IV

Aristophanes in America

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THIS ESSAY is animated by a question whose answer seems perfectly obvious. The question is, can television, particularly television comedy, ¹ play the role in contemporary American democracy that Old Comedy played in ancient Athenian democracy? And the perfectly obvious answer is of course not. Ancient drama was a highly specific, if not unique, historical occurrence. When we examine its context of performance, which we must to understand its “content,” as we elaborate its place within a designated time and space as part of a vast conglomerate of religious ritual and civic festival, the claims dramatists made to be the political educators of their audience, and the way in which that audience coincided with the civic order of citizens who originated, regulated, and judged dramatic competitions, the juxtaposition my question poses seems far-fetched at best. The same conclusion presents itself if we begin with the historical specificity of television. Think of how different our world is from that of the ancient Athenian, politically, religiously, socially, economically, and culturally, or of those huge transformations of sensibility and scale that established the context for “television.” Just imagine setting a classical Athenian down in New York or Los Angeles. It is itself a pretty promising comedic premise.

One can hardly ignore the significance of such disparities, which means that insofar as I do, I can only ask the reader for a certain suspension of disbelief and a willingness to play along much like what Aristophanesasked of his audience. And though I will make something of an argument, my purpose, like his and that of the TV comedies I examine, is more interrogatory than constitutive. Though Aristophanes seems to think that ridicule, parody, and mockery had ethical import, and that the comic poet was the political educator of his fellow citizens, he does not claim that humor constitutes a politics or an ethics. The point, rather, was to laugh at those who confidently assumed they knew what morality was, at those political leaders who were sure of their wisdom and power, and at those social conventions and cultural practices that were assumed or claimed to be “natural.” Of course for Plato this lack of respect for authority was part of the problem, which is one reason why he is so unrelenting in his criticisms of comedy in The Republic (which is not to deny that there are comic elements in that text).

There is a delicious irony in the fact that what Plato regarded as the height (or depth) of popular culture, namely, Aristophanic comedy, we now regard as “classic” and so part of high culture. Clearly, works of art move up and down the cultural ladder. So do genres, as is evident in the case of movies that have become “film” and “cinema” with baroque theories and intertextualities of their very own. All this suggests two questions that I can only raise here: how do such transformations take place, and is there any reason to suppose that television comedies such as Seinfeld, In Living Color, The Roseanne Barr Show, The Honeymooners, or The Simpsons will climb a similar ladder?

In the case of comedy, cultural respectability is a trap. Tragedy invites and can easily bear the weight of serious analysis. But comedy is highly susceptible to the disease of didacticism because it seems to disintegrate under the scalpel of academic attention. E. B. White called this the “Frog” problem, which seems particularly appropriate in the case of Aristophanes, who titled a play The Frogs. Analyzing comedy, White suggested, was like dissecting a frog: both die in the process of displaying their innards. ² On the other hand, there is something comical about academics scurrying to make Aristophanes into a philosopher in drag (which is not so different from what I am about to do), or insisting that he offers a double message, one for the refined and sophisticated (i.e., us) and one for the unwashed masses.

In what follows I want first to say something about the cultural climate in which Aristophanic comedy was produced, the performance conditions of that production, and the content of the plays, which can be understood only in terms of that climate and those conditions. More specifically, I will be concerned about the relationship between democracy and comedy, and the role of the comic poet as political educator of his fellow citizens. Second, I will turn to the critics of television and their charge that it is a form of antipolitical education that corrupts democracy, and then criticizethe critics, not because I think them wrong, but because I think their attitude toward television (which some are quick to say they seldom watch) is self-fulfilling and therefore politically suspect. My critique of the critics is intended to provide some space for thinking about the ways in which television might become something other and better than it seems necessarily to be, and to reintroduce the juxtaposition between Aristophanic and TV comedy present in my initial question. Finally, I will elaborate this juxtaposition by suggesting that if Aristophanes were to find himself in New York or Los Angeles, he would be a writer for The Honeymooners or The Simpsons.

I

The relationship between theater and politics in Athens was quite different from what it is for us. A playwright did not create a drama and seek to have it produced for an audience that would exist only at the moment of performance. Nor was the play a piece of writing destined for individual consumption by private readers. The audience, wh ich in this respect largely coincided with the civic order of citizens, wa s already constituted, and the poet applied for permission to appear before it.³ There was a preliminary selection determining which text would become a play and a subsequent contest: prizes were awarded by a jury chosen from the general public according to procedures analogous to those used for deciding membership in the Boule¯ (council). This meant that theater was a communal time and place even when representative aspects of that community were being subjected to ridicule and critique. It also meant what contemporary critics find so hard to accept—that ordinary citizens voted first prizes to plays that were highly critical of their own leaders’ policies, fo ibles, an d cultural accommodations such as those concerning gender and class.

But to speak of theater as a whole elides the differences between tragedy and comedy and begs the question of whether comedy did indeed have practical consequences outside the prescribed festive celebration of which it was a part.

