The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch

Abstract

Reviewed by: The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch Susan Sauvé Meyer Marcus Folch. The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii + 386 pp. Cloth, $82. Plato's last dialogue, Laws, investigates the goals, method, and history of legislation, and applies the results of this study to the task of formulating the constitution and the law code for a new city to be founded on Crete. Musical performance will be ubiquitous in this "city of the Magnesians" (860e); it is the medium by which the legislator cultivates and sustains the desirable character traits of the citizens in a busy calendar of religious festivals; its educational importance is underwritten by a psychological theory; and a theory of literary criticism identifies the criteria for selecting the works to be performed, along with the social institution (the "Chorus of Dionysus") in which that criticism is to be practiced. It is this "performance culture" of Magnesia that is the focus of Folch's study. In contrast to recent anthropological readings of the Laws that treat Plato's text as evidence for ancient practices of chorality, Folch stresses that Plato's project is normative; its aim is not simply to report but to improve upon contemporary practice. Rather than reconstruct ancient practices of musical performance from Plato's text, Folch seeks to identify the ways in which Plato's blueprint for Magnesia repurposes and revises the musical genres and gender norms of his Greek contemporaries, as well as the contours of the ideal city of the Republic. In one of the many memorable phrases in the book, "Magnesia is a palimpsest of Platonic thought and ancient practice, at once in conversation with Plato's earlier works and in a dialectic with the cultural fabric from which the second-best city is woven" (42). A substantial introductory chapter gives an excellent précis of the content and structure of the Laws and situates it in relation to the Republic and to the fourth-century political and intellectual context in which Plato is writing. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the theory of "performativity" that informs Folch's analysis and then discusses the interlocking psychological, educational, and aesthetic doctrines that underwrite the central role accorded to musical performance in the lives of Magnesia's citizens. The latter nexus of doctrines has drawn significant attention recently from philosophers working on the Laws, who will find much to agree with in Folch's well-informed and textually detailed discussion, and in particular the prominence he accords to comparisons with the Phaedrus (a welcome change from the more usual comparisons with the Republic). I confess that I found the analytical framework of "performativity" rather hard going and unduly jargon-laden; its upshot for our understanding of the Platonic doctrines, as far as I could tell, is that musical performance is not just [End Page 717] expressive of civic thoughts and ideals, but plays a role in shaping and sustaining the characters of citizens and civic institutions. While the speech act theory developed by Austin and Grice in the 1950s continues to have a lasting impact in contemporary analytical philosophy of language and mind (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/#Bib), it has not generally been embraced as a useful tool of analysis by historians of philosophy. (For a philosophical polemic against the use to which the theory has been put by literary scholars, see D. Gorman, "The Use and Abuse of Speech-act Theory in Criticism," Poetics Today 20 (1999) 93–119). Chapter 2 addresses the principles of literary criticism to be practiced in the city of Magnesia by the Chorus of Dionysus, whose membership and function are explained in Book 2. Folch contrasts that model of literary criticism with the anarchic and anti-authoritarian mode of criticism ascribed to contemporary Athens in the fanciful "history" of Athenian literary criticism offered in Book 3 (700a–701b). We are not to read this alarmist lament of declining critical standards and crumbling generic boundaries as an accurate history, Folch argues, but rather as a polemic against what Plato...