The Power of Words

Well before words mattered in the museum, they had grave consequences for Socrates. After all, he died for them. For Socrates, language’s danger lies in its pliability; the power of rhetoric to convince without the aim of truthfulness reveals the pernicious potential of words. In Phaedrus, Socrates critiques rhetoricians whose facility with language allows them to convincingly lie; the language that persuades can also deceive. Casting the sophists as charlatans, Socrates argues that a facile use of language without a love of truth endangers society. Understanding the techniques of language— rhetoric—allows us to differentiate between truth and that which simply masquerades as truth, between opinion and fact. The use of the written word was particularly suspect to Socrates, but he was not, contrary to common perception, critical of writing per se. Rather, he recognized its dangers; writing cannot reply like a teacher, but it can be moved, re-situated, and shifted. It cannot differentiate between those who read and understand and those who read and do not. Socrates tells us not to destroy the written word, but to enliven it through living conversation and dialogue. In the context of this journal, whose medium is the written word, we as educators, writers, and thinkers must take heed of this warning. This issue of the journal focuses our attention on the power of words in the museum, with a strong focus on the written word. It asks us as educators to think carefully about how we write and engage with language in our work, while itself meditating on the power of the written word to record our work and create dialogue in our profession. Famously, Socrates wrote nothing himself; all our knowledge about what and how he taught comes through his student, Plato. In this way, educators often parallel Socrates— we teach but rarely record what we do, relying on engagement in the galleries rather than the written word. Jacques Derrida explored the irony of the fact that Socrates’ truth and critique of the written word comes to us through that same medium, through dialogues created by his student that appear real but may well be inventions. For Socrates, these dialogues are knowledge, the passage of meaning through ideas and things, something achieved through active engagement with a subject. Dialogue in the Socratic sense is not an act of replacement of an old, dead meaning with a new one as in the Hegelian dialectic; rather dialogue is about a living, multidirectional, shifting meaning. Art historianWendy Shaw has noted that Plato’s definition of knowledge as dialogue, flexible and agile as language itself, sits uncomfortably within the museum: