Fido the Yak

Left Alone

2010-05-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

Eric Dolphy did wonders with this tune, but I kind of like this version with the sharp contrast between McLean's attack and Waldron's comping, as if to say the song both is and is not a minor blues.

I've left the blog alone quite a bit lately while I've been pursuing math—I hadn't studied math properly since grade school and now I will need to pass a calculus class for my biology degree, so every day it's math, math, math, math and math. It's all going swimmingly but I've let my readings in philosophy slip while I cram for exams. I've no intention of giving up the blog, or philosophy.

Mary Lou Williams Centennial

2010-05-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

NPR marks the centennial of Mary Lou Williams' birth with links to some fine performances.

Presence of the Listener in the Utterance

2010-05-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.

But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.

What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?

Afroblue Polyloquy

2010-04-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

Here's soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome having some fun:

The Prehistory of Repetition

2010-03-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

Michael Balter, blogging for Science, reports that engraved eggs suggest early symbolism. He asks:

What do Homo sapiens have that our hominid ancestors did not? Many researchers think that the capacity for symbolic behaviors—such as art and language—is the hallmark of our species. A team working in South Africa has now discovered what it thinks is some of the best early evidence for such symbolism: a cache of ostrich eggshells dated to about 60,000 years ago and etched with intricate geometric patterns.

The team writes:

The standardized production of repetitive patterns, including a hatched band motif, suggests a system of symbolic representation in which collective identities and individual expressions are clearly communicated, suggesting social, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings that overlap with those of modern people.

Beyond the dichotomy of "naked" repetition and "clothed" repetition repetition manifests as a variety of nakedness, the human paradox of being able to be naked because we have clothing and vice versa—we never get beyond the dichotomy but the idea of the dichotomy must be for thought to get beyond it, if thought is the right concept here.

Can we, in thinking, retrace the origins of repetition? We think beyond our endowment only to discover our endowment, our earthly bestowal. What would we have discovered had we striven to think within our bestowals, within the chemistry of the naked and the clothed?

Repetition. I use it (see above and passim) but I don't understand it, not in the way of having an understanding I can hold on to, a practical grasp that I can agree with. In one true sense, the sense that corresponds with the category and the production of the same, i.e. sameness, repetition appears to be impractical, but that can never be the whole truth, and being of the categorical it's the sort of truth that asks for wholeness. (Indeed I envision other kinds of truth, other constancies, even as I recognize that constancy creates problems for the intellect, if that's what we're talking about here, specifically a problem of the other.)

Could wild repetition possibly be repetition for the sake of repetition? Wild, naked, raw, empty handed. Is mere decoration not characteristically human? Ornate repetitions, repetitions that don't yet exist as examples of repetition, fluid, lived, merely enacted repetitions: can these be accessible to thought?

p.s. Jonathan Amos of the BBC has done some reporting on the paper by Texier et al. Amos quotes Texier talking about the cross-hatching motif: "The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something." We need in fact to question the relation between communication and repetition, the semiosis of the decorative. What prejudice do we introduce to our archaeologies by identifying a pattern as a "motif" (implying repetition) as opposed to, for instance a "design"? Are we prisoners of pattern recognition? Or doubt? Surely the cross-hatch design on these egg shells deserves to be called "motif," but what is the communicated of the motif?

Primate Archeology

2010-03-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

Brian Switek reports on recent archeology of a chimpanzee tool assemblage dated between 4300 and 2200 BP. We will definitely have to give up the idea that culture is uniquely human, unless perhaps we accept a contention that culture equates to language. What goes out the door with culture in this case? Historicity?

How natural is nature, I wonder. Has the concept passed its best-by date? And if we have to rework what it means to be a natural phenomenon, what sense do make of culture? Does an inhuman science even make sense, or must it remain fundamentally contradictory? A parahuman science?

In what ways are wild chimpanzees participants in our culture? What claims do they naturally have? Egalitarianism?

The Reader is Warned

2010-02-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

"The reader is warned," writes Francis Jacques without a jot of irony, "that he or she will not find ideas or analyses that can be isolated and used in other contexts; the meanings of such ideas would suffer if they were detached from the book's overall trajectory, which covers questions taken in part from the rapidly developing field of the linguistic of utterance and in part from literary criticism, but also from psychoanalysis and theology" (Difference and Subjectivity, p. xxiii).

There's evidently a duality within the philosopher's image of himself as a speaker of philosophy. He decontextualizes and at the same moment, in the manner of a Heraclitus I guess, he doesn't decontextualize.

Will this work for me in the context of a blog post? Let's see. Jacques imagines that philosophy "remains rooted in the resources of everyday language, which is the universal metalanguage. The aim of philosphers is to articulate an interpretation of their experience as a whole. They attempt to bring about a process of semantic extension within various domains of ordinary discourse. Their own difficultiy is how to put forward a coherent and overdetermined interpretation of experience using a set of interdependent metaconcepts" (pp.xxiii-xxiv, my bold).

Do I just blithely skip over the part where philosophers are radical empiricists—would that it were true—in order to talk about (metaconceptual) gatekeeping? The reader is warned. . . . The reader is suddenly aware of culture of reading that allows for such things as warnings from the author along the way. Or charities. It could be otherwise, it occurs to me. Now, as thinkers, then, if we're really alive to our whole experience as readers of texts, then shouldn't we have acquired some basis for charitable writing, that is, writing that doesn't bar the way? Should lucidity of a certain kind—lucidity of love?— be a part of one's enculturation into the whole world thing of the philosophical text?

And now I'll put the shoe on the other foot. I assume that we know, you and I, gentle reader, that a more charitable reading of Jacques than the one suggested above is called for. Indeed any text given to us in some way as a work of philosophy (like a work of music, with that same ontic ambivalence, an existence in "performance" or "utterance" broadly conceived and at the same time not localizable within that in), any such philosophical text cautions charity. Or precautions? Have we begun to read when we have read the preface? At what point is the entire trajectory of the book apparent to us? When can we begin to read in good conscience?

Eternity with a Forward Direction

2010-02-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

Kangas writes that by contrast with Plato, for Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, "the instant of eternity has to be thought of as the 'extreme opposite' of eternity" (p. 189). He continues:

The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a passage to reality, but reality itself. Or more simply: passage as such is real, identity is illusion. This evaluation of what remains between being and nonbeing is conditioned on defining eternity with a forward direction. Eternity is not what remains eternally self-present, or what can be reduced to that, but what never ceases to beckon and threaten from the future. The eternal cannot as such be integrated into the present but remains essentially futural: the present and the eternal are thus extreme opposites. This essential gap, the excessive futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the most strenuous demand upon the subject.

(ibid., Kangas' emphases, my bold)

Why would the recognition of a reality of passage be conditioned upon any sort of eternity, or indeed, an extreme dialectics? Is the real being reified surreptitiously for the sake of dialectic, in contradiction to any professed relaxation within the anarchy of the instant? Well, we are speaking of passage as such, passage considered apophantically. In what sense aren't we speaking of the real from within an idealism?

I harbor serious doubts about excesses of futurity. Are these doubts consistent with a practice of ataraxia? How does the skeptic deal with the sudden, existentially? Is there any existential import to skepticism—would it be arrogant to deny any such importance, as arrogant as the denial of edifying discourses, perhaps?

Possibly there is no merely about the evanescent.

Elephant Glass

2010-02-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

While being administered a Wechsler IQ test I balked during a task of placing numbers and letters in sequence when the same number was given to me twice. Is the intelligent answer "1,2,5,8, b,f,h,r,t, or "1,2,5,5,8 b,f,h,r,t"? I became preoccupied with my problem of repetition. Does anybody else have a problem with repetition, I wondered. Am I afflicted by an abnormality of thinking, an inability to process repetition that causes symptoms of mental confusion, or, indeed, actually confounds me in a way that nobody else could clearly understand but merely diagnose? What am I at this moment bewildered by repetition? How is it possible to go on thinking at all?

Kangas writes (citations omitted):

If at any moment repetition were allowed to occur, the very idea of repetition, a movement "by virtue of the absurd," beyond representation, would be annihilated. Repetition is essentially deferred. To think repetition can therefore occur only by means of an even greater thinking of its difficulty, at a limit, its impossibility. Thinking repetition takes shape as a continual stepping back from the present and self-presence to the point where freedom—whose "supreme interest" is repetition—discovers its destitution, in the ordeal. To think is to arrive ever again at the point where though discovers an abyss (vibrations, rotations, whirlings) and freedom finds itself ungrounded. Thinking proceeds up to what cannot be thought.

(p. 123)

Revelations of Eoreality

2010-02-06T20:32:00.000-08:00

Jankélévitch makes, while essaying music's ambiguous "depth," in a section that could be placed under the heading of enchanted chronology, the seemingly prosaic statement that musical works exist exclusively in the time of their playing (p. 70). Before critiquing let's read the full paragraph for context:

Music is an essentially temporal art, not a secondarily temporal one like poetry or dramatic literature or the novel. Of course, time is necessary to perform a play: but theatrical works can be read one right after the other, or in fragments, and in any order you please. A musical work does not exist except in the time of its playing. Now, this playing occupies a certain durational interval interval (by virtue of tempo), and one can work out its timing; the elapsed time is measurable but not compressible and would not submit either to being abridged or extended. Thus the sonata is properly speaking a succession of expressive contents that unfolds itself in time: it is an enchanted chronology, a melodious form of becoming, time itself. Sonata is sonorous time: the temporal realization of the virtualities contained in two musical themes. And it takes time for the listener to discover these virtualities and for the spirit to delve into the core of this immanence: there is a time for sinking in, and this time, perpendicular to the time of the performance (if one dares to use such language), is the time that the listener spends in delving into the thickness of this meaning devoid of meaning.

(Op. cit.)

Now let's take the position that a musical work exists only in the moment of its performance, knowing that we might afford some depth to such a moment, knowing that there is a time of listening. What does one then rehearse? Of course a musical rehearsal may be thought of as a kind of performance. However in a crucial sense the rehearsal, insofar as it a performance, has an as if quality. Its being as performance, if we may permit ourselves such a phrasing, is conditional. Is it conditional on there being some—some other—awaited performance, a performance that must have the quality of not being realized, not yet, or in the case of the perpetual student of music, not ever, but in any case not realized? Is the performance pseudoreal? Eoreal? Rehearsal reveals the eoreal aspect of the performative—an aspect beyond the telic and the atelic— which minimally teaches that the temporality of the musical is indeed well characterized as having depth, if not depth of being, which may perhaps not pertain to things eoreal, then appreciably depth of phenomenality.

What does rehearsal mean for enchantment? Again, one comes up against a problem of repetition. "In music," Jankélévitch asks (p. 71), "is repetition not often innovation?" I ask, is repetition in general an essay of the work of temporality itself, an essay which potentially reveals the eoreal aspect of time?

Ordeal

2010-01-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

Kangas writes, "The ordeal expresses an event that is neither temporal nor eternal. It is not the direct presence of the eternal within time, which would annihilate temporality, but rather an interruption of it" (p. 116). He also says, "Receiving time is the most basic work of the of the living subject" (p. 105, his emphasis).

Does the living subject interrupt temporality in order to receive it? What relation might there be between the event, which could be cosmic, or material in the extreme, and exchange, a social relation? The gap of reciprocation, which is not exactly the gap of return, that is, the lag between the reception and the sending of gifts, stands out as a practical, coexistential temporality. The art of interruption—is it itself an interruption

What role is there for patience to play in the constitution of the event of the ordeal? Must it always remain yet to be determined—or is that already too much of a determination? Is it really so hard to wait and see?

Elephant Listening Project

2010-01-07T17:35:00.000-08:00

The Elephant Listening Project was on the popular American television show 60 Minutes last weekend. A little surfing on seismic communication among elephants turned up reporting on research by Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell: (1), (2) and (3). Also, see O'Connel-Rodwell's review article, Keeping an "Ear" to the Ground: Seismic Communication in Elephants.

A couple of lines of inquiry. First, is "listening" at bottom a too comfortable metaphor for conceptualizing how elephants perceive seismic vibrations, how they live with vibration? In any case let's ask ourselves what listening could possibly be. Second, elephants can apparently recognize each others' "voices." (This too, this thing we call "voice," among the metaphorical—even as we learn that voice may be something that develops "in" nature, as if nature had no concourse with imagination.) "I know you." "I recognize your vibration." "I hear your voice." And already I have gone too far. Does an elephant say "I"?

Portrait of an Eremite

2009-12-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

Historian Robin Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original sets out to humanize Monk. We should question the image of the human that's being offered. In place of Mad Monk, Monk the childlike genius, images which Kelley is right to regard critically, Kelley presents us with an image of Monk the Revolutionary Worker. It makes one wonder whether there could be an intelligible biography that didn't traffic in cultural doxa, thereby assuming rather than demonstrating ways of life, a biography that, to stick to our current topic, didn't traffic in preformed images of the human, but rather arrested images, for a brief moment, spun them around, talked to them. Is it possibly in the nature of history to form an image of the human as we go along, we who are marked by historicity?

Myth, the bête noire of so many of our discourses, creeps in through the most improbable fissures. Is severe mental illness a fissure in the human?

Perhaps if the gods seem childlike it's because they don't accept their fates—naturally they do end up being who they are, but there's something both more than and less than fatal about the whole affair of coming to be a mythological figure, a simulacrum of fate that any message about fate must pass through. That's myth.

The image of the human generates its own inhuman, It stirs its own negative image from the depths of its mythos. But is that true? Doesn't the inhuman arise in the telling? And doesn't the human itself ask to be thought of as something more akin to story than to myth?

September Sea Ice

2009-12-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

It takes a while for the data to get settled in, and I'm in no particular hurry. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center September sea ice extent over the arctic pole was 5.36 million square kilometers. That's more ice than last year, but less ice than average. There are many efforts to intepret the data. In my view the skeptics seem more reasonable in light of this data point than they would had sea ice extent declined from the previous year. I remain concerned about the polar bear's habitat, and the possibility of extinction.

