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We begin this article with a number of thoughts that are highlighted on the Amnesty International website.
Indeed, freedom of expression means being able to communicate and express oneself freely, and is a fundamental right for living in a fair and open society. In this respect, at the Symposium Institute, it is an aspect that we have always wanted to reflect on. I therefore recommend that you read Jordi Montaner Maragall's article "Plumas contra lanzas" (The Pen versus The Spear) to get another perspective on this issue.
It is obvious, but no less necessary to emphasise, that the right to express and disseminate, to seek, receive and share information and ideas without fear or unlawful interference is an essential pillar for the education of every human being, enabling us to develop as individuals, to actively help and decide on ways to develop our respective communities, to access justice and to enjoy each of the fundamental rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
However, it should be noted that in some cases it can actually serve illiberal forms of power to completely reverse this objective for their own, often spurious, purposes. In other words, social media can end up being a means of blocking new activism that governments struggle to control, and more: it can be used in a transmedia strategy by governments and spurious interests by offering a complete reversal of the concepts of parrhesia, and those that follow from it, to build liberal elements on the plane of the Enlightenment and the exercise of all means to build open and free societies. This is a recurrent phenomenon in history and has also been reflected in the cinema. We will therefore propose a series of reflections based on selected pieces of different filmographies.
Parrhesia in its Historical Context: The Role of Theatre and Comedy as an Instrument of Mass Manipulation
Well, freedom of speech could find its referent in Athens in the middle of the 5th century BC. C, in the parrhesia παρρησία (from Ionian Greek παν = all + ρησις / ρημα = locution / speech), and would come to mean something like 'to say anything', within civic life and, although slander and blasphemy were considered legal offences, the degree of freedom of expression enjoyed by the Athenians could be equated to that of many modern cultures, if in some cases not even exceeded. It is precisely for this reason, and for the task of convincing the Assembly, that this political principle was so important and is linked to the presence of the sophists, those who, on payment of generous sums for the best, taught the arts of rhetoric and eloquence to persuade the audience.
But political life does not stop there, as it turns to the central element of politics, a weapon of communication and education in the hands of the great Greek tragedians (Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus), but also with comedy and the political use made of it by Aristophanes; or, rather, we should emphasise the use of theatre by those who pay for plays, to subsidise artistic works, plays, pay for expenses such as free meals, participation in the Panhellenic games, etc. ... anything that could make the theatre more attractive to those who pay for it. ... anything that brought voters to share views and best opinions about a particular individual and his person served a purpose..... but it is in the Assembly and in the theatre that paresis will have a fundamental weight in democratic life as a rhetorical figure, before being used by philosophical schools like the Cynics or the Epicureans.
The theatre, which as a site is precisely a 'place of contemplation' (θέατρον, theátron), would today be the mass media and social networks. And this precisely highlights the very significance of this element as a civic institution in fifth-century Athens BC.
That is, just as a full citizen has rights and duties, which in our time and thanks to Pericles, involve receiving a public salary, if necessary, to serve in the army, the navy, the civic institutions seen so far, and which have a spirit of "gathering the commons", the theatre is the place where one should also gather, as a more fundamental part of the democratic body politic, the demeos, to "contemplate". What? For this period, three different types of theatrical function, which eventually polarised into two: Tragedy and Comedy.
As for the theatre, Athens had a huge open-air theatre with a capacity of 15,000 seats. Some high-ranking officials had to supervise these popular performances. The plays of the best authors were performed at the most important festivals in the following way: three plays plus a fourth, alternating tragedy and comedy. The officials decided which of these plays were to be performed on the different days of the festivals, so that the whole polis was affected. The winning play became a reference for the citizens, which they talked about and discussed, while at the same time becoming a reference for, for example, Aristophanes, where he used paragraphs and plots from Sophocles and, above all, Euripides, in order to divert the plot and manipulate the masses.
The choice of elaborate and complex costumes, sets, stage machinery, not to mention the best actors and chorus elements, not to mention the rehearsals to ensure that the text and the way it was delivered were perfect - all this took months and enormous effort. For this reason, because of the intrinsic value of theatre as a place of civic education and political expression, the polis allocated public money from the liturgies (literally, 'plays of the people', λειτουργία/leitourgía, from λαός/laós, 'the people', and the root ἐργο ergo, 'to make, to accomplish') for all performances. But the complexity, the rigour, the expense and the effort to succeed were enormous. So it was accepted that citizens with sufficient resources could contribute to the expenses, the so-called choregos (χορηγός, "he who leads the chorus"), and the dramatist was responsible for supervising the play, directing the rehearsals, choosing the best props and costumes, etc. Obviously, the more the choreographer was paid, the more he influenced the content, and in general, if there was satisfaction between the author and the "producer", so to speak, the more the dramatist could work and get prizes. Even, if his stage skills allowed for it in terms of voice and dance, since there were both sung and danced parts, choreographers could appear on stage for the audience's enjoyment.
This public service with private funds was very much appreciated by the people, as it contributed to their entertainment, the effects of which would last for a long time, the content of this play would be discussed by the citizens and its vision would be sown in the whole population having the right to vote, but influencing in a global way, including women, even if they did not have this right. Indeed, any successful playwright, or one very close to it at other times, was known by the people as the 'master of the people'... and the fact that part of the 'text' they were to inculcate in the people was paid for by a potentate, a guarantor of success, gave not only prestige to the choregos, but also an influence that was to be manifested in the domestic, foreign, military, economic and moral policies of the polis. The choreographer whose work was successful had the right to erect a stone and metal monument, paid for by him, which commemorated his success in the eyes of the whole world.
Similarly, now that we have a basic audiovisual instrument associated with a screen, we can 'take advantage' of what the 'choregos' of our time offer us by promising us 'free' opinion, debate and entertainment, and access to these media for life, 'because it will always be free' in the form of commitment on the part of certain social networks.
Aristophanes' Model: Serving the Oligarchy
Looking at Aristophanes' plays as a whole, it is clear that the author identifies a series of enemies, on whom he hurls his astracanadas, and all of them revolve around the elements and subjects that undermine the control of power of the oligarchs in Athens.
Let us remember the figure of the choregos, the rich man who supplements with remarkable private funds the public funds allocated to all in order to influence the "dêmos" and gain prestige and prizes, as well as to make this message last for a long time by talking about it in the public and private life of the polis.
