Читать книгу Couch City - Harry Berger - Страница 12

The world of Berger’s Protagoras is dramatically and literarily capacious as well as charismatically bounded and contagious. With no possibility of immunity from its subversive speech dynamics, not even for Socrates, the dialogue appears to offer no way out. In the registers of sophistic, interlocutory, and poetic speech, as these are depicted in the dialogue, this is true. Socrates’s and Protagoras’s performances at the gathering of sophists charismatically bind them to each other and also to their audience. In the Protagoras, however, Socrates speaks not only as a participant at the gathering (interlocutor to Protagoras, performer for the audience, interpreter/producer of poetic speech). He is also the dialogue’s narrator. What happens, Berger asks, when we pay attention to narratorial speech?

Socrates’s role as narrator is in evidence at the beginning of the Protagoras. Ahead of his account of the gathering, Socrates is depicted in an exchange with what most translators call a “friend” or “companion,” but, as hetairos, is probably better translated as “comrade” (309a–310a). When the comrade learns that Socrates has just been in a “long conversation” with Protagoras, he asks Socrates to recount it, if he is free. Socrates replies that he would “look on it as a favor [charis]” if the comrade would listen. The comrade answers that he would see it as an act of charis if Socrates spoke. Sealing and mutualizing their charis bond, Socrates calls it a “double favor [diplou charis].” With the exception of one comment that Socrates makes to the comrade at the end of his first description of the gathering (316a), the Protagoras never explicitly returns to its frame.

But, as always, the frame is crucial. For Berger, Socrates’s framing narration enables him to appear as not only “trapped in the role of sophistical parodist and entertainer” but also as aware of his plight. Similarly, as Berger notes in “Facing Sophists,” Socrates’s statement—“The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking”—may be read not only as “a disclaimer of responsibility” but also as “a rueful confession of failure” (381). Socrates’s awareness that the I, in speech, is inevitably an I-in-relation-to-my-audience does not break the bond of speech or undo the law of interlocution. But it does open the possibility that the charis bond of speech need not always and necessarily result in charismatic bondage. And this opens the possibility that the Protagoras is not only depicting, describing, and performing its charismatic bondages, but also targeting them.

Consider again Socrates’s framing narration. When the comrade invites Socrates to “sit down here” and tell the story of the gathering, he directs Socrates to the place occupied by his “boy” or slave. Socrates complies, and, in taking the slave’s place, casts a shadow over his freedom. Socrates, in turn, tells the comrade to “Just listen” (310a) and the comrade does as he is told, speaking no more for the remainder of the dialogue. Charis bond or charismatic bondage? Socrates sets up the “double” and reversible bond of interlocution in a way that makes it hard to tell. The dialogue’s frame thereby puts us on the lookout for the proximities and differences between the charis bond of interlocution and charismatic bondage, which rematerialize just a few lines later when, in a mirror of the opening, Hippocrates sits down by Socrates’s feet (310c), as well as when Socrates and the sophists first make their own charis exchanges (328d–e, 335d). The dialogue’s frame also puts both of these speech bonds in their place. When Hippocrates sits by Socrates’s feet, the very first thing he tells Socrates is about his runaway slave, Satyrus, whom he has spent the last two days trying to recapture (310c). With Socrates’s displacement of the comrade’s slave and Satyrus, it is implied, still at large, Plato excludes slaves from the dialogue’s depictions of the transformations of the charis bond and its assumptions of reciprocity and reversibility—doubling and symmetry—into bondage. And this suggests that he may not have been blind to the significant and substantial differences between the bondages of enslavement and those of interlocution.

Under what conditions might the charis bond of speech not become charismatic bondage? Perhaps if confessions of failure stop being, as they are in the Protagoras, occasions for weaponizing virtue or speaking in the name of another to evade responsibility, and become instead occasions for avowals of responsibility. Those avowals, which Berger calls assuming “the middle voice of shared responsibility,” depend first and foremost on acknowledging the power of words as deeds to affect the ethical capacities of speakers and auditors. The main characters of the Protagoras fail to assume that voice. But their failures, as these are explored in Couch City, may, in prompting readers of the dialogue to do otherwise, open a different ethics, rhetoric, and politics of responsibility.