Does Music Appear?

2009-11-21T06:40:00.000-08:00

Jankélévitch writes, "In the very measure that one tends to confer upon music the dimension of depth, music is, perhaps, the most superficial form of appearance" (Music and the Ineffable, p. 11). Taking up Jankélévitch's problematic requires putting any hermeneutics of music into question, a position which invites us to consider the question of whether music is a form of appearance at all. That music is a form of appearance is upon reflection not at all obvious. The very idea of appearance as we have inherited it evokes a hermeneutics. Appearance elicits an understanding of depth that, duly appreciated, demands the persistence of a critical distance between immediacy and experience. Does music absolutely require such an interpretive distance, as some musicologists would claim? On the contrary one could argue that in order to be music—as it urges to be understood—music must break from criticism. We could of course refine our notions of "understanding" and "appearance." We could make allowances for music. But does music want our allowances? Aren't we in the end left with ideas that don't mean in the way we want ideas to mean? We have no idea of music. We have no idea of music, yet we still live it, and we still want to approach it philosophically.

Shirl

2009-11-06T16:28:00.000-08:00

If you dig "Peace" you'll probably dig "Shirl," a Horace Silver ballad with a couple of rhythmic quirks and a handful of far out harmonic ideas.

James Mahone has provided a transcription of the head. I'm trying to spell out the chords (or implications of chords, you know) and either make a usable lead sheet or just learn the tune so I don't need one. At this point it seems rather doable on guitar. I know Hutcherson did a version on vibes (with strings, no kidding). If anybody knows of a version done on a horn I'd love to hear it. And, incidentally, I think Flanagan's version of "Peace" is pretty definitive, but I'm all ears.

The Shudder as Ongoing Recollection

2009-11-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

The philosophical question of the moment is whether the spasmoreal is mediated by ideation or any passage through an ideality that would mean exposure to its repercussions. Where does the shudder of the sudden come from? Could this shudder be symptomatic of an awareness of recollection exactly as it happens? We couldn't be aware of such an awareness and still be in the process of recollection, could we? Yet there appears to be some trace of such a subterranean awareness in the shudder, which gives sense to the spasmoreal.

In spasmorealization are we technically operating within consciousness, i.e., one observes spasmoreal moments within a more or less phenomenal unicity of existential duration, or do we instead in spasmorealizing enact a modality of sudden consciousness, a modality that would paradoxically carry within itself both an awareness of its coming into being and simultaneously an inability to be fully aware of itself (in its ongoing recollective aspect)? Now imagine that irrealization is a condition of possibility for any spasmorealization. Immediacy is the condition of possibility for any mediacy. And why not?

You may well accuse me of misreading Kangas. He relates that according to Kierkegaard recollection is a specific kind of repetition that is neither reality nor ideality, but both reality and ideality that has been. But let's look for a second at what's being said of repetition. (We'll come back to it again, I'm sure.) Is repetition either reality or ideality? "Repetition indeed has the same structure as mediation: reality is cancelled (hæves) and set into the light of ideality at the same time. The real is made plastic for consciousness" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 84). Is the spasmoreal plastic, and if so, has it been made plastic for consciousness? (In such pathways one risks thinking that if consciousness plasticizes itself with a sufficient feeling of suddenness one may speak of spasmoreality, and the problem remains that, being conditioned upon irrealization, the imagination may have surreptitiously canceled reality in the very giving of the spasmoreal; the spasmoreal is always spasmo~~real~~—and in that cancellation its sense of suddenness is jeopardized. Could we really then be talking about the spasmoreal as such?)

Anyway, to return to my misreading, Kangas says very clearly that as repetition, "consciousness is itself the gap between reality and its re-presentation" (p. 86). Let's play along for a second. The spasmoreal would not then be a mode of consciousness but something like a place where consciousness finds itself, and, one might add, finds itself duplicitously. Does consciousness really belong here, it seems to ask almost itself. The point of the misreading is that repetition is decidedly outside of reality, even if it's only outside in the sense that there used to be something real which people called repetition. However, if I believe that, what do I make of the shudder of the spasmoreal? Does this signify for me in any way a manifestation of repetition? Indeed it's hard not read the shudder as itself expressive of repetition at the same time the shudder is the attenuation of a trauma, not the trauma itself, but a repercussion. The repercussion is the blur within apophansis. It gives a sense that consciousness is not merely intentional, that is, consciousness of something, but also of something else again. We can give the something else again the name recollection but are we thereby any closer to understanding it? How much closer to understanding could we be than sudden? We could say this recollection is ongoing. Does the spasmoreal, in order to be sudden, carry within itself the cancelation of this ongoingness?

Blues Face

2009-10-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

At the risk of veering off into something that's not quite philosophy I must forward the argument that the ultimate dimension which makes the world intelligible is provided by the face of the Beloved, understood as a person. Concomitantly, irreplacability of the singular face rather than the reversibility of relationship to the world characterizes the drama of existence. It must be acknowledged that not everybody knows the Beloved, or any beloved of any kind. Existence on this planet is such that faces may become strange and even horrible and still possess the semblance of being faces, appearing to possess the power, even in shock and pain, of calling upon an ethical, indeed a loving relation. Are we dealing with masks or faces, persons or persons? If faces change, how do we know which face is deepest or truest? Is it a question of which face calls for love? How do we recognize the beloveds of this earth?

In one aspect the problem of the world of the face has everything to do with persons (personae). It is the face who speaks, the face who expresses, and the manifestation of the face within the visible is only this inchoate power of dramatic expression. The face is always on the verge of saying something. But why should that something be "love me" much less "I love you"? What does the inchoate have to do with love? We risk confusing what we wish the face would say with what the face means stripped of our narcissisms—is this, though, realistic, this stripping away of narcissism from reality? Quite possibly it is. Somehow we find ourselves taking responsibility for faces as if we could love them in spite of any realities to the contrary, in spite of other feelings that more or less directly contradict love. Does the world laugh at the sense of responsibility engendered by the face of the beloved? Only love would allow such a stupidity as responsibility for an other to be tolerated, and if love didn't enable such stupidities it wouldn't be love. It should be of the utmost concern to philosophy to know whether the absence of love indicates something like a hard, cold reality or, rather, something like the blues.

A Touchable Face

2009-10-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

Perhaps Morris is being fair to Levinas when he writes, "Far from an ethics of seeing, remoteness, and the face, when we become attuned to our sense of space as a sense of living movement that crosses us with the world and other bodies, we find an ethics of being in touch, of movement, that goes back into the prior movement of development, place, and the social, a movement limited by death in the here and now, rather than the infinite of God, as in Levinas's ethics of the face" (Sense, pp. 178-179). Be that as it may, I'd like to recover from the concept of the face something of a physicality and a phenomenality that doesn't efface the infinition of the other person, a phenomenality that does recognize singularity and radical exteriority even as it's characteristically encountered by way of chthonic temporalities and indeed a certain fugaciousness of existence, for, this may be paradoxical, in order that the world be intelligible, the infinition of the other person's face necessarily functions as a hermeneutic measure of finitudes, or, more broadly, horizons. We can't properly know what finitudes mean absent the appearance of the face of the other person, and conversely and simultaneously, we need to perceive limits in order to feel transcendent ourselves, to feel our own openness to the world upon which so much of our existence depends. I suggest then that the face be thought of as radically exterior to consciousness, but not by that token remote from phenomenality, for remoteness appears in phenomenality as remoteness from, and implicitly also as remoteness from a horizon. What belongs to the from, what's embedded in the from, is not shaken free in the movement away from phenomenality; such a freedom would require yet another movement, a necessarily invisible movement decidedly not connected to the world of perception. Yet there is however a spasmodic quality to infinition, a suddenness of instantiation, implying a sudden and immediate ethics. The spasmorealization of a cadacualtic—apologies—aspect of coexistence is given in every important sense by the face of the other. Infinition so far as we know it touches upon the contingent, in so many words, which leaves us to think of not what the unknowable face would look like, or some such, but rather the meaning of the con-, which changes everything we should want to say about touch, and thus, insofar as we use touch to interpret the phenomenal world, our statements about the world or indeed even about reality, if we were given to such talk. To sum up, Morris's criticism, regardless of whether it treats Levinas' philosophy with due fairness, would be unfair to a conceptualization of the face as touchable. More strongly, the touchablity of the face informs our understanding of the infinition of the face of the other person which is not arrived at by any detour around remoteness, but through "remoteness" such as it appears exactly.

Life Crisis

2009-10-14T08:26:00.001-07:00

A life crisis makes it difficult for me to blog. We'll see what happens.

Quick Note on Handedness

2009-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Adrien Meguerditchian emailed me some recent articles to allay my skepticism about evidence of handedness in nonhuman primates. One is in press, Meguerditchian et al., "Captive chimpanzees use their right hand to communicate with each other: Implications for the origin of the cerebral substrate for language," Cortex (2009), doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2009.02.013. The other one is Adrien Meguerditchian and Jacques Vauclair, "Contrast of hand preferences between communicative gestures and non-communicative actions in baboons: Implications for the origins of hemispheric specialization for language," Brain & Language (2008), doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.10.004. Meguerditchian's case is bolstered by the recent research. Longtime readers of this blog, nevertheless, will suspect that my skepticism is not easily shaken. In fact, however, I am leaning away from the belief that handedness is uniquely tied to human vocal speech. I remain uncertain about it. My skepticism in no way presupposes any closure on the question of evolutionary substrates for the pattern of lateralization evident in sapiens.

Asymmetries of the Question

2009-10-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

Taking a cue from Morris, who posits a deep connection between asymmetrical postures, openness and extroversion (Sense, pp. 164 ff.), let's provisionally categorize questions as either being symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical questions are exemplified by polar questions, though they include other types of presentation of either/or alternatives. Asymmetrical questions appear open-ended. They appear to transcend the horizon of the question considered as merely a more or less polite form of a request for information. They engage.

The asymmetrical question is grounded in an open posture. It arises as from a vulnerability, even as it negotiates a scaffolding that will support and inform noesis down the road ahead. Alternatively, the asymmetrical question leaps from the leap, comes to earth late in the process of questioning.

Does the asymmetrical question reflect the primitive condition of the question? Does the question initially spring from an asymmetrical posture or acture?

I'm assuming that a question arises from either a symmetrical or asymmetrical posture, and, secondarily, that it has either a symmetrical or asymmetrical form, which has its own shakiness as an assumption.

Regarding the secondary concern: How do we describe the commensurability of the question? Tacitly I have been assessing the symmetry of the question by balancing it against the answer. This is revealing. As argued previously, the question rather implies an answer or answerability, even in the form of refusals to answer. Answerability appears embedded in the horizon of the question, even as we acknowledge the delight people take in playing with unanswerable questions. Our assumptions then are all wrong?

So what is the question commensurate to? The request? Do we know the request well enough to measure the question against it? Is the question commensurate to the utterance in general? Dialogue? Are there, after all, dialogues without questions? (I've tried this, it's very off-putting.) So we face a conundrum of using questions without knowing what a question is, measuring the question ever provisionally, ever by a method open to questioning.

Does the aporetic arrive through an asymmetrical opening of the posture? Where does this lead? Do we ever, in questioning, pass beyond all measure?

Better than Ideas, Matrices of Ideas

2009-10-02T08:42:00.000-07:00

Barbaras quotes Merleau-Ponty taking off from Malraux' idea that we hear our own voices through our throats while we hear the voices of others through our ears: "I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else" (in Being, p. 281). For my part, while cognizant of the sense in which my voice is bound to my concrete existence and my uniqueness, I feel that, as previously noted,the ear comes late to hearing, late to hearing the other as well as (if differently than) the self.

Let's talk about listening to speech in particular, recognizing speech with its implicit dimension of listening as an example of coexistential ideation, an ideation characterized by quasi-interiority, an as if quality of its inner horizon. Here I'm thinking of ideation as allusive, as governed by methectic laterality rather than being directed "from above" or from the outside. Barbaras' thinking about this topic inspires. Under the heading "Sense as Articulation" Barbaras sketches out an ontology of the sign premised on the reversibility of the voice. He says:

Nowhere are we confronted with signs that are strictly vocal; they cannot be characterized as sensible, audible atoms, as individuals situated in exteriority. Most assuredly, I do not hear anything other than sounds, and yet it is not the sounds themselves that I hear. Their relationship escapes worldly exteriority; they are not situated side by side. Rather, they bear witness to a quasi-interiority corresponding to the quasi-reflectivity of the voice. Each sound already slips into the others, makes allusions there and, by this very relationship, sketches a meaningful unity. Nevertheless, this movement does not rest on the presence of a meaning possessed elsewhere; sense is nothing other than this lateral relation between the signs. It is implicated in words and phonemes, as a coherent deformation, rather than being possessed by them. Sense remains, at the heart of expression, "organic" rather than pure meaning, a "matrix of ideas" [Signs, p. 77] rather than an idea. Thus the incarnation of sense in the voice corresponds to the quasi-exteriority of signs.

(p. 288)

Just as it's obvious that there can't be deformation without form, there can't be as if without irrealization. However, irrealization in its usual forms emerges not from an isolated "interiority" (in an Idealist acceptation) but rather from matrices of delocutary vibrations, echoes which one echoes, gnoseologically, as it were. The aesthesiologicality of the vocal recovers a meaning of the as if as coexistential resonance and at the same time cadacualtic.

The vocal, it must be added, represents only one modality of embodied sign usage. Nonvocal coherent deformations are both imaginable and empirically evident. The vocal ought not be reified, as there are other routes to irrealizing coexistential vibration.

Ardi

2009-10-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

The panthropologists need to explain Ardi. It's not that Ardi can't be explained by any possible panthropology, but the fossil evidence must be dealt with, which in this case means, among other things, dealing with an affirmation of great diversity among the hominoidea, hominidea, and to put a fine point on it, the hominini. Check out Nature's report on the unveiling of the oldest hominid fossil, Ardipithecus ramidus. Key takeaway: "humans did not evolve from ancient knuckle-walking chimpanzees, as has long been believed. The reports, in Science, illuminate how early phases of humans evolved along a separate lineage from the last common ancestor shared by early hominids and extinct apes."