It is relevant to highlight the following ideas:
1/ Oligarchic propaganda is disseminated through the work of Aristophanes, and does so through comedy. This is in contrast to the use of the gravity of tragedy, a means of educating the 'demesne' in order to promote political, economic and social reforms that would make them free and equal subjects, as mentioned above.
2/ Aristophanes' criticism of Euripides is based on a single idea: to criticise rationality. These criticisms, which are spread over almost the whole of his work, are also concentrated in two plays that Aristophanes 'dedicates' to Euripides, The Thesmophoria (411 BC) and The Frogs (405 BC). It should be noted that the cycle marked by the years 412 and 411 BC is marked by a clear weakness of Athens in its conflict against Sparta, which had organised a naval force to exploit the Decelian breach, affecting Athens' economic resources and resulting in the loss of about 20,000 slaves who abandoned the farms, towns and strategic mines of southern Attica. Let us remember that rationality is one of the fundamental premises of a well-functioning democracy, in addition to material prosperity. It is already being played out against Athenian democracy; the former is attacked by Aristophanes for the first time and with full force in 411... just as Alcibiades is manoeuvring to return to Athens and an oligarchic revolution is taking place under the protection of the city and Alcibiades. The so-called Council of the Four Hundred was formed to replace the democratic Council of the Five Hundred, all of whose members were wealthy; these 400 men in turn prepared a new political census so that only the 5,000 richest men in Athens would participate in the Assembly. In the meantime, diplomatic relations were established with Sparta in order, among oligarchs, to reach a peace agreement. In the end, Alcibiades realised that his political game made more sense at that time with democracy, and the oligarchic coup failed. Supporting the oligarchic offensive, that year also saw the birth of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, 411 BC, a pessimistic vision of a peace that would, if achieved, serve as a pact with the Spartans and their oligarchy.
What is the context in which The Frogs takes place in 405 BC? Why attack 'rationality' again, especially when Euripides has been dead for almost a year? Aristophanes' style of play differs negatively from that of his 'competitor' in the same theatrical genre, Aeschylus, who paid homage to Euripides when the news of his death reached the kingdom of Macedonia. But Aristophanes again uses comedy as a political weapon to attack democracy by attacking 'rationality' in the face of the dêmos. The defeat of Antiochus, a helmsman of Alcibiades, at Notio by Lysander's Peloponnesian fleet left Alcibiades out of Athens for good, because the Assembly voted so, due to the propaganda action of the oligarchs. The miraculous and brilliant victory of the Athenian strategists in the naval battle of Arginusae was a stroke of bad luck. In the Aegean Sea, storms are terrible and unpredictable. After the battle, Athenian strategists saw an opportunity to divide the forces, with a few ships picking up the shipwrecked and recovering the bodies of the dead, while the rest of the fleet pursued the Peloponnesian fleet financed by Cyrus the Younger, the youngest son of the Persian king, to move from a tactical to a strategic victory and put the conflict on a winning footing for Athens. An unforeseen storm broke out, and the strategists were unable to reach and definitively defeat the Peloponnesians. In these conditions, they tried to arrive as quickly as possible to rescue those they had left behind, as conditions had worsened. A trial was organised where the dêmos, manipulated by the oligarchs, wanted to condemn all these strategists to death, because they were the ones who had come to command from a democratic perspective while Alcibiades was leading the war. It was a death blow to democracy. Socrates tried to warn against the tricks used, but ended up making even more enemies. Oligarchic propaganda would establish that rationality is ungodliness, an offence to the gods, in connection with the religiosity of the common people, and that democracy is all that.
As we can see, Aristophanes does not seem to neglect the issue, just as The Birds, dating from 414 BC, also contains a satire of Athenian imperialism, the mainstay of Athens' functioning as a political system. Or as with the restoration of democracy in 403 BC comes a critique of democracy as such in The Assemblywomen (393 BC). ), where he criticises the fact that the restoration of democracy has led to the demesne being paid to attend the Assembly, so that there is a kind of daily competition, according to Aristophanes (The Assemblywomen, 378-379), on the part of a demesne that already has all the characteristics of having become an increasingly impoverished body politic, where the political system is controlled by demagogues who try to hold on to power and manage wealth by manipulating the votes of these people in various ways, a situation that will end with the elimination of these institutions by the Kingdom of Macedonia in 322 BC.
3/ Exploitation of contradictions. Let us recall that the formation of the demesne starts from the union to form a political body of craftsmen and peasants. The city and the countryside together. It is conceivable that the separation of the two bodies is a good way to start controlling the strengthening of the dêmos by Ephialtes and Pericles. So we are talking about the ideas of patronage and clientelism. It is important to define these two ideas correctly, and for this we will turn to the following text:
"Patronage is asymmetrical; it involves unequal power; it tends to form a large system; to extend over time, or at least not to be limited to a single, isolated transaction; to possess a particular ethos; and, although not always illegal or immoral, to be outside the formal morality officially proclaimed by the society in question. To some extent, this set of traits may be present almost everywhere, or at least is fairly common. What constitutes a patronage society is not the mere presence of this syndrome, but its prominent or dominant position, to the detriment of other principles of social organisation. Gellner (1986, 13).
In turn, Scott adds an interesting nuance when he says that:
"It is important to note that the term "employer-client relationship" is sometimes used indiscriminately to refer to any relationship of personal dependence, without taking into account that for clients it may constitute an exploitative relationship. It would be more correct... to avoid the value-based terms 'employer' and 'client', and to speak instead of personal dependency relationships between members of different classes. From this point on, the question of the degree of equity or exploitation becomes a matter of empirical analysis, and ceases to be a disguised prejudice. Scott (1985, 57-58).