Theater provided a place and time in which the assembled citizenry saw itself represented onstage confronting issues such as leadership and authority, democracy and empire, generational and sexual conflict, the relationship between oikos and polis, gods and humankind, wisdom and madness, power and freedom, ingenuity and transgression, nature and convention, as well as the place of drama in public life. But the form of representation and so the way those issues were considered were different in comedy and tragedy. As we saw in the previous chapter, tragedy relied on stories from heroic myth, emphasizing dire personal and social eventsthat had befallen heroines and heroes, families and dynasties in the distant past, mostly at places other than Athens, mostly in highly stylized language. Comedy, by contrast, was firmly anchored in the present and in Athens was openly topical about its objects of ridicule—militarism, greed, litigiousness, Socrates, the Sophists, war with Sparta, Cleon, Pericles, education, the gullibility of the demos, patriotism, and the glory of the past. Except when parodying the conventions of tragedy, its language was colloquial and its choice of linguistic and musical registers and subjects much wider. While a tragic hero was likely to meet a horrific fate as the result of an equally horrific transgression, the comic “hero” was likely to be a farmer or artisan who was merely trying to “make ends meet.” And while tragedy encouraged its audience to reflect in the most general way on issues of agency and fate, reason and passion, comedy’s satirical depiction of Athenian democracy was designed “both to arouse laughter and to encourage reflection.” Like a modern topical cartoon, it humorously distorted reality to draw attention to gaps between truth and lies, principle and practice.⁴

Though a tragedy might speak about an otherwise unspeakable act (such as incest), or a character in it might question the gods, it was comedy that was free to engage in types of ridicule audiences regarded as illicit in public life. Because comedy was allowed or even encouraged to indulge in forms of personal ridicule and flout otherwise common standards of propriety, it was the quintessential expression of parrhe¯sia, fr ank and honest speech unintimidated by power. To a degree impossible in tragedy, comedy ridiculed gods and politicians, g enerals and intellectuals, mocked the demos’s favorites and its critics, al l the while exulting in verbal abuse, uninhibited sexuality, an d repeated references to excrement and flatulence.

James Redfield has argued that tragedy is “a partial art” that calls forth its antitype, “Old Comedy.”⁵ While tragedy brings home the limiting conditions of human freedom, comedy mocks these constraints. The cultural forms that tether human possibilities to the earthly realities of everyday life are ridiculed in a way that reminds us that culture is something invented and can be renewed and recast. In The Wasps, the judicial process is likened to a game that could just as easily be played with cooking utensils; in The Birds, the hero decides to conquer the air rather than other cities; in The Akharnians, he opts for making a separate peace with Sparta and then makes fun of his compatriots who self-destructively keep fighting; in Lysistrata, the women take over the city; in The Ecclesiazusae, the question is raised as to whether the Athenian assembly could make women men if they so desired. After all, why should nature be a limit? If the Athenians have the power to make every sea and land a highway of their daring, and conceive of themselves as an island and then act in theworld as if they were one—proposals made by Thucydides’ Pericles—then what is to stop them from voting to make women men?⁶

In what sense was Aristophanes the political educator of Athenian democracy? There are two questions here. The first concerns whether the audience brought its theatrical experience (whatever that might be) to their participation in other political venues, or, more broadly, whether comedy had any substantial political consequences. The second concerns the ways in which these consequences could be termed “democratic.”

Many commentators believe that Old Comedy was necessarily conservative, since whatever anarchic, transgressive, and liberatory impulses might be present in the plays were domesticated by the “controlled environment” of state-sponsored religious rituals. In these terms comedy seems more carnival than a prelude to an action, more a letting off of steam “than a challenge to conventional hierarchies.” Because of this, whatever vision of renewal comedy might offer remained a mere vision since it “lacked any programmatic” dimension. Add to this a nostalgia for a “simpler time,” and comedy could not pose a viable alternative to the inequalities embedded in city-state life.⁷

Part of this skepticism about comedy’s having radical consequences outside the carefully patrolled context of festival and theater may stem from skepticism about democracy and the capacity of the hoi polloi to make intelligent judgments. (It is a skepticism mirrored by leftist critics of television who see it as a vehicle of the capitalist class controlling the unwitting masses, and by conservative critics who see the medium as further debasing an already contemptible popular culture.) While it is true that the playwright had to please the judges and audience, it does not follow that pleasing them meant flattering them, or that they could not appreciate mockery of their own foibles and excesses. Nor is reaffirming traditional values quite so conservative if those values are democratic and if, as I shall argue, they include a tradition of collective self-critique.

Nonetheless, the argument is a useful corrective to any presumption that we know what an Athenian audience took away from a dramatic performance (though the argument has its own presumptions about this). No one can be sure whether Aristophanic comedy had any effect on Euripides’ reputation or the fate of Cleon, for example. Indeed, Cleon was voted the generalship soon after the judges awarded first prize to The Knights, in which he is viciously lampooned. Nor, given the bivalent meaning of skoptein and its cognates—to joke with reference to play, fun, and humor, and to mock or deride in ways that dishonor—can we be certain that ridicule did not exacerbate rather than heal divisions within Athens (presuming what is not obvious, that such healing is always positive). In a culture as shame-oriented as ancient Greece, the derisive dimensions of laughter were volatile indeed.⁸ The skeptical argument also sharpens the distinction between an immanent critique of Athenian democracy as found in Aristophanes and a transformative one present in The Republic. And it reminds us that Aristophanes’ plays must have meant something very different to their original audience from what they do to all subsequent audiences and readers.

But it is not obvious that Aristophanes is nostalgic for some simpler time. Old Education, Aeschylus, and the rustic Strepsiades are subject to as much ridicule as New Education, Euripides, or Socrates. More important, there is evidence that comedy was expected to and did have substantial impact on Athenian democracy. There is, to begin with, Plato’s harsh and persistent criticism of what comedy does to the citizenry. And of course Plato and Xenophon thought Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates helped shape the animus against him.⁹ Then there is the fact that Aristophanes was awarded a crown by the city after the performance of The Frogs in 405 B.C.E. for having given it good advice. In addition, Cleon’s lawsuit against Aristophanes makes little sense if comedy had no political consequences outside the frame of theater and play. Moreover, the fact that the liberty of comic ridicule was suspended by law (from 440/39 to 437/36) suggests that it was regarded as something more than lighthearted entertainment. ¹⁰ Penultimately, there is the sheer implausibility of the idea that theatrical experience could be tightly compartmentalized, both because laughter is often uncontrollable and because other posited compartmentalizations in Athens (say, between public and private) are far more porous than official designations indicate.