The news staff at Scientific Blogging also stresses this point:

Until now, researchers have generally assumed that chimpanzees, gorillas and other modern African apes have retained many of the traits of the last ancestor they shared with humans—in other words, this presumed ancestor was thought to be much more chimpanzee-like than human-like. For example, it would have been adapted for swinging and hanging from tree branches, and perhaps walked on its knuckles while on the ground.

Ardipithecus challenges these assumptions, however. These hominids appear to have lived in a woodland environment, where they climbed on all fours along tree branches—as some of the Miocene primates did—and walked, upright, on two legs, while on the ground. They do not appear to have been knuckle-walkers, or to have spent much time swinging and hanging from tree-branches, especially as chimps do. Overall, the findings suggest that hominids and African apes have each followed different evolutionary pathways, and we can no longer consider chimps as "proxies" for our last common ancestor.

Rupture of the Question

2009-09-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

Kangas' thoughts about the traumatic raise questions for our project of thinking about the question.

The trauma is less an experience than a quasi-experience, for what defines trauma is a tear in the fabric of presence itself. Consciousness is exposed to more than it can integrate and, unlike the experience of the sublime, does not recuperate itself in a secondary moment. The effect of the traumatic event is a dephasing of consciousness from its own temporality: the temporal "now" is no longer lived as an integral moment, relating to past-present and future-present, but placed out of time and out of being.

(Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 53)

Should we move then to thinking the quasi-experientiality of the question, the "as if" nature of the way the question unfolds in what we provisionally identify as experience? Let's note a rupture. Something about the question escapes the moment. Something escapes recuperability. Do these "somethings" have the status of things in our apprehension, or do we call them "things" only in the vaguest way possible, not to grasp them, but to feel our way around them. If it would be more exact to speak of the escaped or the irrecuperable, it would still leave something unsaid, something "out of being."

The question (the lovely question of rhythmosophy) appears to have an "as if" dimension, as if it were extramomentarily sprung from being. This sharing of space with the epoché, the bracketing of onticalities, occurs by virtue of its quasiexperiential irruption, which is nonetheless for being out of the present still yet spasmoreal. Is the quasi-experience in general spasmorealized? Question appears as if by surprise and interiority is dragged into question, as-if-dragged; is that the same way the questioning person is dragged into question?

More than anything the question interrupts. What kind of beginning is this?

The Empathic Dimension of the Question

2009-09-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

The question emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths. Which is deeper, the intersubjective or the coexistential? Perhaps this question is destined, by virtue of these depths, to remain in a state of transfusion. It absorbs a liquidity. It swims.

The interrogative clause (the opening clausula of *-subjectivity) functions as a politeness marker in various discursive universes. The interrogative phrasing, involving syntactical transformation as well as prosodic inflection, makes requests nice. It shows care for the face of the other, which emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths.

A typology of speech acts will not stand as an adequate guide to the description of all that can be adventured with the question. Yet, let's ask in passing how the paradox of inquiry, one starting point for philosophical questioning, might be connected with the everyday request or the functions of the interrogative.

Is the request a passionate form of inquiry? Can there possibly be any true love of inquiry without passion? Well, the votaries of dispassionate inquiry have much to say in their favor. Indeed, as a provisional critic of dispassionate inquiry I rely upon the indirectness called "dispassion" in order to communicate a critique of and ultimately to think about—very about—the question. Nonetheless, exploring the empathic dimension—function, modality, horizons—this is yet exploratory—of the question inevitably touches on the matter of the passions.

In questioning we catch a glimpse of the for-itself at the same time we work with the for-others. On another plane it appears that the question entwines with feeling, or with vulnerability. We feel for the others whom we question.

To inquire is to empathize? Contrary examples abound. However, the quotidian polite question by its nature of caring about the face of the other demonstrates a consciousness of vulnerability. Are we already empathically understanding the other even before we inquire of them? If that's true in any sense, then how do we make up for the horrible impoliteness of asking? Are our true feelings for others irrevocably wrapped up in polite fictions? Asked to sacrifice something resembling authenticity—must we be asked, or do we already feel this thing like authenticity being set aside as we begin to formulate the polite question, the empathic question? Do we set this thing aside for a true understanding of the other, or a true transfusion of horizons, a fiction true to our feelings for others? Would there then be something ultimately untrue about selfishness revealed by the question?

When asking about the question, which are the truths we must attend to?

A Repertory of Questions?

2009-09-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

In what sense does the question—in contradistinction to the assertion, perhaps—open up the possibility for a contradiction of experience, a subjunctivity at the nexus of conceptual and communicative praxis? A more basic question concerns the irrealizing function of the question, its operation without a single apparent referent. What is the real question? The fact that we say such things reveals an attitude about questioning, shows a facet of what its consequences are for mental life and what the question as question is. Questions are multilayered, but the layers are moving, more undulant than level, more given to transformative paraphrase than to pure synonymy, such as it exists. (As usual, I side with Sapir against the hypostatization of *language, a theoretical stance that may be implied by though not fully explored in Hagège's work.)

In The Dialogic Species Hagège presents a twofold conception of language: on the one hand language is the work of conceptual intelligence, language is signification, the traffic in signs and their meanings in place of things; on the other hand language is a dialogic exchange between speakers. He places the question, along with injunction, in the hand with dialogic communication. The argument seems to be that in human speech there is something like completely intersubjective dialogue whereby the listener assumes the full functions of the speaker. Does this division between signification and communication help make sense of the question? Here's Hagège:

[M]an, alone in the living world, is able to signify and to communicate in the full sense of each of these notions. Man uses a continually evolving repertory of signs, organized into coherent structures, to transmit and interpret messages presupposing a highly complex social relation of interaction and dialogue. These are messages that assert, interrogate, command and express states. And it is because human languages are the only systems invested simultaneously with this dual property that they must be recognized as unique.

(p. 79)

How does a question belong to a repertory of signs? Do we have repertories of questions that we necessarily work from when we ask any and all questions? Is it the case that creative, performative inquiry (repertory) begets the sign in its sense of its attachment to a system of differential meanings? Is inquiry of itself systematizing?

Raising an Eyebrow

2009-09-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

Interpreting the raising of the eyebrows to mark a question in American Sign Language:

In the sign languages of the deaf, facial movements and expressions often serve syntactic functions. For example, in American Sign Language, a declarative sentence is converted into a question if accompanied by a forward movement of the head and shoulders, and a raising of the eyebrows. Relative clauses are signaled by a raising of the eyebrows and upper lip, with the head tilted back. An affirmative sentence becomes a negative one if accompanied by a shaking of the head. (Examples are from Neidle et al. 2000.) Of course, sign language does not necessarily resemble any gestural language that our ancestors, such as Homo erectus, may have used. It is nevertheless interesting that facial gestures should generally convey syntax, whereas manual gestures supply content. As suggested earlier, syntax may have been grafted onto gestural communication from around two million years ago with the emergence of the genus Homo. If syntax was predominantly facial, this suggests a progression from manual to facial gesture in the emergence of language.

Michael C. Corballis, "From mouth to hand: Gesture, speech, and the evolution of right-handedness," Behavioural and Brain Sciences (2003) 26, 199–260, p. 203.

The prelinguistic raised-eyebrow gesture may not itself be particularly meaning specific, but pragmatic considerations surrounding the communicative interchange would contribute to its being inferred as a gesture indicating interest or intentness, or that some information is being solicited, akin to a question being asked. This prelinguistic gesture—available to both deaf and nondeaf communities in North America—is also used as a grammatical yes-no question marker in ASL, however. In this grammatical context it is specific in meaning, marking any string as a yes-no question. Thus a prelinguistic gesture has been recruited as a grammatical marker, and it would be difficult to claim that either is a lexical item in the sense of a content word. In this case, it appears that a grammatical marker, albeit a rather iconic one, takes as its source a more general communicative gesture, with no lexical word developing or intervening at this stage of grammatical development or later. . . .

Terry Janzen and Barbara Shaffer, "Gesture as the substrate in the process of ASL grammaticization," in Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages, pp. 199-223p. 214.

Raising the eyebrows primordially expresses inter-est, an opening of the person to coexistence, or, to be specific, the person-to-person world. The question along with its precursors is prominently interpersonal, as if we related to being-together first through concrete personhood.

Lets play for a moment with the nonlexicality of the question, or the nonlexical inflection of the question itself. What is, after all, the content of a question in general? Is the question something we graft on to other meaningful utterances, something that thrives only by being grafted on to other expressions, a style that must be added, a doubling of expression, a twist? Is it itself a hybrid, or does it represent a process of hybridization? Or does it represent, in particular, which can be inferred from its nonlexical mode of expressing interest, an originary interpersonalization of meanings? Or likewise a giving of meaning to the interpersonal? What is Sinngebung in its nonlexical mode? (Assuming it has one. I would tend to assume that there is a prelexical mode of the Logos, whether it be accessed in the complete absence of words, or, on the contrary, only through words, perhaps through an abandonment of words. I'm open to criticizing this assumption.)

Baboons Communicate with their Right Hands

2009-09-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

Despite retaining a healthy level of skepticism, I post these findings because I am sure they merit some serious attention:

Humans are mainly right-handed for many actions including gestures. This bias is strongly linked to a left cerebral hemispheric dominance for language functions. Whether similar lateralized systems for communicative behaviors are present in other animals is unclear. Here we report the first evidence of strong population-level right-handedness in 60 captive baboons for a species-specific communicative manual gesture. Our findings support the view that lateralization for language may have evolved from a gestural system of communication controlled by the left hemisphere.

Adrien Meguerditchian and Jacques Vauclair, "Baboons communicate with their right hand," Behavioural Brain Research 171 (2006) 170–174.

Ambiguous Illocutionary Force

2009-09-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

Martin Bell, guided by the thesis that acts of questioning "are illocutionary acts belonging to the command genus," notes a difference between the question that is put and the question that is raised ("Questioning," Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 100, 1975, pp. 193-212; p. 206, p.209). In his view the raised question has no illocutionary force. "Here the question is, as it were, in quotation, and no illucutionary force attaches to it" (ibid.).

The question of the raised question, having been raised rather than put, is not powerless any more that is not simple. It is complex, containing within it myriad questions. What is the raised question? How does it operate? It is a question by whom? For whom? For what kind of existentiality is the question raised? The raising of the question gives us to think about the question itself and its powers, its dynamics. Can it transform a person? Is the question raised for transmogrifiables alone? For, paradoxically, autotranscendent entities? (At this point, in quotation as it were ("."), it is tempting to affix "questionable" to every noun, "questionably," to every verb and modifier, or to say that this or that is a question of this or that.) Does the raised question throw everything into question? Presumably it would leave some space for itself to exist as a raised question in contradistinction to a put question, but throwing the world into question may be the special province of the raised question. The world of whom? Just anybody's world, or the world in the inflection of the just anybody? The world suspended for the sake of the question?

The raised question, then, should not be quickly determined to be powerless. It gives us to stop and think. Communicatively any question signals "your turn to speak" but insofar as the raised question also gives us to stop and think it doesn't oblige us to immediately respond. The turn is held in abeyance. The turn and the communicative response may represent situationally contradictory or counteroperative demands. Thus inasmuch as the raised question presents us with a dilemma it gives us more than to stop and think; it issues a challenge. This challenge signifies its power, a dilemmatical power. A doubling of the raised question as the dilemma of either to go on speaking or to stop and think takes hold and gives itself to be questioned; a challenge is put without the raised question ceasing to be a raised question, a question of ambiguous illocutionary force.

The dilemmatical is an existential concrete at the same time it is an elaboration of the dilemmic; perhaps we routinely approach the dilemmic by way of the dilemmatical. The dilemmic of the raised question seems to be that it is to be distinguished from the put question only by being put in quotation, as it were. It is precisely its authority that signals its dilemmic. If the authority of the raised question can be read as inscribed in being put, its authority appears to be erased in being put into quotation. If in fact the authority of the question put into quotation doubles the authority of the putting into question, the raising of the question leaves that authority without a world. Do we stop and think in worldlessness? No doubt the raised question has horizons, but they more than any other are given to be put into question.

The raised question has ambiguous illocutionary power, but its power is to upset the world.

The Motionless Question

2009-09-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

The hand may be too rough an instrument to measure the space between the abstractness of a posing of the question and the concreteness of a posing of the question.

Our results show that nearly identical patterns of left hemisphere activity are present while deaf signers generate verbs (compared to repetition of nouns) independently with their right (dominant) and left (nondominant) hands. The pattern of activation observed under these conditions is consistent with patterns reported for spoken languages. Importantly, the present data concur with delineation of functions within the left frontal region related to lexical–semantic, phonological, and search and retrieval processes. The results also provide important evidence for a nonmotoric role of the right lateral cerebellum activation during a language task, as well as additional support for a cerebellar contribution to cognitive behaviors. The data indicate activation of the left ventral fusiform, a region typically associated with form properties of written words. These data suggest this region may be responsive to visual properties of word forms that are not strictly tied to written languages. Finally, the patterns of activity observed in this study are more consistent with studies of linguistic processing rather than movement execution and perception.

In summary, these data indicate that linguistic–semantic processing relies upon left-hemisphere regions regardless of the modality in which a language is realized and that linguistic programming of non-dominant-hand use in signing arises from the same left-hemisphere regions responsible for dominant-hand use. These data provide new insights into the characterization of the neural systems underlying human languages and the articulatory motor system characteristic of signed languages of the deaf.

—Corina et al., "Language Lateralization in a Bimanual Language," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 15, Issue 5 (2003), pp. 718-730.

Does making a gesture towards speech in the throat feel like gesturing with the hand? I'm grasping. I must slowly come to grips with the possibility that the question has precious little to do with movement, or that it resides so deeply in the phenomena of surfaces that it must be understood as a superficial.