By the time Cimon is expelled and Ephialtes is murdered, a pact is made that makes democracy stable and attractive to the oligarchs, who aspire to control it and use it for their own purposes, taking up the tools and methods used by the democrats, as Ober (1989) concludes. The latter gives prominence to rhetoric, philosophy and theatre, opting for comedy as embodied by Aristophanes (e.g. in The Acharnians, 19-39, where Aristophanes shows us that the peasants now count more frequently than before in decision-making). Thus, the use of comedy by the oligarchs for their political purposes is a way of manipulating the demesne in order to divide it. The domination of the city over the countryside in economic activity is reinforced by the Peloponnesian War and its consequences, notably the plague. If Aeschylus promoted the rise of Pericles in The Persians by recalling and reinstating Themistocles, Aristophanes does the same with Cimon in Lysistrata, performed in 411 BC, when he puts the Athenian heroine in the mouth of the Athenian heroine:
Lysistrata: And then, Lacedaemonians, since I am now turning to you, do you not know that once Periclidas the Laconian came here and sat before the altars like a suppliant of the Athenians, pale in his scarlet cloak, begging for an army? At that time Messinia was falling on you, and so was the god of earthquakes. But Cimon went with four thousand hoplites and saved the whole of Lacedemonia. After receiving this favour from the Athenians, do you sack their territory, from which you have received benefits?
Nice quote and nice argument presented to the dêmos to make peace with the Spartans and their alliance, isn't it? But it is a lie. Aristophanes manipulates the dêmos by explaining a part that is true, there was an earthquake that shook Sparta and cost thousands of lives. Aristophanes' lies then begin: the Spartans, or Lacedaemonians, are an oligarchic power. In fact, the conflict of the Peloponnesian War will end with an oligarchy established in Athens by Sparta, which will be overthrown. Recall that Cimon was trying to establish a tyranny by focusing on the rural part of the demesne in imitation of Pisistratus. He distorts the facts when he says that "Messinia at that time was falling on you", because, while it is clear from his words that Aristophanes recognises Messinia as a Greek people, and they are indeed a Greek people, it is no less true that the Spartans, who used the freedom of all Greeks as a piece of propaganda, and with this slogan waged war on the Persians in the second invasion, also waged war on the Persians. But they also used this slogan to promote oligarchy against Athens and its democracy. The Spartan oxymoron and hypocrisy is particularly evident in the fact that the Messenians, a Greek people, were defeated by the Spartans and enslaved en masse to keep them; among their religious acts, the Spartans carried out an annual massacre of Messenian Greek slaves, as well as destroying what little they had and abusing their legal position. So yes, the Messenians came against the Lacedaemonians... but for freedom, justice and redress. It is also true that Cimon, an Athenian oligarch and therefore pro-Spartan, spoke in the Assembly in response to the request for help from Sparta, then still allied to Athens by the shadow of the Persian power ; The fact is that when Cimon, a brilliant strategist, arrived with such a display of resources on the part of Athens, and despite the fact that Cimon was in command, they feared that he would be removed from his command or that he would obey the Athenians, and that they would join the Messenians, restoring their cities, their fields and their freedom. This was a huge affront to Athens on the part of Sparta and made relations extremely tense.
Aristophanes in his plays is constantly defending the rural part of the demesne, charging against the democratic politicians, especially Cleon, against the economic, commercial and political system that allows the preponderance of the city over the countryside, the pillar of democracy, freedom and equality, taking advantage of the receptivity of the peasants who suffered from the war and the loss of their crops, as well as of their slaves. Democracy was to blame for all this, the Spartans were very good, things should be as they were when Pisistratus, of course, does not mention that he came to power on the basis of abuses in the form of debt and slavery of the eupatrics, Those who would come to control their "freedom" and ensure their prosperity by magic because they were increasingly exposed to a process of further impoverishment and proletarianisation of large parts of the population, especially the rural ones, and yes, the rural ones, The industrial and commercial power of Athens and its port would endure, and the oligarchs were determined not to lose their share of the cake, which brought them huge profits. Athens should therefore ask the Spartans for peace without thinking of the consequences, which would mean a strengthening of the oligarchy and a degradation of living conditions and real freedom. He devotes three works to this: The Acharnians, The Peace and Lysistrata. In speaking out against the Athenian empire, he dedicates The Birds. We also know from The Acharnians that in the Dionysia of 426 BC, Aristophanes presented a play, now lost, entitled The Babylonians. In this play, Aristophanes presents the members of the League of Delos as slaves of Cleon... and he did so precisely on that day, because this play was to be seen by the members of the League of Delos who came every year to pay the phoros or tribute to Athens. In other words, he called for a rebellion of the undemocratic oligarchs who held power in the League of Delos. Cleon acted against Aristophanes, accusing him of treason. Let us not forget that in 427 BC, Mytilene revolted against Athens. Aristophanes' play was therefore intended to create a greater state of unrest among Athens' allies whose leaders were undemocratic.
Thus, in the field of domestic policy, he is absolutely opposed to the warmongering demagogues and democrats (besides Cleon, against whom he takes exception, he also mentions Hyperbolus and Cleophon), he takes exception to those who occupy the position of strategists and support the democratic policy, He also criticises the officials who support this course of action, as well as that part of the sovereign people, whom he describes as abulic and perverted by the flattery of demagogues, who do not know how to choose their rulers correctly. His criticism is never directed at the institutions of democracy, however, but at the people who represent them and who are in favour of radical democracy and the stopping of Sparta, i.e. he does not call for a change of constitution, but for other men in government. To the people he speaks of what we would call today a 'meritocratic' component, according to which honesty and diligence should be rewarded, which should lead to prosperity and well-being. Whereas for Pericles' democracy, a man must divide his time between the public sphere and the personal and family sphere, for Aristophanes the good citizen is one who concentrates on his own affairs, does not participate in politics and leaves everything in the hands of the eupatrids, i.e. the oligarchic-democratic ideology of Solon's time, approximately ; This is called in Greek apragmosýnē (ἀπραγμοσύνη), or "apolitism" (literally: "freedom from political effort"), which derives from "prudence" (sōfrosýnē), which must be expressed by the humble classes.
4/ Against Socrates and the Sophists.
The motives are the same as those of which he accuses Euripides: rationality. This has implications for morality, politics and religion.
