling to mind of a criminal act or a
shameful thing ... is no better than the thing itself " (p. 45). Tertullian, of course,
is also interested in showing that a sin in intention is as damning as a sin in act, but
his conflation of representation with reality, as Barish shows, is rampant.

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 232 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

14. On this point, I disagree with Ferrari, "Plato and Poetry." F

mirably clear on the fact that Plato is concerned not so much
themselves, but with their expression, in poetry. On the basis of this
Plato's suspiciousness of poetry is justified. But Ferrari, like Plato
representation of (the expression of) sorrow with that expression i
tification, I am arguing, is illegitimate.
15. It might be asked at this point why someone who did have k
craft could not produce a more profound imitation of it. This is a v
tion. The short answer, which is defended at length in "Plato on
59-60, is that to produce something in the full knowledge of what it
any longer to produce an imitation, but a further instance of it.
16. A more extensive treatment of this point can be found
Imitation," p. 62-64.
17. Quoted in Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Making of Am
sion, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 300.
18. George Gerbner and Larry Gross, "The Scary World of TV's H
Psychology Today, April 1976, p. 44. It should be remarked in this c
is a subject I propose to discuss in detail elsewhere) that the short l
television programs is not necessarily a shortcoming. It is a conventio
and, as such, it can be exploited in very interesting ways, much as, sa
the classical tragedians, on the average, had to compose four plays
within a single day, between sunrise and sunset. The question is r
Thornburn in "Television Melodrama," in Richard P. Adler, ed. Un
Television: Essays on Television as a Social and Cultural Form (New
1981), 73-90.
19. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York:
Morrow Quill, 1978), pp. 279-80.
20. Mander, p. 219. A similar view is expressed by Michael Novak, "Television
Shapes the Soul," also reprinted in Adler, Understanding Television, pp. 19-34.
21. A fascinating alternative view is proposed in Gerbner and Gross, "The Scary
World of TV's Heavy Viewer." Their research suggests that the more television one
watches the more one tends to be afraid of the violent world that is so often depicted
there: the heavy viewer is likely to withdraw from this world rather than to engage in
the behavior depicted on television.
22. Wayne C. Booth, "The Company We Keep: Self-Making in Imaginative
Art," Daedalus 111 (1982), pp. 56-57.
23. Rudolph Arnheim, "A Forecast of Television," in Adler, Understanding
Television, p. 7.
24. Mander, Four Arguments, p. 26.
25. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of
Show Business (New York: Viking Press, 1985), p. 86.
26. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 155. Postman's attack on televi
sion, duplicated, among other places, in Booth's "The Company We Keep," Martin
Esslin's otherwise sympathetic The Age of Television (New York: Freeman and
Company, 1981), and in Douglass Cater's "Television and Thinking People," in
Adler, Understanding Television, pp. 11-18, demands serious and extensive atten
tion. The basic idea on which this sort of attack depends is a contrast between the
medium of print, which is assumed to be complex, articulate, and highly suited to the
communication of complicated information on the one hand and the visual media,

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 PLATO AND THE MASS MEDIA 233

especially television on the other: television is supposed to be incapable of answe

serious questions, of examining complicated issues in depth, and of truly invol
the rational capacities of its audience?this is said to be due both to some tech
features inherent in the television image and to the immense time constraint
which television is always subject. The irony here is very deep. Almost every
ment this approach uses to demonstrate the inferiority of television to wri
repeats, without most of those authors' knowledge, the arguments Plato used in
Phaedrus to demonstrate the inferiority of writing to speech and, in the Gorgias
the Theaetetus, the inferiority of rhetoric to dialectic. The fact that Plato's
guments for the superiority of speech over writing can be so easily used to show
superiority of writing over another form of communication is a subject with
ranging implications which I propose to discuss in detail on another occasion.
27. Ronald K. L. Collins, "TV Subverts the First Amendment," The New Yo
Times, September 19, 1987.
28. References to such interpretations of Plato can be found in "Plato on Im
tion," nn. 4, 60, 75, 96 and in the passages to which those notes are appended
29. Peter Walcot, Greek Drama in Its Theatrical and Social Context (Cardif
University of Wales Press, 1976), p.l.
30. Pickard-Cambridge, The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (Oxford: Clarend
Press, 1946), pp. 140-41.
32. If, that is, we are to believe Plato's statement that Agathon faced an audie
of over thirty thousand at the Lenaia on the day preceding the dramatic date of
Symposium (175e).
33. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, pp. 266-68.
34. Demosthenes, De Corona 262. The passage refers directly to the Ru
Dionysia, but there is no reason to suppose that the situation in the City Dion
was significantly different.
35. Pollux, iv.122; Demosthenes, De Corona, 265.
36. Vita Aeschyli; Pollux, iv. 110. Whether the story is or is not true is not imp
tant; what matters is that stories of this sort circulated and were found believab
37. Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Pres
1985), pp. 252-53.
38. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, p. 79.
39. In some cases where television is examined as a medium, the standards app
to it are implicitly drawn from other media and art-forms and, not surprisingly,
the conclusion that (by those unacknowledged standards) it is an utter failure
serious art. This is particularly obvious in the case of Postman, Amusing Ourse
to Death.
40. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, p. 79.
41. This is well discussed in John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance:
Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976). See also Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), esp. pp.
5-6, 29, 34. It should be pointed out, though, that, on the basis of Euripides' Hip
poly tus, 451-56, and Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451b25, Pickard-Cambridge doubts that
the Athenian audience was familiar with the myths explored in drama. He considers
"even without the context ... an easy and obvious joke" the comic poet An
tiphanes' complaint (Fr. 191K) that the tragic poets, whose stories were known to
their audience, had an advantage over the writers of comedy (pp. 275-76 and nn.). I

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 234 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

don't find the joke either easy or obvious. On Aristotle's statement, cf. D. W.
Lucas, Aristotle: "Poetics" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), n. ad loc.
42. Arthur C. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," in The Philosophical Disenfran
chisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 117-33. Some
of the ideas of the following paragraphs are also presented in my review of Danto's
book, The Journal of Philosophy LXXXV (1988), pp. 214-19.
43. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," p. 121.
44. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," p. 128.
45. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," p. 133.
46. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," p. 119.
47. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," p. 131.
48. The show's director at one point denied that his hostile portrayal of United
Nations troops and Soviet characters was significant, since this was after all a work
of fiction, but insisted that his strongly sympathetic and always more complex por
trayal of his American characters was intended to show how Americans really are,
and should be the main focus of his audience's attention.
49. Danto, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," The Philosophical Disenfran
chisement of Art, p. 155.
50. Cf. Thornburn, "Television Melodrama," in Adler, Understanding Televi
sion.
51. Stanley Cavell, "The Fact of Television," Daedalus 111 (1982), pp. 77-79.
52. Cavell, "The Fact of Television," p. 75.
53. Cavell, "The Fact of Television," p. 95.
54. This statement needs to be qualified in light of shows like Hill Street Blues, St.
Elsewhere, or L.A. Law, which allow for some character development. Such
development, however, is both slow and conservative.

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