Imagine the motionless question, if you will. It is a question without style, destined to a perdurance—anything as existential as a per-durance of the motionless question would open an aporia, one that we will pass over for the moment, for the even the motionless question exists here in the nowish, be it irreal and provisional, existing so nonetheless—outside of speech, or, better, indifferent to speech, indifferent to expression. There is no enthusiasm for the motionless question. One simply doesn't approach it that way, the way of for. It is cold, yet curiously it corresponds to a resonance, a flow of blood. It itself doesn't inhabit space, but occupies space (or its simulacrum, a parallel spatiality).

Does one properly ask the motionless question? Does the motionless question transcend asking? Does it follow asking like a shadow?

The motionless question, unlike other objects of linguistic study, cannot directly coincide with its saying, better, its implementation. Indirectly, and most paradoxically, it exposes a hereness of the question. Does the moving question, the question in the hand, have this very same hereness? Is there any hereness besides existential hereness, hereness that is?

Could the hereness of the motionless question approach the absolute? To be a question it must have space for answers, must have answers wrapped inside it, and at the same time open itself to other heres, unforeseen heres of answerability, a cunicular substratum of response—how could the motionless question possibly be involved in a movement from one here to another here? If there is only one here given with the motionless question there is no space for answers, and "additionally," no space for motionlessness. Everything is crowded out except its own motionlessness. If the motionless question is without place there is no gap between it and the concrete question in the hand. It becomes any question and every question. It loses its sense of being the motionless question.

Presence of Another Person: Silent Logos

2009-09-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

Must we acknowledge the transcendence of the other person? The postulation of alterity and its attending shadow, an implicit ipseity, already prejudices the inquiry into coexistence. Is alterity perhaps then a necessary detour on the path to understanding coexistence? Is transcendence? Patočka usefully distinguishes between an abstract personal conception of the world and a concrete personal conception of the world. In the same way that we can approach the concrete personal after having discovered the abstract personal, we can approach the infrapersonal through the personal. The question arises, though, as to how the infrapersonal world connects with the world of things. Are they coextensive? Is there any continuity between them? How can we distinguish our unthinking projections of our own cherished images from our reachings towards knowledge?

"The other is not a transcendent existence, a being resting in itself," Barbaras argues from the vantage of a mature Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, "but another openness to the world" (Being, p. 243). Clearly he states that the other is not a transcendent existence; however, at other points in his exposition we are asked to acknowledge, understand and value the transcendence of the other. Are we to think of a transcendent openness in place of a transcendence existence? Or is there a troubling inconsistency in this approach to the presence of other people? Let's follow the argument through a longer passage:

The problem of the other should not be posed as the problem of the alter ego, because starting in this way from the identity of consciousnesses, one finds oneself immediately constrained to reject such consciousnesses in favor of a radical alterity. The relation to the other must be sought just short of this level, at the point where neither the other nor I are yet pure consciousnesses; that is, it must be sought on the plane of corporeity. But, on the other hand, it is nevertheless not a question of identifying the experience of the other with the revelation of this corporeity; instead of the other proceeding from the ordeal of my objectification, it is because the other first appears that I can discover for myself an objective body. Precisely insofar as it is truly the vector of the openness to the other, that is, to a determinate experience, corporeity cannot be understood as pure passivity, thrown back onto the side of the object. In short, in order that the other may remain transcendent, it is necessary that its givenness not proceed from an ego that is closed in on itself. But in order that this transcendence might be preserved, as appearing transcendence, it is necessary that the passivity to which it responds be simultaneously activity, that the movement of disappropriation, by which alone the other can advent, equally be appropriation. Incarnation is not the passage from a transparent consciousness to its other but the very modality according to which it can be in relationship with itself.

(p. 241)

Succinctly, Barbaras says that "in its carnal depth, transcendental subjectivity is truly transcendental intersubjectivity" (p. 247). My worry is that the intersubjective or the interpersonal, along with the infrapersonal, may be hastily conflated with the objective, for lack of a vocabulary for passage through various worlds. What exactly must the call to participate in the world of another person involve? What about tacit involvements, or the call to listen to a silent logos? What is our tacit relation to the other person? The obligation to question this relation is not only ethical but also internal to quest to understand the phenomenal (which may or may not constitute an ethical enterprise). We risk a deprived understanding of phenomenality if we conflate the objectivity we discover through our embodiment with any world that could possibly be discovered as coarising with coexistence, tacitly or otherwise. Infrapersonal horizons align with the depth of experience. Their extents are not measured by any euclidian geometry that would pertain to objects encountered in the natural attitude. "The other and its world are born together around a certain accent, around a certain dissonance at the heart of the spectacle. The other separates itself [s'écarter] from the world in a distance that is nevertheless not objectifiable" (p. 261).

Apparently I'm in danger of reading Barbaras, for the sake of argument, at too great a distance. True, he does say that "there is a full continuity between the thing and other, and that . . . the pertinence of a distinction between them must be called into question" (p. 264). This must be weighed against an argument for an "inner frame of intersubjectivity"(p. 253). I'll give Barbaras the last word here:

If the relation to the other has a meaning, the relation cannot be reconstituted on the basis of poles closed in on themselves, nor can it be reconceived on the basis of a neutral element within which every distinction would be abolished. The relation is this point of contact between subjectivities which is also a point of disjunction, this "surface" of separation where, finding themselves again, they are pushed back toward their difference, where the difference and the identity of consciousnesses and, consequently, the depth and the phenomenality of the world are constituted at the same time. It is necessary therefore to understand this Ineinander, this "inter" of intersubjectivity, as an ultimate, irreducible reality and finally as the fundamental Dimension of the world. There are not consciousnesses, because if the consciousnesses were truly consciousnesses, they would make one sole consciousness, and the solidity of the world would disappear in the inconsistency of a pure thought. There is no world or Being, because cut off from its phenomenalization it would not even be a world, it would disappear into nothingness. There is intersubjectivity, a hinge around which the world gains its unity, achieves a sense by dispersing itself in a plurality of experiences, thus preserving its depth and therefore also the depth of this sense. Intersubjectivity is the "field of fields" (VI 281/227) that is none other than those it articulates, the element in which the unity of carnal poles is at once both announced and differentiated.

(pp. 252-253, Barbaras' emphasis)

Auscultative Exigency

2009-09-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

Johannes Fabian writes, "oralization, that is, recourse to audible speech, actual or imagined, is an essential part of our ability to read texts. Yet our 'ideology' of literacy seems to put a taboo on revealing what we actually do when we read, for fear that oralization might subvert the authority of the written text" ("Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading," in The Ethnography of Reading, Jonathan Boyarin ed.,1993, p. 89). The issue is not simply that, to lift an idea, "the ear comes late to listening"; we come to listening, ears and all, by listening. Listening is the elaboration of an idea, its perplication and all that. What is prior about audibility is daring to listen, allowing the power to augment, authority, to be placed within transition—a phase in the metastabilization of the abyssmorphing of reciprocity, i.e., speaking— allowing the pause to resonate.

Absolute Irony of the Question

2009-09-16T06:37:00.000-07:00

The so-named rhetorical question, an ironic trope at first blush, is in truth an example of the speculative question. The ignorance of the speaker doesn't really amount to much in this case. The totally ironic question is something altogether different, for total irony points to an irrevocable split between phenomenon and essence "beyond their recuperable identity" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 29). The opening up of the possibility for total ironic questioning readies thinking for philosophy, philosophy in its post-Socratic phase, which has become synonymous with philosophy itself. The ironic question, ironically both phenomenon and condition for a phenomenon of questioning, exists as a prepatory gesture, and hence its eidos remains in withdrawal. Its eidos forever becomes recallable as the unrecallable: "The infinite absolute negativity of the Socratic standpoint. . . is to have the Idea merely as limit, to recollect it only as the non-recollectable" (p. 33, Kangas' emphasis).

The critique of the eroticization of the question, which eroticism almost amounts to a paraphilia among the clerisy (as does, ironically, critique), paradoxically calls for a poetics of inquiry, and implies not the temperament—poetic temperament could only be determined in its cold state—but the life of a poet. Philosophy gives us to think, poetically as must needs be, the enigmatic existence of an original preparatory thinker, of a *Socrates, in the spasm of the question. Is it possible to emulate Socrates and still be critical of the philosophical question? How do we emulate enigma, or simply admire the enigmatic existence, without succumbing to obscurantism?

In the Socratic movement, philosophy, the question "receives a radical priority over any expository discourse aiming at knowledge" (p. 24, my emphasis). Is the search for knowledge via the question supervened in favor of an apeironic priority of questioning, a priority indifferent to being and nothingness? Kangas here at this juncture equates the radical priority of Socrates' question concerning the good with the radical priority of "the original possibility of questioning—Socrates maintains a relation to the excess implied in any new beginning. Remaining faithful to this excess is the condition for remaining faithful to Socrates' 'historical-actual, phenomenological existence'" (ibid.). Fidelity to Socrates' enigmatic existence paradoxically means allowing the figure of Socrates to recede behind the absolute priority of inquiry.

Having drawn a distinction between the ironic and the speculative, between the preparation and the journey, do we then, in inquiry, seek knowledge? Not in an expository way, one might answer. Yet we might still investigate how we imagine these things are put against one another, journey and preparation, if that's how our imagination approaches the problematic. Does the absolute irony of the question ever cross paths with the expository? Or is this crossing of paths what is meant by the "enigmatic existence" of the philosopher?

Topology of Up and Down

2009-09-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Morris conceptually demarcates two classes of movement: grasping, whose topology is based in habitual activity, and residing, a movement by posturing and seeing. "Up," he says, "is specified by postures of residing that point back to an underlying topology of residing, and to an emotional register of our postural relation to earth" (Sense, p. 150). Presumably both kinds of movements are chiasmic. "The referent of 'up' is neither in the world nor in the body, but in movement that crosses the two" (p. 139), and, further, he says the referent of up is "postures of residing, postural movements" (p. 140).

Additionally Morris relates "up" to "open," inviting us to explore an ambivalence in the chiasm between movement from the body out into the world and movement from the world into the body. "[T]he closed posture is like the open posture in implying a relation to earth. But the open posture expresses unconcern for the earth, implies earth as a power at one with the body's power of residing. In contrast, the closed posture implies earth as a region of concern, antagonistic to the body's power of residing" (p. 146). Morris takes walking with the head hanging down as an example of the closed posture and associates this posture with shame.

Tilting one's head toward one's body closes one's body in on itself. This closed posture is protective and concernful, it turns one away from moving involvement with the surrounding world, and brings one into a moving relation with one's body and roots in the world/ One looks down at one's feet and there one notices what Neruda calls "the isolated and solitary part of [one's] being." Just as the unconcern of the open posture hides one's concerned relation to the world, the self-involvement of the closed posture hides the fact that one is concerned not just with oneself, but with one's residence on earth. The closed posture, like fainting in Sartre's analysis, is a postural, emotional attitude that affirms contact with the world precisely in turning away from it.

(p. 145)

Having broached the topic of the world of others, Morris then leads the discussion into the phenomenology of the face, using again the example of shame. He says:

[I]n shame, something curious happens. One turns one's face to oneself. But in doing so, one is facing others in face of whom one is ashamed. How? By taking on their point of view in turning in shame toward oneself, as if one were taking on the face of the other and looking at oneself with another's face (the face of genuine contrition, of shame, and so on); but in the very same moment one is facing away from the others, not looking them in the face, and showing that one cannot face oneself as others do (perhaps the face of contrition is a mask). In the hang-dog gesture of shame, one acknowledges the other's position only by showing that one cannot coincide with it, that one faces shame only by not facing it. There is something tremendously complex going on here, and I suspect it indicates something deep about the phenomenology of facing: that facing can never entirely encompass what it faces, that we can never take on the face of the others we face. Facing is thus an index of responsibility and care in the deep grammar of our facing bodies.

(p. 154)

Polygenesis of Languages

2009-09-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

Claude Hagège hypothesizes a monogenetic origin of a faculty for speech but a polygenetic origin of human languages (The Dialogic Species: A Linguistic Contribution to the Social Sciences, trans. Sharon L. Shelley, Columbia University Press, Second Edition, 1990). I'm not certain the radical critique of universal grammar requires an evolutionary argument (in fact I reckon Hagège's radical critique is born of patient, close study of diverse living languages), but here is one:

We have seen that all evidence indicates virtual simultaneity of the birth of the species and the ancient migrations. Moreover, we can better sketch this vast adventure if we keep in mind the difference between the notions of speech faculty (langage) and language (langue). Through a continuing series of improvements, the first more or less coded stammerings became regular formations; their repertories extended as the aptitude to symbolize became enriched with the more specific faculty of articulating thought in ordered signs expressed by combinations of sounds. But such an evolution itself assumes a considerable period of time and thus cannot have produced human languages in the contemporary sense of the term, until after the great migrations. Thus, in all likelihood, this process took place in several different geographical areas. The ecological milieu, nature and its sounds, vegetable and animal species as well as the sound phenomena they produced, were therefore quite diverse. Diverse also, in each living biocenosis (or community of interdependent beings), were the nuclei of social organization which were constituted, and, consequently, the first languages themselves. For, from the beginning, they were closely affiliated with these social organizations, although it is true that this relationship was gradually obscured by the progressive and arbitrary conventions that separate words and phrase structures from their original sources.

(pp. 7-8)

For Hagège the origination of languages is closely tied to a capacity for thought; articulating abstract thought through vocal signs is a vital function of language above and beyond any residue of its sensory-motor aspects. He presents the view that the neocortical elaboration of Homo and of sapiens in particular precedes the development of languages. (Reportedly the neocortex ratio for humans "is about 50% larger than the maximum value for any other primate species" (Robin Dunbar, Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans.); of course the encephalization quotient of sapiens is also remarkably high; see the lecture notes of Bill Sellers, Primate Brains).

