BA2 CLASS READING - TEXTILES IN SOCIETY -WEAVING AS POLITICAL SYMBOL (YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS ONE) GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text.

WEAVING AS METAPHOR AND MODEL FOR POLITICAL THOUGHT. ARTHUR C. DANTO. 2006.

Contemporary writers on the meaning of textiles and of weaving often draw their illustrations from cultures very distant from ours. ... I instead shall briefly examine the way weaving figures, as model and metaphor, for the Greeks. Our culture rests on Greek foundations, and weaving is as much a part of our conceptual scheme today as it was in the time of Homer.

The complex Western attitude toward the fine arts -  that they are simultaneously dangerous and frivolous - was famously articulated in the core writings of Plato two and a half millenia ago. ... The most famous of Plato's disenfranchising texts on the subjects is, of course, 'The Republic', where ... the arts are marginalized: they are marginal in the universe as a whole, having only the substance of illusions ... the deep mistrust stains the entire fabric of Platonic speculation - to compound a metaphor from the crafts of dyeing and especially of weaving, for which Plato had a particularly high regard and which serves him as the root metaphor in his mature reflections on the art of ruling. ...

In one of the less frequently consulted dialogues, known as 'Statesman', an anonymous spokesman, identified only as the Stranger, undertakes to instruct a young thinker (identified as the Younger Socrates) ... The task at hand is to define the statesman or ruler, and as the dialogue evolves, it turns out that ruling is itself a kind of art, ... What kind of art is the art of statesmanship? ... Plato, predictably enough, disparages the fine arts ... Interestingly enough, in view of the invidious contrast sometimes drawn between craft and the so-called fine arts today, Plato's spokesman locates his paradigm in the art of weaving:


'What example is there on a really small scale which we can take and set beside kingship, and which it comprises an activity common to it and to kingship, can be of real help to us in finding what we are looking for? By heaven, Socrates, I believe I know one. Do you agree that, if there is no other example ready to hand, it would be quite in order for us to select the art of weaving for the purpose?' ...

It is at times thought remarkable that Plato should have drawn so exalted a metaphorical use of what some today might dismiss as a mere craft, and one, moreover, that was associated with women in ancient Greece. Weaving is almost always an attribute of female characters in Greek literature, much as armour or weaponry is the attribute of males. When we first encounter the radiant Helen in 'The Iliad', she is 'weaving a growing web, a dark red folding robe, / working into the weft the endless bloody struggles / stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze / had suffered all for her at the god of battle's hands.' Helen's red web symbolically reproduces the web of violence her beauty has unleashed upon the world, and in general, like arms, weaving is not a simple emblem of domestic order and harmony: it can even be a weapon in its own right, through which women are able to achieve their ends. Weaving - and unweaving - famously emblematises the means through which faithful Penelope, the crafty and exemplary wife, keeps her suitors at bay while her husband makes his zigzag way home. But the tapestries Clytemnestra and her maids wove for the homecoming of Agamemnon were a trap: Agamemnon, urged by his treacherous wife to walk on purple cloths, is entangled and tethered, and, rendered helpless ... he is slain. ... The woven object is at once a symbol of protection and of betrayal. But Plato is anxious to play down female superiority in such domestic accomplishments as weaving in order to argue that there is no 'feminine mystique' that would bar women from the role of administration in the state ... However reactionary we find Plato on the subject of the fine arts, he was singularly enlightened in his readiness to admit women to the highest functional rank of the ideal society. ...

Plato thinks of weaving as exercising a certain kind of judgement, which cannot be formulated nor, in consequence, applied mechanically. ... It is precisely by 'this effort they make to maintain the due measure that they achieve effectiveness and beauty in all that they produce.' ... Plato speaks of 'the kingly weaving process' in which different and even opposed human materials are combined and interwoven.

This perhaps helps to explain why weaving should have struck Plato as so natural a metaphor for statecraft, and why the fine arts, as he understood them, are of no use in thinking about politics at all. It is because Plato held to the theory that the fine arts are mimetic, or imitative, and hence involve nothing he would recognise as originality, since they involve merely copying an external reality. The artists are as passive in this respect as the camera would be. ... The beauty of the weaving metaphor is that each move made by the weaver has the whole fabric in view ... The aim of state making is justice, which means, in effect, weaving together the various social virtues without allowing one more than another to dominate. And it is that which makes weaving so apt a metaphor for statesmanship. The task is 'to make the city as a whole as happy as possible ... not modelling our ideal of happiness with reference to any one class.'

Plato had a very vivid sense that various irreducibly different kinds of skill are required if there is to be what we today would call a 'sustainable' political order. We need philosophers, guardians, and producers, all of them necessary and non of them dominant. And weaving naturally suggests itself as a metaphor to him because of the way in which these disparate but necessary elements can be held together in a whole that offers shelter, protection, and fulfillment. (Danto in Hemmings, 2012, pp.205-208).

REFERENCE

Danto, A.C. in Hemmings, J. (ed.) (2012) The textile reader. London: Berg.