Finally, there is the poet’s claim, acknowledged by the city, that he was its political educator, not in the sense that Plato’s Guardians were or Plato himself perhaps hoped to be, though Old Comedy, like The Republic, exposed the demos’s tendency toward self-deception and confronted the artifices of a political system that tended, as all political systems do, to naturalize its practices. Rather, Aristophanes offered advice by way of parodying the city’s favorite leaders, giving some issues more salience than others, articulating shared resentments or a general malaise, pressuring for reconsideration of policies already adopted or minority views previously rejected, and in general providing a stage on which the tensions, instabilities, and transformations of democratic life could be dramatized, mediated, and explored.¹¹

One could say that comedy was aporetic in the sense that it “transferred the last word to the audience who were left to enact [their] own part but a little more reflectively than before.”¹² In this sense comedic political education could help its citizen audience think about what they were doing and what others were doing to them, sometimes in their name, always for their supposed benefit.¹³

Still, none of this directly addresses the question of how much and whether comedy extended and deepened democratic practices and culture.¹⁴ Suppose we think of democracy as an ethos¹⁵ that includes a form of governance of, by, and for the people, and an egalitarian constitution of cultural and political life. A democratic ethos encourages the sharing of power and responsibility, presuming both that the former can enhance the latter (but without the naive expectation that it necessarily does), and that the sharing of power is a prerequisite for dignity as well as self- and mutual respect. A democratic ethos is suspicious of hierarchies, especially but not only political ones, and is prejudiced against claims to authority by actual or potential elites. Similarly, democrats may treat political leaders with respect, but ultimately the people are the government and leaders are more advisers and competitors for public stature than august representatives of the state.¹⁶ A democratic ethos presumes that political knowledge is constituted discursively rather than deductively, that at the very least it requires the contributions of high and low, and involves sometimes heated debates among people who may differ intensely about what they should do and who rightly constitutes the “they.” A democratic ethos can tolerate some economic inequality as long as it does not compromise political equality or legitimate moral or significant social inequalities. Pen-ultimately, a democratic ethos is a social process through which fixed identities and naturalized conventions periodically confront their conventional status. This does not mean that people can shed such conventions easily, or that simply naming them as conventional could or should be liberating. It does mean that social and cultural conventions are modes of performance, instantiated in thousands of small and large actions in ways that elude full cognitive disclosure. Finally, a democratic ethos assumes that democracy is as much a politics of disturbance as a form of government and order.

In what ways does Old Comedy exemplify and define such an ethos? We know that conservatives disliked it, that it was exceptionally inclusive in subject matter and audience, and that comic fantasies and inversions of the norms provided a vision of things as they used to be, or should and could still be, against the weight of the status quo.¹⁷ Then there is the additional fact that while tragedy at its origins was patronized by tyrants, comic drama was officially accepted into the Dionysia only in 486 and into the Lenaea about forty-five years later, suggesting that it was the product of “democratic patronage.”¹⁸

In addition, comedy was a cultural form of political accountability. Here is Jeffrey Henderson:

The precise effects of comic ridicule and comic abuse are impossible to gauge.But surely no prominent Athenian imagined that the laughter of the demos at his expense could possibly do him any good, and the better the joke the less comfortable he would be thereafter. For this very reason the demos institutionalized the comic competitions. In return for accepting the guidance of the “rich, the well-born, and the powerful” it provided that they be subject to a yearly unofficial review of their conduct at the hands of the demos’ organic intellectuals and critics, the comic poets.¹⁹

Moreover, comedy helped sustain the egalitarian constitution of political and cultural life. In The Clouds, for example, everyone becomes a spectacle for everyone else: the Chorus and characters onstage; the characters who, stepping out of their roles, talk directly to the audience about themselves as actors and refer to the theater in Athens; “Aristophanes,” when he comes forward to address the audience in the parabasis, and the audience when he looks out at them. No one escapes being part of the spectacle; each is in turn seer and seen. Each moment of superiority, of laughing at others and ridiculing their foibles, is reversed as if Aristophanes was, in the context of theater, imitating rotation in office that was distinctive to Athenian democracy.²⁰

Penultimately, Old Comedy helped constitute a tradition of self-critique in which various practices and cultural accommodations basic to Athenian public and private life were called into question. An example of such self-critique is present when Thucydides’ Pericles criticizes the convention of giving Funeral Orations that required and entitled him to do what he is about to do, thereby dislodging the practice from the tradition that legitimized it. Such problematizing of what is also enacted (which is also present in Socratic philosophizing) is an aspect of the restless daring the Corinthians tell us (in Thucydides 1.70) typifies their Athenian enemies. “To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others” (Crawley trans.). A few pages later, the Athenians echo those words in the course of boasting about their daring patriotism at Salamis. (The restlessness is brilliantly parodied by the twitching of the flea-infested Strepsiades in the opening scene of The Clouds.)

Finally, Aristophanic comedy does not simply endorse such daring and self-critique but provides a stage on which “conservative” and “postmodernist” excesses are both ridiculed. Thus The Clouds dramatizes the costs of the displacements democratic politics may demand, and which it otherwise celebrates. Consider, for example, the way the play treats the opposition between town and country, upper and lower classes. Strepsiades comes from a lower-class farming background, while his wife comes from an aristocratic family linked to Pericles. The birth of their son exacerbates these differences as they fight over his name. They finally compromise on “Pheidippides,” meaning cheap aristocrat. But this solves nothing whenthe son is instructed to honor his parents. How can he when they come from different classes and ways of life? The only solution, which the son adopts after his sophistic education, is to dishonor them both. Here the fluidity, egalitarianism, and hybridity of democratic culture has a darker side: dispossession, confusion, and loss of ground.