Varieties of Ideation

2009-09-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

Barbaras reads Merleau-Ponty as wanting "to reestablish the experience itself of ideality" (Being, p. 235). He says further, "The fidelity to experience, to which the dialectic of the visible and invisible bears witness, imposes the recognition of the intelligible as a specific experience; that is, the fidelity of experience imposes that we distinguish ideality in the strict sense from the 'ideas' that are inscribed within the heart of the sensible" (p. 236).

The irrealization of experience absent any magistral discursive function (though not deposed of all possibilities for learning), which is to say experience on an equal footing with the experience of itself, exposes variation as an element inscribed within the experiential. I want to interpret experience as it is experienced, yet I read variation into experience by the very ideation that brings it to consciousness. It appears equally true that variation was already "there" within experience as a condition for reading anything at all into experience, into indicating a movement between an experience and its other. Fidelity to whyless variation—chaosmic, spasmoreal whyless variation—is a requirement of fidelity to experience. Plurality emerges more or less suddenly in tandem with experience, which is the source of the difficulty in saying definitively "experience means p," or "experience means q."

Perhaps on a note of tension, then, I share with you Barbaras' statement that "the sensible already carries within it the entire destiny of meanings, but in it meaning remains opaque and allusive" (p. 237). Meaning doesn't stand still except by allusion. At best it sometimes plays alongside remaining in place. In its original form meaning precisely and almost at once not entirely departs. Remaining is a departure of meaning.

Øieblikket

2009-09-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

What do we make the positing of the instant that cannot be posited? Does one always come late to the instant, the instant that refuses to be even partially anticipated because it emerges as a surprise? What are we to make of this metaphysics of birth? In Kierkegaard's Instant: On Beginnings David Kangas rereads Kierkegaard's philosophy in light of such an instant, a coming into existence, he says:

that falls essentially prior to any beginning that could be represented, posited, or recollected by a subject: a beginning prior to all beginning, prior to the total horizon of presence—hence, an "anarchic" beginning that will always already have begun. This is what is meant by "Kierkegaard's Instant." The problem is one of thinking a beginning that cannot be translated as a first principle or ground, a beginning that neither serves as foundation nor can be posited. Self-consciousness, we learn from these texts [of Kierkegaard's], arrives always too soon or too late to the instant in which existence is given; it cannot be made to coincide with itself. Vis-à-vis this infinite beginning, existence shows itself as absolute departure, without foundation or goal.

(p. x)

If we take Kangas' reading as impetus to institute a logic of letting go of first principles, might we then also desire to let go of the coupling of the instant with a givenness of existence? Another passage may edify:

What transcends self-consciousness is not what stands over against it, but falls prior to it. Through paradox after paradox Kierkegaard's early texts exhibit a movement toward the radically anterior, the irrecuperable, the unrecollectable. They return thinking to an "infinite beginning," which he names "the instant" (Øieblikket), in which temporality itself begins. The instant is the name for a beginning that cannot be interiorized, appropriated, recollected, represented, or possessed. It is not a work of self-consciousness, not mediation, but rather the event through which self-consciousness is first enabled. The instant is the gift or birth of presence. An instant cannot claim to be. Of itself it is nothing, it is nowhere; it neither is nor is not. And yet everything changes in the instant. An instant enters into experience, or becomes present, either essentially too soon or too late. Anytime one says "and before I knew it," or "and then suddenly," one will have felt the residual effects ("traces") of the instant.

(p. 4, Kangas' emphases, my bold)

The Recursion behind the Recursion

2009-09-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

The concept of experience implied in saying "experience as complex" presupposes something like originary experience prior to the construction of experience (and concomitantly it implies a spacetime prior to the constitution of spacetime, along with a self prior to self); experience in a paradoxical sense would have to consist of a congealment of itself, the freezing of itself in a moment together with. . . ? An interest in this together with prevents me from rejecting the paradox of recursive experience outright. Behind that question of experience's together with lies a horizon of metaphoricity (together with intentionality), behind which a horizon of comprehension, behind which a horizon of chiasmic reach, behind which a forest of heterogeneity. . . .

Touching on the topic of seeing together with the whole person, here is a quote from Nelson Goodman's Language of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols which takes its inspiration from Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation: "The eyes comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by and old and new insinuations of the ear, nose and tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism" (quoted in Corradi Fiumara, Metaphoric, p. 95).

At the risk of foreopening a question, I deliberately speak of the person and not the animal without therewith denying the animal. We are particularly human, Corradi Fiumara suggests, "to the extent that we manage a roundabout access instinctual depths" (p. 107). If metaphoric processes are conditions for attaining personhood, however, they also carry a destructurative potential. Person designates an ambiguous creature of (its "own") metaphoric processes. Metaphoricity "develops in conjunction with the creation of an intermediate space of ambiguities, extending between the individual self and the communal epistemology" (ibid., my emphasis on being in conjunction).

The crazy straw of experience can be imagined as synergistic. Cognitive synergy refers to, according to Corradi Fiumara, "the occurrence of incompatible properties being experienced simultaneously in relation to the development of one's identity" (p. 109). Simultaneity and origination, together with and incompatibility, synergy and play, recursion and recursion.

Crazy Straw

2009-09-08T13:38:00.001-07:00

"Each experience is a modality of the expression of the world," says Barbaras (Being, p. 233). The world, he says, "is constituted around points of passage, axes of equivalence, through which every thing communicates, gaining access simultaneously to their identity and to their difference. The 'mutual expression,' the allusion that everything makes to every other, therefore precedes their distinction; rather, from this 'mutually expressive' tissue things surge forth, as things of the world, that is, as things still enveloped in what they envelop" (p. 234)

A Peristaltic Flow

2009-09-08T13:19:00.000-07:00

Two items:

Neural signals take time to travel from periphery to brain, but they all have different distances to travel, and therefore take different amounts of time reach the brain. The brain receives signals coming in from different parts of the body, but these signals are from events at different points in the past, as light reaching the star-gazer is from stars at different moments in the past. IF touch my toe, the signal from my hand will arrive in my brain before the signal from my toe, since it has less distance to travel, yet I experience both events as happening at the same time.

(David Morris, Sense of Space, p. 116)

"The Ultra Deep Field observations, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, represent a narrow, deep view of the cosmos. Peering into the Ultra Deep Field is like looking through an eight-foot-long soda straw."

A third item, which has arrived here before:

An event cannot be neatly isolated from previous and later events without losing its essential character as an event, a character of "emerging from" and "leading into" which accounts for the continuity of the process. An event is thus not the result of an abstraction out of the flow of time, but a constitutive dynamic element of the flow itself"

Something like a thought of "experience as complex" arrives. "Experience as constellation." Like a thought, but "it" didn't all happen just now. "Now" I want to look at experience through an eight-foot-long soda straw. "." Does experience ever arrive uninflected?

An Extended Definition of Culture

2009-09-07T04:56:00.000-07:00

From the Summary of Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins:

Cultural diversity within a single population has rarely been documented. In non-human primates, the only comparable case of a subculture within a population appears to be the grooming hand-clasp of chimpanzees in Mahale, Tanzania. In contrast with non-human primates, where culture has been demonstrated by using regional comparisons between populations, the observed vertical transmission of culture with a matriline of a single population creates a different spatial pattern. Thus, the operational definition of culture used in primatology does not capture cases as described in our study. We propose, therefore, to extend this definition to "include traditions that are habitual in some but not other individuals with overlapping home ranges, within the same population, where genetic and behavioral data are inconsistent with those individuals having acquired the behavior genetically."

Panthropomorphic Thinking

2009-09-07T03:24:00.000-07:00

Consuetudinal tool use, evidenced in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), and humans, is probably a synapomorphy of the family Hominidae (see van Sheik et al. (1999), "The Conditions for Tool Use in Primates: Implications for the Evolution of Material Culture," Journal of Human Evolution, 36: 719–741; the article's hypothesis is that social tolerance is a condition for the development of material culture (i.e., consuetudinal tool use)). How strong is the evidence, then, that "an unprecedented level of behavioral developmental plasticity" is a hominini (Pan/Homo) synapomorphy (van Sheik (2004), "Book Review of Behavioural Diversity in Chimpanzees and Bonobos, Journal of Human Evolution, 46: 517–518)?

The possibility that consuetude represents a phyletic elaboration of plasticity doesn't preclude the tracing of our understanding of plasticity back to a primitive consuetutindal tribalism ("phylism"). We face a dilemma. The natural history of plasticity, like the natural history of reflexive consciousness, appears to leap out from the physis that precedes it. We can no more reasonably deny that an understanding of plasticity arises from human experience than we can deny phyletic origins of plasticity. A revolution has occurred at some point, to choose a metaphor, or, to choose another, the birth ("nature") of something new on earth, something rather paradoxical. However, vestiges of a parthenogenic fantasy may constrict our thinking here. Reciprocally, fantasial thoughts about plasticity appear to be constrained by the tribe, operating through a sphere of shared affects which steer the thinker back from frontiers of knowledge. We need to know how flexible plasticity is—and generally how plasticity works, what it does—before we can profitably determine that x or y degree of plasticity (supposing developmental plasticity admits of degrees, which there is some basis for if one looks at, for example, weaning times, or the period it takes to learn rudimentary locomotive skills, not to mention consuetudinal tool use) represents an unprecedented level of plasticity among Hominidae, Primates or, indeed, Animalia.

Popping in and out of Eternity

2009-09-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch advises that the creative person distinguish between constructive judgment and obstructive judgment.

This means telling the difference between two kinds of time. The feedback between constructive judgment and ongoing creative work goes back and forth at more than lightning speed: it goes on in no-time (eternity). The partners, muse and editor, are always in synchrony, like a pair of dancers who have known each other for a long time.

(Free Play, p. 134)

Does one simply pop in on eternity? Pop! Has it always been "there," or does it need to be generated through something like practice? Can we judge eternity into and out of existence? Must eternity at any moment have been inspired? Does eternity even have moments?

Inquiry and Error

2009-09-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Inquiry would be pointless without the possibility of error. However, the quest for accuracy, a modality of care which Corradi Fiumara justifiably identifies as a saliency of human thought (if it isn't perhaps the punctum saliens of inquiry in the main), seemingly contravenes a bona fide acceptance of error at any point during the course of inquiry. Once we admit the possibility of error the quashing of express errors during the course of inquiry becomes problematical. By disallowing for the appearance of error itself we betray error and so therefore implicitly compromise any commitment to inquiry, or else we follow a path away from noncontradictory reason—we error in refusing to accept error.

Perhaps the possibility of error resides in answers and not in questions? Yet the question envelops the answer. Dialogue, response, is as keenly an element of the question as oxygen is an element of water. To close the question against error by dismissal of wrong answers is to stray from inquiry in its dialogic essence, which isn't to say one can't reasonably dismiss any given answer as wrong, but simply to posit that such dismissals can't close the question as such against error.

Roughly I'm concerned with the flightpaths of inquiry here, at the expense, perhaps, of fixing boundaries. Are our expectations about inquiry altered as an investigation makes its way to its destination—we haven't yet settled questions of destinations, the manner in which questions are folded into an investigatory itinerary, causes of the question, consuetudinal structurations—or over the span of a career of philosophical inquiry, inquiry that calls itself into question? Do we start a philosophical inquiry with a question and then allow some latitude for error on the way to an answer? Does an initial question guide all subsequent questioning, set a trajectory that constrains all possible deviations? Do questions metamorphose under scrutiny? Are questions in the process of an inquiry like hinges, small joints that allow the doors of inquiry to swing shut and open? If inquiry is a revisionary process is the model of inquiry then also open to revision? Revisability as a facet of inquiry may imply the correction of errors but by the same token it would have to also imply the possibility of error.

While I can't wholeheartedly recommend an erratic pursuit of inquiries, neither can I recommend against it, and I can't quite see the reason why an erratic style of questioning need be regarded as inimical to philosophy. Avowedly I favor the peregrination, despite a few reservations and embarrassments. The adventure of philosophy must at some point pass through the ambiguity of the errant, acknowledge its existence rather than attempt to wish it out of being. As Corradi Fiumara argues, we must inquire into the unbearability of ambiguity, for surely "a measure of ambiguity allows for a constant search for ever greater accuracy" (Metaphoric, p. 80). The acknowledgment of ambiguity folds back on itself, methectically folds back into knowledge. The philosophical question offers not one single immiscible meaning but a multitude of perplications, the opening of a thousand paths of inquiry, a thousand exploits. There is no philosophical journey without exposure to error—and yet, yet, this conclusion is too comfortable. It feels wrong. If the inquiry comes full circle has it genuinely exposed itself to error?

An Enigma of Coevality

2009-09-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

How do we share a here? Nowly? Momentaneously?

Barbaras distinguishes depth, the embeddedness of my body it the world, from the distance between things in a homogenous metrical space.

Depth, the remoteness that cannot be carried forward in the form of an outline within things, is the first dimension. Whereas height and width seem to belong to the things themselves and to owe nothing to the subject, depth corresponds to the originary unfolding of spatiality. The priority of depth does not therefore mean a privilege would be granted to it, within objective space, vis-à-vis height and width; in this space, all of the dimensions are equivalent. Depth is of another order than actual distance; it is situated just short of metrical space and reveals thereby a new sense of dimension.

(Being, pp. 209-210)

Does the space between things exist as space? If so, what kind of space? How is it presented? "The enigma of depth, Merleau-Ponty notes, is that there is a between of things" (p. 213). Is the between of between us of the same order? I feel a depth to our relationship. Do I compare this depth to the depths of my relations to other people? Do I instead operate out of a uniformal between, or, alternatively again, out of a depth belonging to a region or a modality of interrelations between people? Does the between exist polymorphously? Is it made polymorphic? Does the between have its unifocality, in its unfolding if not in its etiology? Does it at any time belong here?