There are many more references to money in the comedy than in other literary sources. The love of money is something that is clearly present, and yet Aristophanes will not even make a veiled criticism of it, except in the last of his plays, Pluto, which was performed shortly before his death. Someone so traditional, at least on the surface, and Aristophanes does not launch into a full-throated defence of the old system of solidarity that bound the chrēstós citizen with 'non-economic' or even 'anti-economic' ties to the community, which is clearly disappearing to the despair of the working classes and who, in the restoration of democracy, will be paid to attend the Assembly and vote what the eupatrids tell them to vote, surely as a protective mechanism for the system. The propagandist element expressed by Aristophanes claims that poverty is 'voluntary', because if one works honestly and leaves politics in the hands of the eupatrids, one is assured of earning a living by one's own labour, even making a profit. However, we have already pointed out that the Empire and the power structures imply market and price control, a massive influx of slaves, economic orientation, in short, all the conditions for such a discourse to be impossible. It is also interesting to note that for Aristophanes, absolute destitution inspires only contempt.
Formal and Relevant Aspects of Aristophanes' Comedy
In general, what characterises comedy is the ἀπροσδόκητον (aprosdókēton), i.e. the constant play of surprise, of the unexpected, which comes through the dislocation, exaggeration or reduction to absurdity of the reality that one wants to criticise.
Aristophanes' plays begin by describing a situation of need that arouses the discontent of a part of the people, the conscious part, towards which the main ideas of the speech are directed. Then the presence of an individual saving idea in the protagonist to remedy the situation is immediately suggested. I was struck by the fact that the solutions in Aristophanes are always individual, never collective. It is about setting up an individual model, which makes a mockery of archetypal elements and characters. The intention is that the people to whom the speech is addressed should believe these arguments, that they should individually believe the speech and the idea that Aristophanes is projecting: a clever, brilliant guy who ridicules the opposing sages and politicians, but also those who share the opposite idea. Either there are no real arguments to defend, or the arguments are manipulated, which is characterised by the fact that he does not use reason but the image he projects.
Then comes the execution of the saving idea and finally the beneficial effects are illustrated in a few particular cases, which always happen to an individual, unlike tragedy where we talk about collectives, as in Aeschylus' Persians, for example.
Aristophanes' discourse is based on two clear and distinct principles: 'the critical idea' and 'the comic theme'. The former consists of Aristophanes' judgement of a serious situation that affects all citizens equally. He goes on to individualise himself again, and sets himself up as a model for all to emulate. This is Aristophanes' opinion as a citizen, and it lacks originality, he does not present himself as a political thinker, nor as a theorist of education, nor as a moral philosopher, but as a comedian who conveys prestigious ideas, however, his speech includes ideas in all these areas, it does not look like it; we could say that he presents it as a matter of "common sense". The part called "comic theme" does not consist of the exposition of the critical idea, let's imagine a pamphlet, but it is presented and crushed in the form of the fantastic and the comic. The protagonist, a 'folk hero', is the one who finds the saving wit and implements the comic theme; he has fabulous energy and enormous sensitivity, he is not rational, rather he is a character who always gets his way, whatever the occasion and whatever the difficulty. For Whitman (1964), he is defined as a 'braggart' (ἀλαζών), i.e. he is in reality either a fraud.
Almost always towards the middle of the play the chorus turns to the audience to play an interlude, which serves to interrupt the course of events and is used by Aristophanes to launch a false debate, manipulating and even distorting dialectical opposites. The role of the chorus is none other than to praise or defend Aristophanes as 'the voice of the people', at other times to criticise the audience for not making 'good choices'. It serves to underline or summarise the above.
Aristophanes also uses it to introduce songs which usually contain invocations to the gods, or after a solemn beginning like this, mockery of specific individuals, or manipulation of the opponent's speech by falsifying the debate in order to sow misconceptions among the people again, because under the guise of argumentation there is manipulation because it is based on opinion and not knowledge, or using a part of biased knowledge that therefore takes the form of opinion, rejecting the other parts of accurate knowledge that would qualify this 'truth' in relation to the whole framework once all the elements have been thoroughly studied.
The characteristics of Aristophanes' comedy revolve around three fundamental axes: intellectual, emotional and social. To the intellectual axis belongs originality; to the emotional axis, repetition for emphasis; and to the social axis, the popular character of some of its resources.
There is a constant call to sadistic, sexual, scatological impulses, or in the repetition of the same situation or a key phrase. Although not a resource he abuses, there is always a recourse to scenes of beating or insulting, a classic in the search for laughter, but also a way of 'punishing' the people and ideas he targets. The abuse of contempt makes it a real 'killing game', according to Simon Byl (1989, 111-126).
And the fact is that nowadays there is a view, no doubt attached to the conception of laughter that appears in Umberto Eco's historical novel, 'The Name of the Rose': laughter against fanaticism, the great terror of power? But the truth is that one can distinguish several types of laughter.
Plato, who was a contemporary of Aristophanes and Socrates, is not exactly a supporter of laughter. In the dialogues of "The Republic" and "Philebus", Plato speaks of laughter in a way that deserves reflection, when he puts the following ideas into Socrates' mouth:
"(...) as a general rule, when someone indulges in violent laughter, this in turn provokes a violent reaction" (The Republic, III, 388 e).
"It is therefore unacceptable for men of worth to be presented as dominated by laughter, and even less so if they are gods" (The Republic, III, 389a).
"But to expound theories while they are still in doubt and being studied, as I have to do, is formidable and dangerous; and not to induce laughter, for that would be childish; the danger would be rather that I should fail in the truth, not only that I should fall, but that I should drag down my friends also on those things where it is least expedient to be wrong. "(The Republic, V, 451 a)
"And this has made it clear that he is a fool who regards everything that is not evil as ridiculous, and who seeks to move laughter by regarding any other spectacle than that of folly and wickedness as ridiculous, and who in turn seriously proposes and pursues any other model of beauty than that of good." (The Republic, V, 452 d, e)
"Then," says the argument, laughing at the ridiculous attitudes of our friends, "by mixing pleasure with envy, we mix pleasure with pain; for we have long agreed that envy is a pain of the soul, and laughter a pleasure, and that both occur at once, simultaneously." (Philebus, 50a).
To recapitulate, Plato in the Philebus points out that laughter is indeed a pleasure, but that it can also be obscene, contributing to the transgression of the harmony, integrity and social conscience of free men, which makes it ugly. He concludes by saying that it is a pleasure that hurts and belongs to fools, buffoons, vile people and slaves.
Aristotle, who knew another world and who prepared the rise of the philosopher ruler, Alexander the Great, a king, spoke of laughter profusely in the Poetics, the Rhetoric, the Politics in his chapter VII devoted to ridicule, On the Parts of Animals and the Nicomachean Ethics.