By the fourth century, the growing specialization of culture meant a separation between popular and elite culture, seriousness and humor, education and entertainment. As popular theater developed into a form of entertainment, the new genres of rhetoric and philosophy took over the paideutic function that drama, including comedy, had once possessed.²¹

II

Given all this, co mparisons with television can only be absurdly tendentious. There was a time before the triumph of industrial capitalism, consumer culture, an d the commodification of leisure when one could find less tendentious parallels between ancient and modern theater.²² Before nineteenth-century state building and industrialization, ch urches, lodge halls, an d community centers were sites for theatrical productions designed to make occasions such as weddings and holidays more festive. The new commercial theaters that replaced them “needed no special occasion nor ritual activities” to justify their existence. Such performances, G eorge Lipsitz argues, “b ecame commodities sold to strangers for an agreed-upon price rather than collective creations by communities enacting rituals essential to group identity and solidarity.” Unlike previous conditions and Athenian drama, pe rformers in these theaters lacked direct ties of kinship, propinquity, an d history with their audiences.²³ The new audiences did not share a history, re ciprocal responsibilities, or obligations.

Lipsitz is careful not to tell a moralizing story of decline. Thus he recognizes how the new commercial theater created a kind of social space for working-class men to escape the surveillance of moral authorities and institutions, and for women to escape parental supervision and patriarchal domination. This theater also encouraged audiences to pursue personal desires and passions outside their socially prescribed responsibilities and, because of the audience’s unfamiliarity, provided a cover for feelings and emotions that could be aired without explanation or apology.²⁴ Nonetheless, he regards the new theatrical forms as creating the “psychic conditions for the needy narcissism of consumer desires,”²⁵ and goes on to argue that by “establishing commodity purchases as symbolic answers to real problems,” the new theater laid the basis for a commodity culture “where advertisers and entrepreneurs offer products that promise to bring pleasures and fulfillment.” Though nineteenth-century theater may haveemerged in part as a rebellion against sexual repression, “its greatest long-term significance lay in shaping the psychic and material preconditions for Americans to shift from a Victorian industrial economy to a hedonistic consumer one.” It is precisely the triumph of this culture, with the material conditions that accompanied it, that makes comparisons with ancient theater seem so far-fetched.

But what about the idea of television as a form of democratic political education? Like Greek drama, television is, in Neil Postman’s words, “our culture’s mode of knowing itself. Therefore, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly staged.”²⁶ But this “stage” is a mass medium that constitutes a spatial and temporal organization of collective life no longer linked to the sharing of a common locale and face-to-face dialogue. To talk about contemporary public spaces, we need to rethink both the idea of space and publicness in a way that reflects the complex interdependencies of the modern world with its highly mediated forms of communication.

Moreover, contemporary democracies are liberal or representative rather than participatory. There is no rotation in office, selection by lot, or absence of semipermanent elites with their own corporate interests. Democracy now does not mean maximum self-rule (unless it is maximum “feasible” rule) and the mutual accountability of citizens, but a mechanism to ensure some degree of accountability of rulers to the ruled. Indeed, one could argue that even this minimal notion of democracy has been eroded in the past twenty years as American society has grown more and more inegalitarian, more divided by extremes of wealth and poverty, and more systematically dominated by corporate power. Insofar as this has meant increased power for elites bent on appropriating the conduct, knowledge, and procedures of public life, it is the inverse process of the democratization Jean-Pierre Vernant traces when he describes the evolution of democracy in classical Athens.²⁷ In any case, what seems clear is that since very few of our citizens actively share in the opportunities and responsibilities of power as Athenian citizens did, they can hardly bring the experience of direct participation in politics to the watching of television. Still less does television seem to provide the occasion and the place to reflect on public life with the depth and comprehensiveness present in Greek theater.

Television is frequently blamed for the attenuation of even this pallid form of democracy, as well as for the corruption of public discourse generally. Some thirty-five years ago, Newton Minnow called television “a vast wasteland” (pinpointing situation comedies as the worst offenders). Television, he and his fellow critics claimed, was vulgar and one-dimensional rather than complex and edifying; sordid, prurient, and mean-spirited rather than uplifting and realistic. More recently, television has beennamed as a significant cause of the erosion of social capital, civility, and deliberative democracy, of the trivialization of private and public life, and of political voyeurism’s replacing political judgment.²⁸ For such critics television is and must be a form of antipolitical education that corrodes democracy. There are eleven elements to this general condemnation.

1. Television transforms citizens into consumers, political freedom and power into consumer sovereignty, and the public sphere into a realm of media manipulation and spectacle.

2. In its quest for ratings, television homogenizes culture, ²⁹ in effect imposing a form of censorship on what can be produced. Cable does not substantially change the situation, since the parts imitate each other rather than offer real alternatives.

3. Television fosters and represents a closing in and down of public spaces. Given VCRs and pay-per-view, there is no need to go out to the movies. Given the Home Shopping Network, there is less reason (mostly for women) to go out in public and be in the company of, if not in conversation with, friends. ³⁰ At the same time, television penetrates the home, helping to order domestic space, leisure time, and family identity, all of which are reconfigured around commodities and possessions rather than ethnicity or class. Finally, it colonizes intimate areas of gender and personality by exacerbating anxieties about sexuality and personality, all in the interests of selling products.³¹

4. In this world of private men and women the good life is the consuming life. Unable to think as citizens, they regard public responsibilities as distractions from and intrusions on the world of banal utopian visions where all needs are instantly met, conflict is nonexistent, and poverty has evaporated into thin air.³²

5. Television fosters political cosmeticians, image managers, spin doctors, and ad experts who sell candidates as they do other products. Almost all candidates are now bound to the commercial form and are presented as commodities. Indeed, television is the means by which democracy is absorbed by the market, producing what Mark Danner calls “democracy commodified,” a hybrid implicit in Loehmann’s sale sign. Given this, is it surprising that people are cynical about government?³³

6. Television worships power and devours those who have it. On the one hand, it displays obeisance to the sacred offices of the state.³⁴ But on the other, it subjects holders of power to a contemptuous scrutiny that is more voyeuristic than substantive.