Does the idea of bewteenness drive us to envisage the coexistence of things and the coexistence of people as belonging to a shared dimension? Indeed Barbaras asks us to rethink coexistence. To begin with, a question of phenomenality, he notes that "the phenomenon ascends to itself only by making itself co-present to the world and consequently to all the others" (p. 215). Does this formulation grant too much agency and ultimately too much personhood to the phenomenon in general? Again, from a different angle, do the co-presence of phenomena and the coexistence of people equally arise from depth? (Is there an implication here that depth is worldless, that things hover in a betweenness, a polymorphic being around in which if a horizon could only be discernible in an embryo?

Coexistence, Barbaras instructs, should not be bemuddled with strict contemporaneity, "which supposes precisely a space entirely unfolded. As soon as the being-together of phenomena is determined as depth, their articulation cannot go up as far as the order of the contemporaneous; their articulation cannot coincide with the axis of the "now" (p. 216). What would a loose contemporaneity resemble? Would one want not want to characterize it as coexistential? What if we initially divide the contemporaneous from the now?

Here's a thought: "The relation of the present to the past must be characterized as chiasm" (p. 224). If nothing in reality exists momentaneously in that the past is always chiasmically implicit and the "presence of depth opens the dimension of a future" (p. 216), then strict contemporaneity almost appears to be a strawman. Well, perhaps our interrelations are haunted by a ghost of contemporaneity. Perhaps we live with a spectral contemporaneity. Or else, if we are to interrogate strict contemporaneity, we could posit an irreducible plurality in the depths of coexistence. I don't know about this. We speak of having a shared history, or sharing a life together. What do these phrases mean? Is what we share enigmatically never quite here, or never quite in a here implicit in there being an us? How do we interpret our irreversibility?

Wherein the Original Wanders from the Translation

2009-08-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

Morris distinguishes between mechanical translation and expressive translation, arguing in fact that expression is translation in the paradoxical sense in which an original text becomes orginal only by being translated. He says "below the turn of experience the representational relation between subject and object is one of mechanical translation: representation amounts to a shift of content from one form to another in an already established system. At the turn of experience the relation between subject and object would instead involve expression [i.e., expressive translation]" (Sense, p. 84, my emphasis). Does translation have a pilgrimatical quality? Does the meaning of the pilgrimage, enigmatically, come from a within? Morris maintains that expressive translation elaborates a plane of meaning from within. Where does that take us?

Exarations of an Earthly Self

2009-08-31T03:44:00.001-07:00

"Editing must come from the same inspired joy and abandon as free improvisation," says Nachmanovitch (Free Play, , p. 109).

The mYrror between the Olympian and the secretarial, a dionysiac hand exarate. The poet knows things like chiton, stylus, catoptron, morph, amphora. He says such things as if his words were butterflies. The poetical far surpasses the poet, such is the amphoricity of the poet's psyche, the bearing of its epiphanizations. What has been relinquished in order to give out giving? Breath? Earthly Breath.

Physiology of the Metaphor

2009-08-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

When Corradi Fiumara speaks of metaphoricity implying a "physiological" transformation of meanings she is not merely giving us an analogy (Metaphoric, p. 55). "The use of metaphoric language," she says, appears to be "profoundly interwoven with the actual development of our inner life" (ibid.). She implies that the recognition of personal uniqueness logically requires the recognition of the metaphoricity of language (p. 52). Are "inner messages" then born of a lived metaphoricity? Do we possibly know personal uniqueness prior to language, or does it even make sense to speak of prelinguistic knowledge? How broadly does one defines language? So broadly as to merge linguisticity with hominization, as Corradi Fiumara seems to do, to see them as interwoven in an evolution of meanings? Of course this kind of knowledge of language would be premised upon access to a metaphoricity—a mode of a speaker's paradox.

If contextual linguistic knowledge itself expresses a metaphoric potential of language, to draw the most from Corradi Fiumara's rejection of the idea of any naturally occurring zero-context utterance (pp. 156-157, note 12), then there is a sense in which linguistic capacity is interwoven with metalinguistic capacity. We see language as being about the interpersonal world. Translation would by this account not be premised on metaphoricity in a way that would allow us to isolate its conditions of possibility from those of language so much as the translative would represent one of the modalities of the metaphoric process of contextualization. The translational encounter, the allusion between "languages" (the emblamaticized formal representations of phatic communities), provokes transformational awarenesses, decipherments, which give rise to the within of language, the recognition of an ipseity in speaking—here I may be significantly departing from Corradi Fiumara, though we both agree on the (eudaimonial, therapeutic, epistemological, affective, human) importance of listening to inner messages, for my intuition is that the withinness of the personal is created. It's a metaphor, or to speak "metaphorically" though not merely so, a translation.

Allusions

2009-08-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

Allusiveness

Barbaras on language:

Against the intellectualist conception which posits the material sign and the signification side by side as positive entities, linguistics discovers that sign and signification become positive beings and are then ordered to each other only by a process of active differentiation carried out first on the signifiers themselves. It is truly by this process that the signifiers become signifiers in the strict sense, that is, carriers of significations. The signification is not attached in a univocal manner to a sign but is situated between the signs as the invisible place where the signifying acts intersect. The sense intended in speech is a "qualified nothingness" whose unity is designed by means of the incessant differentiation of spoken words. Consequently, the sign is never truly isolable and the sense never strictly present in any spoken word; it is sketched in them as their secret web and remains therefore allusive, by principle disappointing every attempt to possess it in person. The sense is reached only in a lateral fashion, beside itself, across the figures in which it is incarnated.

(Being, p. 179)

Chaosmic Metaphoricity

In my usage "spatiality" hardly ever refers to bare geometric space but rather to space as it is lived; similarly "meaning" refers not to a purely intellectual realm of displaced and displacable abstractions but to an embodied gesture towards the world, an expression of mien. The orders of extensa and cogitans are not originary. From such a viewpoint metaphor takes on an ontological and chaosmological significance. "Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed," Barbaras explains, "things proceed from a general 'metaphoricity,' from a universal participation that they concentrate or crystallize in order to be constituted into things" (p. 195, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold). This view of a general metaphoricity apparently describes an inhabited world, a universe of life and of leeway. Can there a cosmos in which leeway as such exists without the possibility of response to leeway?

Anarchic (}∅{) Individuation

Barbaras says that "individuation does not designate an incomprehensible phase preceding the individual whose clarification then necessitates recourse to a principle" (p. 183, Barbaras' emphasis) and likewise, "individuality makes sense only insofar as it does not proceed from a principle, and . . . the individual has individuality only insofar as individuality cannot be assigned. The individuality of the thing can be maintained only by remaining unfulfilled, just short of the point where it could fixed as a principle" (p. 184). Does this argument about things also hold for persons, unique, living beings? I think it's rather meant to: "individuality is characterized by its ability to foil every search for a principle of individuation; to be attentive to the individual is to understand that the search for such a principle is meaningless. One must instead say that the individual produces its own 'principles' as asymptotic poles of its pre-individual life" (p. 186). Does }∅{ designate the total absence of principles, or the autopoetic generation of its own proper extempore "principles?" Can these be separated? Is general metaphoricity not a principle?

An errant thought: "sense at its maximum degree of errancy, nowhere gathered together, pure allusion, horizon" (p. 181). I allege that allusion is like enough to a gathering, a playing along, or a play towards. I note a tension between errancy and allusion; at the same time }∅{ means the absence of an apriori gathered; the allusive gathers up in itself even prior there being an in in itself. The allusiveness of this very concatenation of thought has not escaped my notice. Not even direct quotation erases the allusiveness of sense.

Barbaras says that the "ultimate ground of the real consists of . . . 'rays of the world' which do not lead to the rank of principles" (p. 190). To speak of the ultimate betrays a desire for principles. "Ultimate ground," "ultimate moment": }∅{ issues no ultimata. "Ultimate" must be understood figuratively. The desire for the arche is born autopoetically, in the leap. Rays of the world never arrive at the arche, but they approach the arche asymptotically. The penultimate is truer than the ultimate to chaosmic metaphoricity. It belongs with the spasmoreal, though it is "almost" ultimate. It alludes to another order.

Infinitions of the Reach

2009-08-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

Let's begin by thinking of the temporality of the limit, the path between fields, for the limit is not tacked down but unfurls or advances–in a meaningful sense it consists of its own advance. The nature of its existence is existence, that is, the animate surpass, but much more can be said about it. We should want to know for instance whether the limit as such is necessarily schematicized. Schematicization is an aspect of embodiment, and if the limit were discovered to be a bodily phenomenon it should have this aspect. Things aren't so clear, however. We may know the limit bodily if not viscerally yet, as Morris says, "the body as a whole appears as a center of indeterminacy" (Sense, p. 66). The "body," not yet "my body," appears as the turning point of infinitions, as if the limit were, in order to be turned inside out, buried in the movements of the chiasm, earth and sprout. The limit must be passed through in order to be a limit. Such movements, infinitions, are schematicized, but the schema is not like a solid thing. It continuously arises from its own activation, autopoetically. The bodily schema, like Bergson's motor schema, is, to paraphrase Morris, a phenomenon of the limit, of chiasmic movement that (unlimitedly) limits itself (p. 67). The bodily schema unfolds in "real" time, as a limit, Morris insists (p. 69). In a sense then the limit becomes its asymptotic approach, the positioning of the telos that never quite arrives, a course of turns felt as the inhabitive cunicularity of styles of approach. The temporality of the cunicular leaps with studied suddenness, a leporine quality of both evasion and celebration, a novelty of approach; at the same time the world intrudes into the cunicular, earthy itself. The paradox of the leap: only in the leap does the earth becomes earth, take on its heaviness as earth. Earth as limit is turned inside out. Infinition reconfigures its own beyond, the repertoire of to/from structures native (as second nature) to existence within the leap. Says Morris, "The moving schema is already beyond itself, open to the world and development, ready to run into kinks that develop into new folds. The formation of such folds is a gross reorganization of body-world movement. . . that rearticulates our exploration and interaction with the world" (p. 70).

Pluripotentiality/Plurifinality

2009-08-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch says, "Bricolage implies what mathematicians like to call 'elegance,' that is, such an economy of statement that a single line of thought has a great many implications and outcomes" (Free Play, p. 86). Does this line of thought have consequences for our thinking about causality? Are there spheres of play or creativity completely divorced from causality? (And isn't there the argument that suchlike divorce is essential to causality? Is this any less a statement about the given that it is about causality?) As ever it seems I'm uncertain about the ontic status of the cause. Does the cause have many outcomes? Does the cause implicate the way the metaphor implicates—by what rights would one say that metaphor doesn't implicate conversationally? What is the ontic status of a maxim of manner? Should I say *maxim of manner?

Interdigitation from Within

2009-08-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch:

The voice of the muse comes to realization in and through the limits of the body. Look at your hand. Turn it over. Stretch it. Point it. Thump it. For a musician, of all the structures that impose their discipline on us, the most ubiquitous and marvellous is the human hand. Beginning with the fact that the hand has five digits and not six or four, the hand predisposes our work toward particular conformations because it itself has a shape. The kind of music you play on the violin or piano, the kind of painting that comes from your handling of the brush, the pottery you turn on the wheel, is intimately influenced by the shape of your hands, by the way they move, by their resistances. The structure of the hand is not (once again) "just anything"; the fingers have certain characteristic relationships, certain ranges of relative movement, certain kinds of crossing, torquing jumping, sliding, pressing, releasing movements that guide the music to come out in a certain way. Graceful work uses those patterns and instinctively moves through them and out as we find ever-fresh combinations. The shape and size of the human hand brings powerful but subtle laws into every kind of art, craftsmanship, mechanical work, and into our ideas and feelings as well. There is a continuous dialogue between hand and instrument, hand and culture. Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.

(Free Play, pp. 81-82, my bold)

Terpsichore represents the apotheosis of the muse—the prism through which the full spectrum of musicality becomes spectral—because of this emancipating limitation of the hand. Does improvisation have as a deep structure the morphology of the hand? A human hand? Why not two hands? Is the breach shaped or directed by hands? Are apparition and depth on par, a par shaped by the hands?

Forget propositional knowledge for a moment. Feel your hands from the inside. Does this describe a real feeling: feeling your hands from the inside? Where does "from the inside" find its place in the full spectrum of musicality?

Cheirokinesthetics of the Question

2009-08-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

"A misleading philosophical education," Corradi Fiumara warns, "silently assumes the task of curing students of unprofessional ways of thinking, of that vital epistemophily which is conducive to asking unfamiliar questions" (Metaphoric, p. 39). Surely she is not alone in placing value on the expedition into the unfamiliar, or in holding that in the course of inquiry our reach must regularly exceed our grasp. How could such a regularity be established except through a method of learning—a learnt method, it might go without saying, that is, a method of learning that emerges from learning, an inculcative materialization decidedly from a praxis of curiosity?

Our institutional instructors are in general critical of overreach. The criticism of overreach may appear to be criticism of reach itself, as if grasping could be accomplished without any reaching. "That's reaching" or "that's a reach" mean effectively "you don't get it," there is no grasping nor very much hope of grasping in that direction, the direction indicated by the reach. "That's a leap" functions as a similar criticism, though it may be specifically intended to teach syllogistic thinking, and it may be a stretch to say that syllogism is hostile to epistemophily. If setting off into the unfamiliar necessarily involves a leap, it doesn't follow that a leap necessarily sets off into the unfamiliar. Nonetheless I value the leap. Does this placement of value represent a harmonic of the value placed on the expedition, or on the unfamiliar? Would it be consummately displacement, or a displacement by reverberation? Can we disentangle all these values and still understand what they do as values? Would a deterritorialization of values be of values in any localizable sense? Must there be an integrability of values? Of questions?

The question as question is—inherently, transmogrificationally—metaphoric. Corradi Fiumara advances the idea, intelligently, that metaphor transforms not merely belief, that is, the mind's perdurable sifting of its noetic objects, its schemes and manners of classification, but rather perception and also therefore chthonic as well as metachthonic interrelation, suggesting that perhaps relation itself is malleable. (*Re- represents the breach of malleability, the setting off of tractability.) She says, "Heterogeneous as they may be, even stimuli deriving from external sources and images emerging from our psychic depths are commonly thought to interdigitate in our different ways of shaping reality" (p. 30). Is heterogeneity any less a quality of relation than it is of stimuli or of physis?