According to Ueding (1988, 99-111), we must emphasise that for Plato, Socrates and Aristophanes, as well as for Aristotle, laughter is intimately linked to the affections, and these are crucial in determining the human will, so that laughter is a fundamental part of human morality, with its respective social nuances.
In Greek we distinguish two types of laughter: 'γελάω' [gelao] and 'καταταγελάω' [katagelao]. The first one is a joyful laugh, in fact, it shares a semantic part with the verb "to shine", so one would "shine with joy", and that is where this laughter would come from. The second is the negative aspect, because in the background there is the denigration of the weak, their humiliation, their deception. It's interesting how the prefix 'κατα' [cata] is used, because it's used to talk about things falling down, what starts from the top and continues downwards, it's the subversion of a concept and it's used for when things are reversed or turned upside down.
Sexual allusions are also a permanent reference, so much so that Thiercy (2007, 329-344) proposes to distinguish between works with a 'dominant erotic structure' (The Acharnians, Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae and The Assemblywomen), or a 'secondary' one (The Clouds, The Wasps, The Birds and The Frogs), without, however, incriminating pornography.
For Aristophanes, finally, everything ends in happiness, eating, drinking, laughing and fornicating, with which he hopes to make the connection with the way the elites after Pericles made the demesne, and to move it to the ends of those who pay him for his theatrical performances, who also pay for the sporting events.
In summary, it is in the context of the rise of the theatre and its great impact on society (the theatre was attended by absolutely everyone) that we find ourselves in a first phase, dominated by the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, in which there are virtually no legal restrictions on what is said in a play, beyond certain restrictions that may arise from the protection of others' reputations against lies: telling the truth is fundamental, and that truth is told to convey thoughtful and practical knowledge. The reaction to the offensive unleashed in the theatre by the use of paresis leads to a fear of the political impact of the theatre in the face of manipulation, which leads to restrictive rules such as those forbidding the use of proper names, coinciding with a progressively authoritarian drift that will go hand in hand with the events leading to an early end to the democratic regime. Thus, sanctions are applied to those who publicly expound ideas or doctrines contrary to the democratic regime as a way of defending democracy against aristocratic threats and the propaganda element used by the latter, which is the comedy of Aristophanes, which takes refuge in paresis, although it is rather the perversion of this principle and it is in fact the conjunction of the two elements that led to the end of democracy and the reign of oligarchy, taking advantage of foreign influence (oligarchic Sparta) and the outcome of the Peloponnesian War. And these ideas are fundamental in order to situate us correctly at that time, and in my opinion also at this time, because of the arguments I will present from this point.
Before moving on to the next section, it is worth reflecting on the following points, as it is time for us to establish the criteria for distinguishing ignorance, opinion and knowledge.
Opinion (from the Latin "opinio", and the Greek "doxa", δόξα) lies somewhere between ignorance and knowledge, and as such is often used as an element of mass manipulation, closer to ignorance than to knowledge, as it is often repeated and assumed as an assumption by the ignorant and by some (paid or unpaid) professionals of opinion. 'Doxa' has two degrees: 'eikasia' (εἰκασία) and 'pistis' (πίστις), i.e. conjecture and faith or belief respectively.
Knowledge ('episteme', ἐπιστήμη) takes place only in the world of ideas (intellectual knowledge) and not in the sensible world (sensible knowledge), where 'doxa' or opinion takes place.
For Aristotle, the "episteme" is the result of logical reasoning by syllogism. An examination of Plato, for example, would not be out of place for some "sensitive souls": the "Meno", the "Phaedo", book VI of the "Republic" and the "Theaetetus" and its criticism of Protagoras' theory of knowledge... And another to Aristotle in his "Metaphysics", "On the Soul" or the "Second Analytics".
Parrhesia in the Formation of American Revolutionary and Liberal Thought and its Transposition in Foucault
It is no coincidence that on the American continent, at the dawn of the bourgeois revolutions, there was intense interest in Greece and also in Rome. In the case of Greece, they focused on Sparta and Athens and their respective leagues. It was Benjamin Franklin who, in letter 8 of the series he wrote under the pseudonym Silence Dogood, dated 9 July 1722 and published in The New-England Courant, asserted the prevalence of freedom of thought for political freedom, when he said literally and in the manner of this time and place in the 18th century:
"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know" (Source of the quotation).
Freedom of thought is the ability of each individual, according to his or her conscience, to choose, hold and change any opinion, belief, ideology or thought. The formative phase is therefore crucial to talk about freedom and the quality of freedom in two aspects: whether this right is allowed and with what sources I feed it. If so, my next freedom would be to express it (freedom of expression or parrhesia), and depending on the field, this freedom of expression would manifest itself as scientific, artistic, academic or creative freedom.
With a certain ambition of synthesis, we could define Foucault's main field of interest in the subject and the different processes in which the subject constitutes itself as subjectivity, starting from the relations it establishes with knowledge, power and, very specifically, with truth. For truth, two quite differentiated forms can be established: the first, in which the subject enters into a relationship with the truths that the other two spheres (knowledge-power) could establish with a claim of validity, all of this circumscribed to the dynamic "productive" game that will always accompany it; while a second form would come from the fact that the subject constructs truth from what it can "tell" about itself after its life experience.
In such a way, Foucault's main academic interest becomes a project endowed with a reconstructive as well as an analytical character of the different forms and processes of subjectivation given in and through the relation of the individual with the truth of knowledge, with the truth of power and with the truth of the self. The analysis of each relation is given a name: thus, those related to knowledge constitute the archaeological stage; those related to the exercise of power are the genealogical stage; and those related to truth as an 'alethurgic' construction, which would be, according to Foucault in 'The Courage of Truth' (2014), the production of truth, the act by which truth manifests itself, and which propitiates the processes of autonomous subjectivation, are the so-called ethical stage.