7. Television makes the workings of power invisible. This is as true of its own form of power as of the larger structures of power in which it participates. In presenting itself as providing direct, unmediated, instantaneous reports of events as they are occurring, television obscures the framing force of the medium—for instance, the way stopwatches organize theimages that constitute “the news.” It also obscures its own place within a capitalist economy—for instance, the unprecedented corporate consolidation of the media during the Reagan and older Bush administrations.³⁵

8. Where television does not misinform or underinform us about its own power and complicity with the dominating economic and political powers of our time, it distracts us from power’s effects by substituting what Pierre Bourdieu calls an “imaginary participation,” which is “only an illusory compensation for the dispossession people suffer to the advantage of experts” and professionals.³⁶ This pseudopower is symbolized by the “remote control” that allows people (usually men) to change the world by changing channels.³⁷

9. Television news precludes thoughtfulness, depth, and analysis.It relies on sound bites in which images compete with each other for ninety-second slots and leap from one issue to another in a way that flattens all distinctions and differences. By moving instantly from protests in Bosnia to football in Brazil, from floods in California to spelling bees in Pennsylvania, from research on the AIDS virus to an outing of the royal family, it eliminates hierarchies of significance; each fragment is related to another only by the medium itself.³⁹

10. Television is ahistorical and presentist. In his study of the medium’s coverage of the Ethiopian famine, Michael Ignatieff shows how its “brief, intense and promiscuous gaze”⁴⁰ provided viewers with no opportunity for historical background and no reason to think one would be relevant. It was not only that television ignored the food shortage until it became a famine of epic proportions and so worthy of voyeuristic coverage, but also that, absent any analysis of imperialism and colonialism, the crisis appeared to be a natural phenomenon outside of history and politics. Thus real human suffering was seen as an elemental unmediated moment of connection between human beings outside of time, power, or ideology.

Domestically, te levision (along with other mass media) has turned us into political amnesiacs. This memoryless public is an essential element in the structure of political passivity that sustains “megastate power.”⁴¹ Media politics makes the present the definition of reality. The present itself is merely an arbitrary arrest of sound, motion, and fashion, and the future is simply the next successive image. Because television cannot convey the historical depths of events and the political implications of those events, it ignores history and turns politics into a Nintendo game. Nietzsche’s concern about memory and forgetting becomes a nonproblem.

11. As part of the privatization of public life television is a significant factor in the decline of the rich associational life Tocqueville thought essential to combat the susceptibility of individuals to the quiet despotism of an administrative state, and of what Robert Putnam, building on Tocqueville, calls “social capital.”⁴² The loss of social capital has meanta loss of citizen trust (the proliferation of lawyers and security guards is evidence), of willingness to keep agreements, of reluctance to cheat strangers or to give or take bribes, and of encouragement of good citizenship in one another by unofficial means, all of which is essential to democratic self-government. Not only does the centrality of television privatize public life in a way that undermines social capital; the speed of the medium as represented by MTV promotes superficial relationships rather than deep friendships, or political allegiances and expressive associations at the expense of substantive ones.

There is a great deal to be said for this critique of television. Yet it is an exaggeration and itself antipolitical insofar as it assumes a technological determinism, supposing that the medium is the message, and that the aggregate of such messages does and must define the quality of public life. More than that, it is self-fulfilling and demonizes television rather than allowing it to be seen as a problematic whose contradictory forces and democratic possibilities need to be explored rather than peremptorily foreclosed.

This is not meant to deny that the medium contains a powerful cultural logic, or that regarding it as a neutral instrument to be used for good or ill is superficial. But the challenge is to specify the medium without reifying it, to see it as a cultural form embedded in historical and material practices and shaped by decisions taken by particular groups in specific circumstances. This means studying television both as a vehicle of corporate capitalism and as a generator of forces that move outside or even subvert the hegemony such capitalism seeks to assure. It also means, following Marx on religion, looking at how television salves the wounds and disappointments of daily life, and at how its power may be symptom and sign of our powerlessness. “Even if we could safely dismiss every program on television as artistically worthless,” George Lipsitz writes, “we would still need to understand the ways in which television presents the illusion of intimacy, how it intervenes in family relations, how it serves the consumer economy, and how its hold on the viewing audience is related to the disintegration of public resources, the aggravations of work, and the fragility of interpersonal relations that characterize our lives.”⁴³

Once we see television as part of a larger cultural dialectic, it becomes possible and necessary to ask whether television invented the superficiality and triviality of public discourse, political sloganeering, and distracting pageantry that define our public life, or has become dominant because of that development. If we could transform the vulgarity and shallowness of the medium or even eliminate it altogether, would that restore or let flourish a more acceptable form of discourse? Do charges of television’s being antidemocratic nostalgically ignore the parochialisms, hierarchies, and exclusiveness present in previous forms of public life andcommunication, as one might argue in regard to Habermas’s story about the rise and decline of the public sphere?⁴⁴

It also becomes necessary to look more closely at the assumption that what corporate sponsors and television executives or producers want to communicate is what is in fact communicated: that, in Todd Gitlin’s phrase, the medium “operates hypodermically,” injecting the proper ideas into the unsuspecting bloodstream of the masses. Like those critics who suppose that Aristophanes wrote for two audiences—the sophisticated few who recognized his real intentions and the gullible many who did not—critics from Plato to Adorno, Postman, and Habermas assume that the masses are manipulable fodder for elite control through the latter’s domination of the media.⁴⁵ But there is evidence that the effects of programming are more various and dispersed and the audiences more savvy than this, ⁴⁶ which means that we need to know how programs are read rather than just what is watched. “Preferred readings,” Stuart Hall writes, do not preclude “oppositional ones.”⁴⁷

III

While these responses qualify and complicate the critique of television, they do not, nor are they intended to, undo it.⁴⁸ What they do is to provide interpretive space for thinking about the ways in which television might become something other and “better” than it seems necessarily to be, or, more precisely, about the possibilities of television as a mode of democratic political education. And that opens the door, if only slightly, for reconsidering the apparent absurdity of comparing Old Comedy with television sitcoms.