In reaching do we forget grasping? Must we? Or does there effectually exist a cheirokinesthetic memory, an indelible or more or less persistent knowledge of the grasp, intrinsic to the reach? As handmade, the question would be privileged. Would this be a privilege we knowingly afford, or does it appear to come as if by nature from its being handmade. Is the reach handmade? The leap? A coordination of stereoscopic vision and the reach? What color is the reach? What color is coordination of hand and eye? What can't metaphor *re-member?

A young chimp's reach exceeds its grasp:

Meaning as Openness to the World

2009-08-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Barbaras says that the world comes into appearance "only because it is woven from the signifying power of the body" (Being, p. 160). He then argues on the side of apprehending meaning not as something that contains, absorbs or otherwise circumscribes the world, but as an openness to the world (p. 165). Could the body be meaningfully open to anything unworldly? How do we know that openness itself is worldly? What does the elimanitivist make of openness?

Hand Positions

2009-08-18T04:30:00.000-07:00

"Hand positions antcipate habitual possibilities of movement and prevention of movement," Morris writes. Not merely positions of the body, they "already anticipate their crossing into the world" (Sense, p. 50). Morris' discussion of the body schema as developed from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy focuses on this crossing of body and world. At one point he defines the body schema as being in "body-world movement itself" (p. 45). It is an emergent phenomenon, perhaps neither transcendent nor imminent in any complete and proper sense. I find Morris's discussion quite engaging. However, I am beginning to question whether an equality of body and world is implied in the chiasm, or in the co-arising of body and world. Perhaps embodiment means something like a lived instability, a disequilibrium that can't be shaken from what it is to execute a style of movement, or to "sculpt perception from the given," (p. 43), an act that, according to Morris, requires a dynamic crossing and a prior shaping. Is this prior shaping governed by the world? By the chiasm? Morris rightly explains that phenomenology teaches that any relation between what is visited upon the body and what is experienced has to do with meaning of the lived body, and this meaning is necessarily both habitual and anticipatory (p. 49). Does the world construct meaning just as I do, or am I, animal that I am, privileged in some way in the field of meaning? (One tends not to notice one's own privilege, and not to want to.) Is touching on par with being touched? Does the dynamism of a rock deserve a different name from the dynamism of animals, or from the dynamism of speech? Is any "physical" reality marked by a heterogeneity of forces?

Vital Signs

2009-08-18T03:38:00.000-07:00

Analysis of data from NASA's Stardust, the Comet Sample Return Mission, has been reported. The amino acid glycine was detected. Carbon isotope analysis showed that the sample glycine had more carbon 13 than would be expected from a terrestrial sample of the molecule, making it highly improbable that the glycine originated from a terrestrial source.

In other news, I hope to be rather done with my hiatus from blogging.

Temenos

2009-07-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

In discussing the oneness of practice and attainment, Nachmanivotich tells us about his use of a temenos, a ludic space:

The specific preparations begin when I enter the temenos, the play space. In ancient Greek thought, the temenos is a magic circle, a delimited sacred space within which special rules apply and in which extraordinary events are free to occur. My studio, or whatever space I work in, is a laboratory in which I experiment with my own consciousness. To prepare the temenos—to clear it, rearrange it, take extraneous objects out—is to clean and clear mind and body.

(Free Play, p. 75, my emphasis)

He goes on to add that in situations of live performance he treats the stage or the whole theatre as temenos.

There are those, surely, who wouldn't let philosophical discussion anywhere near a magic circle. However, if philosophy is to allow for experimentation, play without fear, then any objection to thinking within the magic circle would risk seeming picayune. On the other hand why not bring magic under the microscope? Are there words that would undo magic? Magic words?

Rhythmosophic Textuality in the Direction of the Spasmoreal

2009-07-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Corradi Fiumara calls for a deeper appreciation of the reader on the part of writers of philosophical texts:

In a perspective of open systems, Danto suggests that we should not overlook the way in which philosophy functions as literature does, not in the sense of extravagant literary artefacts, but as engaging with readers in striving towards some sense of organic unity. Literature, in fact, can be regarded as being about the reader at the moment of reading through the process of reading. In his view the texts require the act of reading in order to be complete, and it is as readers of a certain type that philosophical texts address us at all; the variety of texts implies a correspondingly great variety of possible kinds of reader, and hence of theories of what we are in the complex attitude of reading something. The propensity to neglect the reader is a derivative of an inclination to leave creatures of the sort readers exemplify outside the situation which the text purports to cope with. Some outlooks almost constitute examples of such an oversight, as if supported by a view of philosophical writing which renders the reader nearly evanescent; it is a view which sustains a sort of "disembodied professional conscience," in Danto's language. He also remarks that science can get away this largely because even when it is about readers, it "is not about them as readers and so lacks the internal connection philosophical texts demand because they are about their readers as readers." If we rotate the discussion in this sense, then we come to appreciate an inescapable live relationship between any living beings engaged in philosophy in its real sense.

(Metaphoric, p. 25)

Noting a movement from regarding the philosophic text as artefact to a forum of vital philosophic engagement, this would present an opportunity to revisit any obligation the writer has to produce readerly texts–but do we read necessarily with an ideal writer in mind?

Like a fern choreosophic textuality unfurls in the direction of the spasmoreal. The evanescence of the reader implied by the gesture towards sudden reality, evanescence is at the same time made evanescent by the implication of a choreography. A rhythmic reading of the text is solicited, a reading which calls into question any finitude attached to reading. Did it have to be there in the first place in order to be called into question? In saying something is "called into question" do we affirm its reality at any level?

The relation between rhythmosophic reading–a style of reading that reads and rereads, relearns and therefore unlearns–and spasmorealization is akin to preparation, and also to unlearning. Just as one selects which texts to read, one selects which texts to reread. Which are the texts that are most likely to lead to spasmorealizations? What are their attributes?

The Pure Answer

2009-07-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

"What really defines a question," writes Barbaras (Being, p. 141), "is that it involves the possibility of an answer, at least as a horizon." The question springs from the tessellation of interpersonal encounters, which in disaggregate form a horizon of actuality of answers for the (possible) question, though it is nonetheless also the home of nexii of singularities, abilities (actual possibilities), ideas of abilities (and on to the "virtual"), membranes, textures, passages, and expressive gestures. The tessellation is where laterality figures, or figures as horizon. Two ideas, both connected to the emergence of the question from the tessellation of encounters: the openness of the question, and the drawing of the whole person into question (drawn not wholly, but by implicature). The person could not possibly be drawn into question given a perfect, irrefrangible solitude. However, solitude is an element of the encounter, texturally, environmentally in its paradigmatic instance, perhaps, though it could easily enough be viewed as a fundamental polarity of the encounter–here I hesitate to describe the encounter in the abstract for fear of foreclosing on any of its possibilities, or any avenues that could be strolled through its concretions. This may be a point of contention. Does the positing of the pure question rely upon the pure answer, whether given as possibility or in some other way? I am tempted to think that it does, and that therefore we must be cautious in defining the question in any such way that would discount or devalue the realities of answer. With such a caveat in mind let's follow where Barbaras goes with the idea of the openness of the question:

What defines interrogation, as pure interrogation, is that the question accepts no answer that would conlcude it. . . . Sense is precisely interrogative sense, present as something to interrogate, withdrawing itself behind the question that gains access to it. This interrogative sense is given at one and the same time as response and reenactment of the question within the response; it is present only at a distance.

(p. 141, Barbaras' emphasis).

Do we, as questioners, only accept tentative answers? (As always, although I make a rhetorical point, the question isn't entirely "rhetorical." It could be answered directly.) What directions would we give to the reenactments of "our" questions? The answers Barbaras gives, the questions he reenacts, gravitate around his ontological account of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. Here the discussion moves from the sense of vision to the body of the question, which is the body as chiasm:

[I]n order to restore the signifying and ultimately the interrogative dimension of vision, as opposed to Sartrean abstraction, Merleau-Ponty appealed to the experience of touch. Ultimately interrogation itself, at all levels including linguistic, turns out to be defined by this reference to touch. . . . [I]nsofar as it is originary interrogation, "auscultation or palpitation in thickness," our relation to Being proceeds from an originary Touching. The notion of the flesh corresponds to this originary Touching; strictly speaking, it is the body of interrogation, the body as interrogation.

(p. 144, Barbaras' emphasis).

And we see Barbaras tying the discussion of the question into his analysis of the dialectic of fact and essence: "The notion of wild essence describes this ultimate level where the fact exists only as the possibility that articulates it, where the essence makes sense only insofar as it remains caught facticity. The Being of interrogation therefore designates Mediation as the last reality, and, in a sense, there is only mediation" (p. 145). So far so good? If it is true that "interrogation proper proceeds from an act of ideation" (p. 143), then we are encouraged to approach the imagination of the question as "caught facticity." An obvious relation exists between fact and question, a relation introduced by response, whether in the form of the question (the wonderful question, always to be questioned) or the answer; less obviously there is conceivably a facticity of question and answer, or a factical background to the exchange of question and answer. There is also the fact of posing a ?-idea.

Is the encounter an act? Does the word interaction hint at a beyond of action, any sort of crossing over? Does the act conceived in one domain remain an act when carried over to another? Does the encounter carry the potential to redefine action, to reenact it? Can the pure answer be any kind of reenactment, or must it be "free" to close the question?

Crossing the }∅{, Breaching the X

2009-07-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Lived depth is both meaningful and labile, David Morris tells us (The Sense of Space, hereafter Sense). Morris distinguishes lability from malleability and metamorphosis, and explains that by saying lived depth is labile he means that "it is open to alterations that propagate from within our experience of it, where the kinds of alterations are themselves open to alteration" (p. 19). Among the rudiments of lived depth we can further note plasticity, the unfixity of thresholds, bodily movement, or, better perhaps, dynamic, chiasmic movement. Morris helpfully defines "dynamics": "Dynamics are simply shifts in self-organization; the intrinsic ordering of perception always reflects the interaction of body and environment, and changes to either will, as a matter of course, produce changes in self-organization" (pp. 15-16). As an aside, does sense in movement rehabilitate Sinngebung?

When we make the leap from the givenness of the chiasm to the givenness of the }∅{, now understood as a modality of our acceptance of the chiasmatic and coexistential extraordinaries, our way of accepting wild meanings, even those that may be our own—the flavor of the spasmoreal is everywhere now—then we come to question the givenness of the autopoietic. In what depth does it unfold? Naturally we are imagining a physis that has yet to be studied except in fragmentary, inchoate crossings. Can there be a betweenness that doesn't be tween with(in) an encapsulating space. Possibly a (between)space (s p a c e) of multiplicities: an autopoietic space, let's imagine (}∅{, too, for kicks—of course we ask about its givenness—does the attribute ever give rise to the eidos?).

Intersubjective spatiality: "One's sense of depth and space is not simply rooted in the crossing of one's body and the world, but in the crossing of one's existence and an other's existence" (p. 25). I note a radical difference between our perspectives, Morris' and mine, far more radical than the substitution of the * and its spasmoreal multiplicity of relatioms for the pattern of the X. Morris wants to attend to the grounds of the encounter with the other (p. 28). I'd rather see }∅{ as a condition of the encounter, at least provisionally. I don't know whether the encounter can be grounded without being ground to a halt.

From this Empty Space

2009-07-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch writes of the physicality of playing his instrument, the violin: "I found that concentrating on body, gravity, balance, technique&mdashthe physicality of the instrument&mdashleft room for inspiration to sneak in unimpeded. From this empty space came all my subsequent adventures in improvisation" (p. 65). Just a quick question: What space is there between the physicality of the instrument and the physicality of the body?

Silence of the Logos

2009-07-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

Montiglio concludes:

Silence is never neutral in the land of the logos. Many of its appearances seem to be variants of a similar sentiment, which could be called horror of the void. The Greek world is resonant, filled with circulating voices. On the battlefield, in the assembly, in the theater, in the city as a whole, the voice is an organizing principle. Silence threatens this fullness of sound. As a troublesome, paralyzing interruption of the verbal flow within the speech code of the Iliad; as an impenetrable and concentrated attitude in tragedy; as a sudden suspension of the normal course of nature, silence heralds disruption and provokes anxiety. Ominous silences most often break into cries: the horror of the void fills silence with its opposite, as if to re[e]stablish a lost equilibrium through an overcompensation of sound.

(p. 289)

I'd let this pass in silence but I want to note a possible difference between cultural representations of silence (the logos of silence, if you will) and silence as it actually experienced (the silence of the logos, perhaps). Does the consideration of silence as speech act obviate this difference? In any case can logoi encompass their own silences?

Language and Life as Metaphors, and also the Question

2009-06-28T04:24:00.000-07:00

Corradi Fiumara's inquiry into metaphoricity, The Metaphoric Process: Connections between Language and Life, hereafter Metaphoric, assumes a reciprocal interaction between language and life, as she works towards 'pursuing the quest for a language not only conversant with intraepistemic deductions but also capable of interepistemic communicative efforts" (pp. 7-8, my emphasis). She defines language as embodied in persons; it is the derivative of personal logic and an unbreakable bond of listening and speaking, writing and reading (p. 8). She moves between speaking of a personal logic and emphasizing the relevance of interpersonal contact. "Once an ontogenetic, life-dependent, perspective is adopted, a more interactive communicational dimension is inevitably disclosed in which language appears as a process rather than as a system—a process which helps us focus more holistically. We can thus incline toward appreciating the complexity of linguistic dynamics rather than positing a 'system' that communicators would allegedly employ in cognition" (p. 6). The possibility of an asystemic holistic processualism asks to be noticed, asks to be further elaborated. We should also wonder about a connection between the unbreakable and the process. I think what is meant is that the unitary process of, say, writing and reading, is composed of processes so intertwined that to consider one without the other distorts our view of language. But are such processess literally unbreakable? This might be a thesis worth challenging, though intuitively it conforms to my worldview. Why is the question of the autology of reading, for example, not being asked? Are we fully inquiring into language and life, or are we still dealing with inchoate concepts?