Following Foucault, we can appreciate that in order to achieve the realization of free subjectivations in the field of language, in the exercise of speech actions, the philosopher uses a notion that he found in that historical moment that serves as our framework, ancient Greece, and in whose praxis the Freedom-Truth relation is extended to the fields of human spheres, such as politics, ethics and aesthetics. This element that has the power to modify the relations that power and knowledge deploy in a common way with regard to the subject and its subjectivation, as a notion and an action, is precisely parrhesia, which in reality expresses the becoming of a free and autonomous subject in permanent formation, and which reaffirms itself as a path conducive to synthesis and which articulates knowledge and power in such a way that the subject exercises a role of active agent and can exercise "alethurgic" processes in spiritual practices that allow him to state himself as capable of truths about himself. For this part, I have followed Deleuze and Guattari (1993, 25).
Foucault places the concept of parrhesia on the intellectual stage, as a nexus that could be described as 'key' between ethics and politics, or in other words, between self-care and care for others. Foucault situates, in accordance with what we have explained here, and rightly so, in "Discourse and Truth in Ancient Greece" (2004), that the concept, although used by Plato's Socrates, is found in our sources in the (political, formative, moral and civic) theatre of Euripides, precisely at the moment when Aristophanes, Euripides and Socrates coexist in the same physical space and the same political articulation ...Moreover, parrhesia will be found above all in the Cynical philosophy of Diogenes of Sinope, as Foucault points out.
In fact, Aristophanes dedicated the following plays to him, precisely against Socrates, mischaracterising him in relation to the Sophists: The Clouds, (423 BC); and, against Euripides: The Thesmophoria, (411 BC) and The Frogs, (405 BC). The use of theatre, primarily tragedy, with the trio Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, in this chronological order, is fundamental to "educate the demesne" in order to promote political, economic and social reforms that will make them free and equal subjects. We have talked about this in the section that precedes this one, but it is worth emphasizing these elements again now, because paradoxically, it would be alleging a use of paresis to deform it and use it as a farce of itself and its own ends.
That is, the parrhesiastes, or the one who practices parrhesiastes, would be the one who in his discourse communicates all the arguments, with absolute frankness; since he would not hide anything, and would not point out a part and obviate those that contradict his interests, and he would express himself with total sincerity through the discourse, with a complete and exact account, so that those who listen would be able to understand exactly what the speaker thinks, in Foucault (2004, 37). That is, we have knowledge of an exact nature (and this is vital), but what we do not have is an opinion, expressed for possibly criminal purposes, and which ends up being pure charlatanism, and such charlatanism in a context like Aristophanes' is not innocent, as it pursues specific political ends. Moreover, instead of flattery towards the powerful and ductility to propagate their ends, parrhesia imposes the duty to reprove it if and when the knowledge of the truth so stipulates, which in some cases may mean the loss of one's life (Socrates, Euripides and the change of his themes after a certain point in his theatrical production).
To conclude Foucault's reflections on parrhesia, he points out one last sine qua non: we will be faced with the parrhesiastes or the one who makes use of parrhesia, and this is closely related to the concept of duty, for it is not enough to tell the truth, without deception or half-truths or whole lies, concepts that are more closely related than we would like to believe. No, telling the truth must be an absolute duty, because it implies a commitment, and this commitment is not valid under coercion or under a stimulus such as giving in to flattery. Foucault ends up leaving us with a definition, which he states as follows:
It is a form of verbal activity in which the speaker has a specific relationship to truth through openness, a certain relationship to his or her own life through danger, a certain type of relationship to himself or herself or to others through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of others), and a specific relationship to the moral law through freedom and duty, argues Foucault (2004, 46).
This may imply at some point the possibility of deviating from the norm, from what is prescribed by moral laws and custom, but this is precisely why Hannah Arendt (2016) establishes the foundation of this aspect as a pillar for the political game, for the plurality of views, but where the whole truth has to be told (and relentlessly pursued) and not just the apparent (and/or convenient).
In this sense, Elizabeth Markovits (2008) has perceived different symptoms at this point in the 21st century, which can actually be traced back to popular culture in an earlier era, but which have increased over time, and which have marked a tendency on the part of many voters to seek out politicians who are dedicated to 'straight talk', in the hope that sincerity means dedication to the truth, also creating a need to reassert a discourse that reaches the public through different channels and is self-congratulatory and all-knowing, but which pursues the interests of different actors, both the state and those who pay it with private money, and which is directed in a global community towards different objects of attention: For example, Russia leads a series of discourses that favour its interests and find connections with the interests of other political and economic groups in the West, or it is somewhat adapted to Africa, where there are even cartoons depicting a very sympathetic bear fighting for the interests of local elements against foreign animals that embody evil. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse given the elements he perceived in politics at the time, Markovits argues that the pursuit of sincerity in the public sphere is in fact a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including the factual truth and ethical significance of political statements.
In other words, we are dealing with the character equated with Aristophanes and those who pay Aristophanes for his theatrical productions in which he develops his discourse addressed to the masses, on their behalf, but for his own benefit and that of those who pay him, and who seeks to change the will of the masses with half-truths or complete lies (really, where does the one start to become the other?) Therefore, Markovits offers an analysis of parrhesia based on the Platonic dialogues. He shows that Plato values rhetoric rather than wanting to eliminate it from public life, which helps to understand how it can contribute to a successful form of deliberative democracy today. However, Markovits fails to grasp the whole period, and fails to perceive Aristophanes' stratagem of pretending to use parrhesia to use something that is not parrhesia for the benefit of those who pay Aristophanes, the use of derision, false irony, saying everything without saying anything that matters to everyone and saying everything that matters to the oligarchs, an omniscient, angry, 'indignant', irreverent, 'popular' discourse. ... and paid to achieve the political, social and international relations objectives that those who pay Aristophanes want.
False Irony in Aristophanes and His Modern Imitators
Theatre offers the possibility of working with images, even images in action, with the voice... but these images can be archetypes or they can be the representation of subjects in order to praise some people and their speeches, manipulating the masses, and scorning with half-truths or complete lies the rivals, ridiculing them, making the simple complex seem like a simple form of deception, destroying the speech and those who have such a speech.
Today, different technological aspects, beyond television, radio, cinema... and fully entering social networks, have ended up serving to put everything in the frame of a screen. Texts, images, videos, animations... we are confronted with the opportunity to unite the subject and the world, ending the distance reflected by the Cartesian axis between the individual as interpreter and the object to be interpreted.