For the door to stay open or open wider it is necessary to find opportunities for contemporary citizens to experience the pleasures and possibilities of sharing power and responsibility, and for them to bring such experiences to the watching of television.

Such opportunities are present in multiple sites of citizenship, both formally and informally defined. They exist in various environmental, human rights, and gay liberation movements, in women’s health collectives, union organizing, mobilization of the poor, and the frequent complex negotiations in multiethnic neighborhoods that generate vibrant effective local political associations. Of course one must be careful not to romanticize civil society and social movements by assuming that their politics will be wholly congenial. And one must avoid assimilating even such neighborhood politics to the Greek polis, though the idea of “the parallel polis” generated by Václav Havel and Václav Benda—along with Hannah Arendt’s suggestion, noted in the previous chapter, that we thinkof the polis not in its physical location or historical configuration, but as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together”—does provide a language for seeing some analogues.⁴⁹

But even if many of our fellow citizens bring some form of political experience to the watching of television, what about bringing the experience of watching television to that political experience? For reasons already adumbrated, any conclusions on the subject must be highly speculative, which will not of course stop me from offering some.

IV

In many respects stand-up comics such as Eddie Murphy, Phyllis Diller, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Margaret Cho, and Chris Rock, each of whom appears on television regularly, would fit comfortably in the world of Aristophanic comedy. They, like he, violate the normative taboos against toilet talk and vulgarity, give ferociously self-deprecatory first-person accounts of sex and sexuality, and refer to orgasms and flatulence, genitalia and fantasies with casual abandon. Such violations of “decorum” seem especially shocking in the case of younger women comics, which suggests how much a double standard remains in effect. (To watch the very different reactions of most men and women to these comediennes is itself pretty funny.) Then there is the willingness to say what is first-person in other contexts and polite company about corporate greed and military posturing, the personal peccadilloes of politicians, and the romanticizing of marriage, parenthood, and family values (epitomized in Roseanne Barr’s gum-chewing nasal proclamation that she is a “Domestic Goddess”).

The lampooning of cultural icons and political rituals, the ridicule of what have unobtrusively become banal solemnities legitimating suspect power, and the mocking of national narcissism and government manipulation echo Aristophanic comedy. (As the reaction to Bill Maher’s comments on September 11th suggests, there are limits to this, as there were in Athens.) These comics unite high and low entertainment with edification in a way that reminds us of Simon Goldhill’s claim that Athenian democracy was the precondition of comedy, and Nicole Loraux’s argument that the reverse was also true.⁵⁰

Nowhere is comedy’s informally sanctioned privilege more obvious than in the “handling” of racial issues.With very few exceptions, comedy allows a frankness of expression found nowhere else. On the comic stage people are willing to see their carefully screened racial attitudes exposed and mocked. Whether it is Richard Pryor’s parody of white walking and white talking, Margaret Cho mimicking her overly protective, fiercelyachievement-driven Korean mother, or Archie Bunker explaining the nature of “the coloreds” or “the Hebes,” comedy can present forbidden sentiments in public and perhaps unite (an admittedly self-selective) audience in laughter at its own prejudices.

But situation comedies as a genre seem to deal with comfortable emotions and easy issues in a highly stylized format. Anything that disturbs their formulaic bromides is erased within an hour or half hour. All divisions between sexes, generations, races, and classes dissolve in what David Marc calls “a whirlwind resolution” that provides a “tantalizing illusion of structural order in family, community, nation, and cosmos.”⁵¹ Nothing illustrates the erasure of dissonance better than Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy about Allied prisoners in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp that manages not to mention Nazism or Jews. From this show to Ally McBeal, sitcoms are populated by generic protagonists and static characters whose principal role is spouting one-liners.

Of course there are exceptions that seem to share some of the aims and sensibility of Aristophanic comedy. The cartoonish characters on Third Rock from the Sun often reveal something provocative about the “real world” their more realistic counterparts do not. When we laugh at the Solomons, it is because the absurdities and shifting boundaries of their lives mimic ours, which means we wind up laughing at ourselves.⁵² Then there is The Roseanne Barr Show on same-sex relations, generational conflict, teen pregnancy, obesity, and working-class life generally; Beavis and Butt-Head on the infantilization of culture (including television); and Absolutely Fabulous on the vacuity of consumerism and parental authority.

But I want to focus on two sitcoms that are different in mood and content and appear at very different moments in the development of television, popular culture, and political life. The first is The Honeymooners, the second, The Simpsons. Pompously put, one is modern, the other postmodern.

Writing about Aristophanes, David Konstan argues that “[w]here society is riven by tensions and inequalities of class, gender and status, its ideology will be unstable, and literary texts will betray signs of strain involved in forging such refractory materials into a unified composition.” 53 The Honeymooners can be read in these terms. It enacts while trying to expunge television’s role in papering over the bitter divisions that surface in consumer heaven, and that very process was dramatized by the contradiction between it and the show of which it was, for a number of years, a segment.

Most viewers were introduced to The Honeymooners as part of a variety show whose overall tone and frame could not have been more at odds with the life of Ralph Kramden. The show began with an overproduced dance number that seemed equally inspired by Busby Berkeley and LasVegas. At its conclusion, Jackie Gleason made a leering entrance dressed in ostentatious finery that paid unembarrassed obeisance to his nouveau richness. When it came to booze and broads, this man lived like a king with a banner proclaiming, “How sweet it is.” Following his royal entrance, Gleason did five minutes or so of stand-up and then asked for “a little traveling music.”

The journey was multilayered: from Manhattan to Brooklyn;⁵⁴ from present success to a Depression-era past, when Gleason left school to become a pool hustler in a working-class neighborhood like the one in which The Honeymooners is set; from Farouk-like royalty to the wounded machismo of a fat guy who drives a bus; from ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption to “a barebones flat the likes of which this consumer medium has not seen since.”⁵⁵ The flat is barren not only of material comforts but of social and psychological ones as well—all this despite the name of the show. The Kramdens’ poverty was present in what was in their apartment and what was not: in the antiquated oven and icebox that barely worked, and the nonexistent telephone and television. Such technological backwardness suggests people whom time and progress have passed by, who are cut off from others and forced to turn in and on themselves. This claustrophobic atmosphere, compounded by the absence of children and a bedroom and the choice of static camera positions, recapitulated their endlessly repetitive lives.

All attempts to open up this world fail miserably. They try to adopt a child, spending all they have to decorate their apartment to impress the adoption agency, only to have the charade demeaningly exposed. After they go to such lengths to pretend to have what they do not and be what they are not, the iceman cometh to demand payment on an overdue bill. Their hopes destroyed, they lapse back into a world without a future. No new beginnings or culture of self-help here.

Ralph’s get-rich-quick schemes—glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, developing uranium mines on the Jersey shore—are no more successful and no less desperate. He is stuck in a dead-end job that brings him neither the material rewards nor the social recognition he craves. Though full of bluster, he is intimidated by the powerful and wealthy. The few moments when he tells someone off are always based on a false premise that forces him into an abject apology later. In all other situations he stands before them hat in hand, looking down at the floor, overly earnest and fawning, as if enacting the stereotype of the slave. For this sycophant with a hair-trigger temper there is no American dream; Horatio Alger might as well be a beer label.

The show is built around two unspoken ironies: its title and his work. As I have already suggested, ther e is nothing honeymoonish about the show, despite the deus ex machina endings of “Alice, you ’re the greatest.” Themoon we hearmost about is the one Ralph threatens to send Alice to when he is in one of his typical rages. Indeed, th e threat of domestic violence is omnipresent. Ralph’s attempt to be master of his house (in contrast to his obsequiousness in the presence of his “betters”) is continually frustrated by Alice, w ho remains “terrifyingly calm” and thoroughly unintimidated in the midst of his fury. Her “Now, l isten to me, Ralph” is both motherly and caustic, a dvice as well as insult. Then there is his job as a bus driver. The idea of a man as impatient as he is driving a bus in Manhattan traffic is both frightening and funny. It is hard to know what would be worse: riding with him or being a pedestrian anywhere near him.

Finally, Ralph is a prime candidate for an early death. Dangerously overweight, constantly frantic, volatile, frustrated, and disappointed, he is heading for a stroke or heart attack. If one were to enumerate the victims of modernity or capitalism, then Ralph Kramden would be high on the list.

But this is all frog dissection. The show is often hilariously funny, particularly when Ralph hatches some plot with his sewer-tending pal, Ed Norton. Norton is everything Ralph is not: self-satisfied, with an oblivious calmness that enables him to slough off life’s insults and focus on what really matters—food. Moreover, there is some opening up of and to the world: a (disastrous) trip to Europe, Raccoon Lodge meetings, an appearance on a quiz show, and a classic train ride.

Though I can imagine Aristophanes writing for The Honeymooners, I am convinced, on the flimsiest of evidence, that should he come down (or more likely up) to earth, he would be a writer for The Simpsons, and not only because the patriarch of the family is named Homer. (The New Yorker had a cartoon of Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. You can guess which Homer it was.) Like Aristophanic comedy the show is anarchic yet pointed, sophisticated, and raucous, anti-intellectual in an intellectual way, subversive and caustic about the excesses of its own subversions. As with Aristophanes’ comedies, the issues are serious—greed and the passion to consume, nuclear power safety and corporate responsibility in general, the erosion of community and local control, the dangers of the therapeutic state, self-help programs and moralistic religiosity, high culture and television itself—while their treatment is farcical. 56 Finally, The Simpsons’ distrust of power remote from ordinary people, its suspicion of intellectual pretense (as when Mensa tried to establish a Plato-like utopia in Springfield), and its mocking of institutions, practices, and cultural forms that pretend to be natural recall Old Comedy.

Homer Simpson is the Strepsiades of his generation. Like Strepsiades, he is ineptly self-interested, manipulative and greedy; he has low and vulgar tastes, tries to cheat his creditors, is infinitely gullible, and has to deal with a “difficult” son. Homer’s vision of the good life is a day in thehammock or owning a used grease concession. He is forever wanting things he’ll never have, scheming to get them only to fail miserably (which is why one critic thinks Homer’s struggle owes as much to Ralph Kramden as to “the poetry of Aristophanes”).⁵⁷ Yet, like Strepsiades, Homer loves his family and, in his own morally bumbling way, is superior to those who proclaim their superiority.

The Simpsons has a cartoon within its own cartoonness that brilliantly satirizes the popular culture of which it is a part. Itchy and Scratchy is its name, and it is every parent’s nightmare. Full of the gratuitous violence that politicians rail against, it has episodes entitled “The Last Traction Hero” and “Remembrance of Things Slashed”; it portrays a Disney-like theme park divided into Torture Land, Explosion Land, Search Gas Pain Land, and Unnecessary Surgery Land, with a state-of-the-art chemical dependency center for Mom and Dad to visit while the kids destroy everything. In one episode, Itchy and Scratchy writers are running out of themes, so they produce a show about running out of themes. In another, a panic about ratings leads to the creation of focus groups and co-optation of new trends (such as rap music) to keep the cliche´d show on for a bit longer. Others are devoted to the cartoon industry, suggesting a self-reflectiveness also present in Old Comedy.⁵⁸

The Simpsons does something Old Comedy did not need to do and The Honeymooners did not do: it preempts the blunting of its satire by the commercialized nature of the medium. To the annoyance of the Fox network, i t mocks television commercials and the way theirmere existence (let alone their explicit content) frames and thus blunts the program’s irony.