Indeed, the real-time communication of audiovisual images brings us into a world dominated by a one-dimensional vision, as perceived by Marcuse (2016). In this paradigm, the figure of the mediator loses its status as a guide to our relationship with the world and is proposed as a sublimated filter. As in Aristophanes' dizzying discourse developed in comedy, we are confronted with the immediacy and irrepressibility of a global digital communication, with many shared referents, and which is performed with a discourse that prevents us from taking a critical distance from the created universe that is presented to us through the element of flattery towards the receiver, because it presents a simple truth, designates culprits, and sends back to us the most basic impulses disguised as absolute truths. What is far from our lives: the economy, international relations, the ultimate causes of the situation we find ourselves in... everything that is distant and strange becomes close and comprehensible thanks to an interpreter. But what we see and conceive on our screens, or in Aristophanes' theatre, is quite far from an ironic worldview, like Socrates, one of Aristophanes' (and those who pay for his plays) declared goals, or as Sören Kierkegaard says in his doctoral thesis on irony. The laughter or smile of Socrates or Kierkegaard is not the laughter or smile of Trump or the communication we see from Chinese diplomats, the Russian media and the Alt Right in general.
Irony situates us in the appearance of subjectivity, i.e. in the separation between subject and object, where the exterior is opposed to the interior, what is verbalised to what is thought, the phenomenon is the opposite of the essence, but it is in no way the perversion of truth, and it has nothing to do with the hijacking of parrhesia and the defence of this hijacking on the grounds that it is parrhesia.
The practitioner of irony says in all seriousness what is considered joking and treats with jest what he considers serious; he seeks understanding but not in a literal way; he does not pursue a direct communication in which what is said is exactly the same as what is thought. The ultimate purpose of irony is none other than that, in the worldview, the one who uses irony does so to reveal his true matter of vanity and rejection, the one who practices it being bound to a negative freedom, for he cannot be bound to the words he has uttered, opposing the positive freedom of the one who gives univocal meaning to words and thoughts.
Irony implies an alignment with subjectivity, a distancing from the world or object, and it is precisely this aspect that gives the practitioner of irony a certain superiority who, like the spectator separated from a representation to which he is a stranger, thus becomes the interpreter of an objective world alien to subjectivity.
The irony that can be found in Socrates seeks, by using maieutics, to confront the questioned by questioning him, but without ever expressing the idea as such, but rather letting the interlocutor come to the understanding of the latent content of the irony. Therefore, the 'know thyself' motif for Kierkegaard is a distancing from everything else, i.e. separating the object of knowledge in order to be able to judge it according to its conceptualisation, i.e. it 'requires ideality', according to Kierkegaard (2000, 247).
Following Kierkegaard (2000), the Danish philosopher contrasts ironic communication (which provides negative freedom because the practitioner is absolved of his words, since what he says is not what he thinks) with direct communication. It is here that we find the distinction between irony and what Aristophanes actually practices, and claims in his "freedom", which is lying: for the latter continues that it must be understood in an immediate, literal sense.
The simulacrum of reality in which Aristophanes and those who imitate him perform precedes reality itself (Baudrillard, 1978), taking advantage of the very medium in which it unfolds and which turns out to be a lie that shows the rupture of the relationship established between essence and phenomenon as simulation, i.e. it takes the form of an objective act with an external intention, as opposed to the subjective purpose itself of irony, whose only intention is not to "chain" or trap people like a fowler traps birds by deceiving them, on the contrary: It is to free people from their own attachments to the manifest world. In irony and the practitioner of irony, everything is mediated, in contrast to the unbridled and seemingly simple and all-knowing immediacy of direct communication, which has a global reach in an immediate way, in which the (self-serving and distorted) image of a person, the (self-serving and distorted) image of a person, The image (self-serving and distorted, of a person, his ideas or words) becomes a universal language when it exceeds the communicative performance of the alphabet, relegating written language to a secondary role, and is instrumentalised and used as an image, the very image that the creator wants us to take as true when it is not, in the media shaping of reality.
It should not be forgotten that communication based on the complex structure associated with alphabetic writing actually implies a separation between subject and object, according to Ong (2016), whereas the immediate communication of images aims to achieve a simulation of the oral cosmos in which man was part of his environment.
The result is that we will be confronted with a lie when communication tends to remove the possibility of reflection, and thus of separation from what we see in real time.
The permanence of the use of the image in Aristophanes, a self-serving and distorted image, and in those who follow him today with a screen and what is communicated by a screen (memes, social networks, video blogs, short texts)... both seek to re-establish the unity between subject and object through the vision of this image created for this purpose. It is not without reason that Jean-Paul Sartre points out that the image abounds in an essential poverty because it does not really bring anything new, nor does it teach anything new, rather the opposite of the perception of an object, which is likely to change according to the point of view adopted, hence his categorical conclusion that 'one cannot learn anything from an image that one does not already know', in Sartre (2005, p. 22), so that the object of an image is nothing more than one's awareness of it, and where the relevant thing is to control that awareness, a funnel of this element being the data generated and filtered by social networks, hence Cambridge Analytica and its role, for example, in defining strategies to broaden the impact on society by presenting a series of images.
Returning to Sartre, the French philosopher states that when we see an image, we are not really doing more than a quasi-observation, since the object of the image, which is a quasi-object, provides at the same time all that it has, without giving any possibility of irony, which is why he points out that: 'I always perceive more and in a different way from what I see', in Sartre (2005, 181). In short, the image is linked to a belief, to an unreality, like dreams, because its object is absent, imagined, and as such we perceive the projection of the other and assume its ends. As Sartre (2005, 261) points out, the dreaming consciousness chooses to produce only images, the imaginary. This multiplicity of images, which includes short texts in images, or images in motion, is thus a communication inscribed in the keys of the dream and, therefore, does not mistake fiction for reality, for it is rather a matter of erecting an unreal world, which we take to be self-evident, satisfying our omniscient need, and fixing ourselves in a kind of consensual hallucination that we share as a given group, and which we fix through the discussions of our rivals in the imaginary. The ultimate goal is to objectively act out the world with the intention of producing a second reality to replace the objective reality, which we can call propaganda, using a defence of parrhesia, which is not parrhesia, but rather the means of producing the second reality so that it becomes the objective reality.
This is why the image actually replaces the word in its written and oral form and acts as a conductor of communication and, consequently, puts an end to any possibility of abstraction from the objective world by means of irony, another fact that shows that we are not dealing with the use of irony but with the vulgarity of ridiculing the arguments and those who state them in the context of parrhesia, including the use of irony, which ends up disappearing in the world of the non-existent of the image, which admits no other interpretation than the literalness of the one who has already given it to us, conceived to consume it through a screen nowadays or through comedy in the theatre in the time of Aristophanes, resorting to a (false) nostalgia, to build a self-interested utopia on the part of those who use these means in the construction of a reality that has to be assumed by the literal and false interpretation.
In fact, another element that unmasks the true purpose of attacking the arguments and ideas of those people who are the enemies of those who build this world of images that pursue their own ends and contrary to the same parresia, which they seek to destroy as a means and as an end, has to do with the fact of attacking in itself. With regard to behaviour as well as expressions, besides being true, as John Stuart Mill says in his book "On Liberty", which is absolutely clear: "whenever there is a definite harm, or a definite risk of harm, either to an individual or to the public, the matter leaves the realm of liberty and enters that of morality or law"; to which Mill adds: "The only purpose for which power can legitimately be exercised over a member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent his injuring others". Or as Edmund Burke himself concludes in "Reflections on the French Revolution": "Man has a right to do what any individual can do without disturbing others". Just because it is not tolerated to destroy a person who uses paruresis does not mean that there is no healthy debate of ideas, as John Locke himself determined in "A Letter on Toleration": "It is not diversity of opinion (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal to tolerate those of a different opinion (unnecessary refusal) that has produced all the conflicts and wars that have taken place in the Christian world on account of religion. But in this case, we point to the use of the elements pointed out as intolerable by Mill and Burke, alleging a twisted use of tolerance as reflected by Locke to lead to the construction of an imaginary in the service of interests contrary to liberties.
All this is reinforced by the fact that the image is a liar, it decontextualises and forces us into a false literality, with the problem that we take it to be true because we assume that it cannot be manipulated, according to Giovanni Sartori (2012, 103-106).
This breaks with the Socratic conception of a rejection of given reality, another reason why Aristophanes charges head-on against Socrates (and Euripides). This means that our experience of the world, filtered by the representation of the imaginary created to be disseminated technologically through various elements, and reinforced by the "permanent state of opinion", and not of truth and knowledge, ends up orienting our thinking as a collective by basing our relationship to the world on the images visualised through screens, including texts which are themselves images and which are only understood with the image they reinforce, to finally come to believe that what we see in these images are not beliefs (created and self-serving) in an absent person, but the very presence of reality. The enlightened emancipation of the subject, stated in Kant (2020), seeks to be cornered and destroyed by this media image and by the ends of those who animate them: nothing better than to take up Kant's statement in the book I quote: "In Defence of the Enlightenment" in the face of those who want to bury it.
This is why Gilbert Durand details in his book "L'imaginaire" (2000) that human thought must be mediated by representation (articulations of a symbolic nature) so that the imaginary becomes like an obligatory connector for the constitution of human representation and, consequently, of all thought. It is the image of our time, which is responsible for the deepening of the simulacrum, and which presents a reality such that our representations are no longer based on a traditional collective imaginary, but rather on a second reality mediated by the profusion of images that become the globally accepted language and basis of the imaginary (the 'memes').
To oppose this, in addition to the construction of reason and the (re)construction of the Enlightenment, Sartre encourages us to make use of reflexive consciousness in order to escape the dreamlike reign of those images that pursue self-interested ends. We take up and echo a central theme in Plato with the myth of the Cave (Book VII of the Republic) and in the theatre of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and his plays El gran teatro del mundo or in La vida es sueño. We can find this reflection in the Philebus (50, b) and the Laws (I, 644 and VII, 803), both by Plato, it is disseminated by the Stoics, it is omnipresent in Petronius' Satyricon, and in so many other authors throughout the centuries, including the Bible. That is to say, we must reflect on the hypothesis of an otherwise painful reality, which consists in knowing that we dream, that we consume images shaped in a corpus, the imaginary, and that these images, which are in reality only absences that enchant the consciousness to the point of producing our memories in the form of a nostalgia for a fantasised and utopian past as a political project and as fiction. Therefore, following Sartre (2005, 262-263), two possible developments are presented to us to avoid the life in the imaginary that leads us into the world of dream and delusion:
1/ Interruption of sleep due to the irruption of a real tax that motivates reflection, the presence of a nightmare that makes us wake up because of a real fear, as happened with the events that marked the beginning of the hegemony of the West in a cyclical way, the last time with the formation of the New Deal and its extension to a third of the world with the aftermath of the Second World War
2/ The dream itself leads us to the impossibility of continuing to dream after this dream.
The dream in which we find ourselves immersed at the moment, based on the simulacrum that fascinates and attaches to a false nostalgia and the projection of a "dystopian" utopia constructed by the presentation on the screens of the absent, by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, in a way very close to the one Borges describes in his Aleph, as when nostalgia is confused with utopia and the latter with the present, projecting us at the same time into the past and the future, as in Borges' novel: Everything converges at the same point, past, present, future; the near and the far spatial, merging the subject and the object.
It is not a question of fighting these structures by reproducing them, because we would only be reproducing the same support and the same imaginary; no, it is rather a question of fighting them by recovering the order of the abstract, in order to distinguish the subject from the object. We return again to Marcuse (2016, 240), for as he points out, we can only take a correct position to do away with this imaginary when the individual no longer accepts the existing state of affairs and confronts it because he or she has learnt the notion of things and also that truth does not lie in current norms and opinions, hence the correct parrhesia, as Foucault pointed out. If we remain in such a question, we opt for waking up in the nightmare, taking the path indicated by Sartre, because in the end, when thought immediately identifies itself with reality, we prevent thought from opposing reality, and this, Marcuse (2016, 397) forcefully points out, leads to fascism, hence the need for the ironic Socratic vision and its correct, liberating and scrutinising use of parrhesia, totally removed from the false parrhesia, ceaselessly claimed by the creators of the imaginary, which prevents thought from having the means to oppose reality, which is constructed under the command of those who are once again constructing the fabric of a real fascism in our days.
In the next article, we will look at several examples from popular culture, especially from the cinema, to better understand the analogy with our times.
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