The Simpsons has certainly had an impact on the “outside” world. Elementary schools tried to ban Bart Simpson T-shirts, and George Bush attacked The Simpsons in his 1992 State of the Union address, tel ling Americans they should be more like the Waltons than the Simpsons. (A week later The Simpsons responded that they themselves were like the Waltons since they were also living through an economic depression.) But of course Bart’s contempt for authority is as American as Tom Sawyer’s or Huck Finn’s, an d while The Simpsons does indeed mock the idealized portrait of the 1950s family and the self-righteousness of the Religious Right, it ultimately endorses the family, a s ragtag as it may be, and, al most uniquely on television, rec ognizes the importance of religion in American life.⁵⁹

But in what ways, if any, can we say that The Simpsons contributes to the political education of democratic citizens?

It is a good question. It is a good question because present circumstances suggest that while political satire is booming (the people who count such things say it has increased fourfold in the past decade), politics isn’t. Late-night comics like Leno, Letterman, O’Brien, and Maher, to mention only those on network television, are full of biting jokes thatskewer the persons and pretensions of politicians. Yet almost all of the jokes are devoid of ideological content and social commentary of the sort found in Old Comedy. The question is whether once politics has become a form of entertainment, forms of entertainment (which Old Comedy certainly was) can be political. The question becomes even more pointed when political figures appearing on late-night talk shows fawn over the host rather than the other way around, as was once the case. The next president, David Letterman boasted, goes through me. It was a joke, of course, but not much of one.⁶⁰

What The Simpsons can do and what Aristophanic comedy almost certainly did was to make the assumptions of the culture visible in a way that brings politics and power back into the realm of social agreements and out of the realm of an unchangeable order of things. Thus The Ecclesiazusae challenges the natural differences between young and old, beautiful and ugly, men and women. Why should the young and attractive have easier access to sexual pleasure? Why shouldn’t the old be given sexual privileges? Why should only men have political power and not women? If you believe in equality, why stop with equality among male citizens? What is it about women that debars them from sharing such power? Even if the Assembly cannot eliminate biological differences—if biological is what they are—why shouldn’t it alter the meaning of those differences by equalizing the functional advantages associated with them?⁶¹ The Simp-sons raises similar questions about capitalism, religion, mass media, and inequalities of status, intelligence, and power.

It is a good question for another reason. If, as some critics such as Jedidiah Purdy charge, our culture is one of irony, and that irony erodes what Robert Putnam calls “social capital,” then The Simpsons may be part of the problem. Purdy thinks the danger in irony is that it is less a way of conveying hidden meaning than an undermining of meaning altogether, and that the refusal to believe in the depth of relationships or trust the truth of speech or the sincerity of motivation leaves us putting scare quotes around our lives. Purdy thinks this has led to an alienation and indifference that encompass a passive acceptance of things as they are. All of this, he argues, is represented by Seinfeld.⁶² Perhaps it is. But The Simpsons is not Seinfeld, and demographics suggest they have significantly different audiences, the former cutting across ethnic particularities in the way the latter does not. Moreover, The Simpsons is less ironic than satiric in precisely the way Old Comedy was.

Even then there are many forms of irony and many instances in which irony can be a way of investing something with insight and feeling. And there are good reasons to resist the possibility and desirability of the purified language Purdy seems to oppose to irony. Finally, irony might even make political deliberation possible. If being ironic means havingsome distance from one’s views, then it allows argument to be something other than people simply repeating their views at increasingly high decibel levels. If that is the sense in which The Simpsons is ironic, we should be thankful.

V

The great Marxist critic C.L.R. James thought television would be an art of the people and for the people; that it would, precisely because of the kind of medium it was, be able to dramatize the infinite complexity of modern life in “the manner of the Greeks.” Television (as well as film, comic strips, and radio) could, he believed, “shake the nation to its soul” as Aristophanes did to the soul of the Athenians.⁶³

With few exceptions (Roots might be one), this has clearly not occurred. As now constituted, television continues to sustain a presentism in which memoryless citizens are made politically passive. This social and economic “fact” must be the beginning of any study of television as a cultural phenomenon. But after noting the fact and acknowledging the lost opportunities it represents, one must also acknowledge that it need not always be that way, that television is a more diverse medium than its critics recognize. We need, as Stanley Cavell put it some years ago, to think of television as a “question,”⁶⁴ and to develop criteria of judgment and political critiques that are not simply mechanical applications of principles developed for other arts that, unsurprisingly, reveal television to be a miserable failure. Indeed, by recognizing the falseness of television’s claims merely to represent the real world, we can move beyond the rather astonishing circumstance that, as Alexander Nehamas has noted, the “greatest part of contemporary criticism of television depends on a moral disapproval that is identical with Plato’s attack on . . . poetry.”⁶⁵

More particularly, while it would be absurd to claim that The Simpsons “shake[s] the nation to its soul,” it has played a significant interrogatory role in our public life. It does not, any more than Old Comedy did, provide solutions to particular problems or offer directives to ameliorate injustice. But it does, as Old Comedy did, make fun of contemporary institutions, culture, and social practices in ways that might lead citizens to think differently and even act differently. More certainly, it will make its audience laugh at themselves in ways that maintain some space between our identities and our public commitments. In that alone it might help keep America whole, not to mention the frog.