When a question is being posed, or a problem identified, it is our philsophical right to ask why just that question is being asked. That there cannot be an explicit, appropriate or consensual reply is no reason for not continuing to inquire why a certain question is being asked in the sense of being privileged with respect to other possible questions. That meaning grows out of use is an increasingly accepted and often sloganized point even though its practical implications are often unsuspected; for, indeed, as contexts of use are invariably contexts of life vicissitudes, it becomes necessary to ask what people are trying to do and why, in whatever context. This line of inquiry may open new perspectives on the creative and metaphoric roots of our cognitive concerns.

(p. 10, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis, my bold)

By Corradi-Fiumara's reasoning we're also compelled to ask about who quests after a more conversant language. "We commonly admit that it takes the whole person to do creative research work, but we are not to ask just how inquiry interdigitates with the live personality of the scholar" (p. 11). Why, for instance, would Fido the Yak investigate imagination as coessential to the structure of rationality? Why do I desire that the question be reimagined, as akin to aerobics as much as procedural law and knitting?

Leondar remarks that a configuration half-perceived, a relation faintly grasped, or a concept newly emergent must be, first, named metaphorically. Of course once such a newly discovered phenomenon is well understood and extricated from its originating context, the metaphor will vanish into the literal lexicon, its heuristic work completed. Through a growing awareness of the pervasive use of metaphors we may come to perceive our imaginative construction of reality (with its derivative structures of meaning) as distinct from the claim that a successful empirical test (with its feedback loops) is what conclusively warrants the acceptance of our basic view of the world. An easier acceptance of this differentiation may enable us to explore a continuity in model-making which connects an expanding variety of different domains.

(p. 12)

The question is like tree pose (vrkshasana). It forces us to balance ourselves on one leg, and so it calls routine equilibrium into question. Equilibrium becomes a problem, a problem that, through practice, can be sustained as a method of pursuing a path of fuller self-awareness, a vital aspect of inquiry, by drawing the problem into the body, the breathing. Now, don't solve the question by breathing, but pay attention to the spaces between the question. Let it come and go freely. Switch to your other foot.

Voicelessness as Symptom

2009-06-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Montiglio turns briefly from the study of Greek tragedy to the study of medical texts:

[T]he Hippocratics insistently note the appearance of aphôniê as a most significant symptom. The meanings of this term range from speech difficulties, to a partial or total inhibition of the vocal organs, to aphasia, to the inability to speak on account of a physical lesion. Such an extended semantic field fits within the Greek pattern of calling "silence" not only a total absence of words or sounds, but also their partial presence. Just as the dative sigêi and the adverb siga (in silence) can apply to a bad speaker, that is, to someone who does use his language even though inadequately, the term aphôniê equates all kinds and degrees of speech disturbances with a "nonvoice." In the view of the Hippocratic doctor, patients who fail to communicate as he hopes are simply "voiceless."

The symptom of aphôniê is all the more disquieting for the doctor because he urgently needs his patients' words in order to understand the nature of their illnesses. Ancient Medicine stresses the importance of entertaining a dialogue with one's patient on a theoretical level. A concrete application of this principle, the Prognosis relies on the possibility of a regular communication with the sick, which alone enables the doctor to describe the symptoms of the disease in the most accurate way possible and to formulate a prognosis along with its evolution.

The troublesome character of aphôniê may explain why its emergence is repeatedly marked as "sudden" (exaiphnês). For it is unlikely that the onset of aphôniê was always so sudden in reality, considering the wide range of meanings of this term. As Danielle Gourevitch remarks, here "the observation is somehow replacing its object." To the doctor's eyes, a loss of speech and voice is apparently so fatal a symptom that it seems to manifest itself unexpectedly, abruptly, with no progression or warning: "When she was given a fragrant application of ground meal and myrrh, suddenly she lost her voice and died," writes the author of Epidemics 4 (30). Not surprisingly, this sudden loss of the voice is followed by an equally sudden death.

(Silence, pp. 228-229, my bold)

The disappearance of the voice more than the disappearance of language disquiets. Are all animal species endowed with a voice? To what extent might the voice be "given" through experience, developed rather than merely genetically endowed? Some species we know are able to learn vocalizations—but do they learn the voice itself? Biologist Stephanie Watwood, who studies how social interactions affect vocal development in animals, notes that the signature whistle of the male bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) assimilates to the signature whistles of other males whom they ally with as they fully mature. For females the signature whistle does not change over the lifespan. (See the video labeled "Whistles of Bottlenose Dolphins" here.) Does the juvenile male dolphin lose its voice as it enters adulthood? Is the autocognominal call an indication that dolphins are recognizable to each other by their voices, or does it signal some need for an additional unique identifier because the dolphin's voice alone isn't in fact unique? Does voicelessness represent the loss of the cognomen, the loss of any and all identity? Did the ancient Greeks conceive of disappearances of the voice that didn't symptomize dying, or is it perhaps the nature of conceptualization to remain loosely bound by a constellation of established usages and pregiven meanings, or to move within the ambit of affiliations, to assimilate? No, I rather imagine—assimilation means this much as much as it means an implicitly thoughtless con-formity— humans conceptualize more freely than that, at least as freely as dolphins and a few other types of animals create vocalizations in response to their acoustic milieu.

Notes on Intersubjectivity

2009-06-24T02:06:00.000-07:00

Barbaras carries forward Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartrean intersubjectivity, a critique which easily applies more broadly. The first point to make almost goes without saying. Barbaras writes that the reality of the other is inescapably missed "as soon as the other is understood as a unity of sense constituted in me, as an analogon of the ego" Being, p. 131). It's my feeling that the ego, rather than presenting a model or a vehicle for approaching the other, in fact distances the self from the other, conceptually at first, but with actual consequences for the relation to the other. This distance is not the distance of the detour so much as that of the wrong path. This is not to say that the goal of meeting the other is the obliteration of all distances. Nonetheless, the possibility of approach structures any encounter, and the encounter with others is no less primeval than the experience of self. The journey through the ego abridges the encounter.

Merleau-Ponty's concept of laterality corrects a theoretical misapprehension of how the encounter with the other actually plays out. As Barbaras says:

The other is given to me only laterally; it envelops me rather than looks at me. And the face-to-face from which a victor must emerge represents only the most radical modality, which is never completely realized, of this primary "laterality."

(p. 136)

Perhaps the critique goes to far, stretching the meaning of laterality to the point where it can mean just about any worldy contact. We should question the sense in which contact with other people is always mediated by the world. In any event, laterality remains a powerful conceptual corrective.

"The experience of the other is that of an encounter," Barbaras declares. "It is not to be asked then, how knowledge of the other is possible, as one need only clarify the meaning of this encounter" (p. 128). Are we allowed to ask then how it is possible to clarify meanings? Anyway, Barbaras continues his riff, asking us to "discover, in the heart of consciousness as it is lived, a dimension which throws it back out toward the exteriority of the other. Because the relation of consciousness to the other is a relation of being rather than of knowledge, its lived immanence does not entail a the negation of all transcendence" (ibid.). How do we know this? How does the body of knowledge that attests to the beingness of the relation to the other support the distinction drawn here between being and knowledge? As for the main clause, why should transcendence be affirmed or denied at the point where the actuality of the relation to the other becomes evident? Do we know that transcendence isn't an irredeemably egological concept, illsuited for a discussion of coexistential laterality?

About Carrying

2009-06-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

Barbaras continues a critique of Sartre:

Phenomenality is just as much negation of determination as it is negation of the in-itself. One has to say instead that phenomenality stops short of both affirmation and negation. It is a negation that not only does not dissolve into the positivity of essence but still negates every form of positivity, so that it also cannot affirm itself as pure, univocal negation nor abolish itself in favor of fully positive being.

(Being, p. 123, Barbaras' emphasis)

Instead of "phenomenality" I would say epoché. The question I'll ask relates to whether one makes a commitment to the study of, or even the worthy living of, phenomenality. Could an encounter with the phenomenal be compromised by a prior commitment to understanding the phenomenal? This goes towards a critique of the instant. How does one declare an allegiance to the instantaneous without doing violence to the instant? Conversely, how does one maintain absolutely no affinity for the instantaneous and yet be able, at the drop of a hat, to live in the instant? Must the instant be unbearable? Well, this perhaps suggests a reason why the instant is thought of as precisely not experienced in any temporal, mundane or ordinary sense. On the other hand the difficulty of sustaining an enthusiasm for the mundane suggests that duration too may be as unbearable as the instant. We live in the to-and-fro between these unbearable states, between duration and instantaneousness. If this movement is bearable, does that mean that the instantaneous as well as the mundanely temporal therefore become bearable?

A Philosophy of Nothingness. . .

2009-06-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

"A philosophy of nothingness," Barbaras writes (Being, p. 121), "is still not realized as long as it defines nothingness as pure nothingness. Nothingness is genuinely nothingness only if it is not nothingness through and through." What is it about nothingness that's not like itself, adulterated through and through? Say that silence is a way of experiencing nothingness. Has there ever been in your experience a moment of unadulterated silence? What would you want to say about it?

Other Rhythms, Breathing In

2009-06-22T04:36:00.000-07:00

Gary Peters, whose Philosophy of Improvisation found its way into my hands today, has written a brief overview of Levinas' ideas about rhythm ("The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics." Radical Philosophy 82: 9-16). Notwithstanding that I haven't read all the sources Peters consults, I'm sure I disagree with Levinas' usage of the term rhythm and with certain aspects of his conceptualization. Nevertheless I'm inspired enough by Peters' review to offer a few words on the topic.

I follow Randy Weston in holding that rhythm, far from being opposed to the melodic, is the heart of the melodic. In fact I can make the case more forcefully. Rhythm is already melody, a lesson Weston first learned during his travels in Tunisia, if I'm not mistaken, though the lesson is portable enough. The following therefore, should make no sense to me:

The melodic (the 'said') can take up residence within the noise of the world, it is stated and yet its delivery (the 'saying') remains silent. The eloquence of this silence is rhythmic, the rhythm upon which the melodic depends, the rhythm that needs no melody. Rhythm cannot be heard, it can only be sensed; it is the melodic that is heard.

(p. 13)

Rhythm can be sensed and heard. If there is a truth here in Peters' summation of Levinas' position, it lies in there being within the saying qualities aptly described as rhythmic, qualities that say, enigmatically, paradoxically, qualities that are said to be "in the saying" eloquently and in silence at once. Levinas' desire to delimit melody, to box it in and then out, to thoroughly captivate it, has of course a special significance with respect to the history of ideas. However, if rhythm is already melody, rhythm does not provide a means of escaping the thesis of intentionality. Rhythm is a phenomenon of consciousness. "Rhythmic" time consciousness and "melodic" time consciousness both illustrate, all things considered, the same reality. Protention and retention still apply. Do they still apply to anarchic rhythm, the pulse of the breach?

Levinas says that in "in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity. This is the captivation or incantation of poetry and music" (Philosophical Papers, p. 4, in "Rhythm," p. 11). Furthermore, Peters explains:

For Levinas, the thwarting of Husserlian intenionality, the eluding of perception, simultaneously enervates conceptual cognition while intensifying the sensation of 'things-in-themselves', precisely by presenting the exteriority of those things. He sees the dispossession that the exotic inflicts on perception as the mark of an aesthetic sensation which, in slipping between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity, and between consciousness and unconsciousness, confounds intentionality, confronting it with the anarchic. The peculiarity of Levinas' aesthetics of rhythm concerns precisely the anarchic character of the exotic pulse and, in particular, the way in which the transcendental ego loses its intentional grasp and is carried away. Having said that, however, it is significant that even in this early work he is careful to avoid the radical amorality of the unconscious and the transgressive potential of anarchic rhythm.

Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative, or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away. . . . It is a mode of being to which is ascribed neither the form of consciousness, since the I is stripped of its prerogative to assume its power, nor the form of unconsciousness, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light present.

(ibid.)

(p. 10)

I like the attempt to shatter continuous duration in the name of the time of the other, but I have limited use for dark lights. In being responsible for our own experiences of rhythm, a responsibility that flows from the freedom to move, which is a primeval way of being in rhythm and all of its modalities, despite contingencies which are in actuality necessary for the exercise of rhythmic freedom, we do not lose responsibilities for the other. We feel other rhythms. The question of an originary ethical relation, though it lies within the scope of consciousness without thereby being created by consciousness, is not to be answered by appealing to a metaphysics of instantaneous time that borrows from our love of musicality, and especially polyrhythmia, only to betray it. "Duration is not the measure of existence." Agreed. But read carefully: absolute alterity is sensed as a rhythm which "is not the respiration of the instant itself but the explosion of that instant, the 'accomplishment of existence'. . . . [T]he result can be forever thrown into doubt; nothing can be 'prefigured' in instantaneous. It is understood here as the stopping of time which then has to be renewed anew" (p. 14). The hard truth is that existence accomplishes nothing by ceasing to breath altogether. Levinas perhaps has more than one target in his critique of prefigurations. However, anticipation does not mean prefiguration, it does not extricate the thinker from doubt, and it emphatically does exist at the edge of existence where people breathe, the edge of existence any sane discussion of existence must address if not occupy. The physicality of the rhythmic is, pace Levinas and Peters, of the body. A genuine rhythmosophic trismagestics interprets the whole instant, and rather than doing away with respiration, sets respiration as a problem to be addressed, a question. The question of breathing is a question of rhythm at the edge existence.

Galumphing

2009-06-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch turns to Winnicott on play:

Like other manifestations of the Muse, the child is the voice of our inner knowing. The first language of this knowing is play. In this light, psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as "bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. . . .It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."

(p. 50)

How do we speak the first language of inner knowing? Playfully, creatively. With toys. Making toys of words and things. But if the language would have to be created isn't the knowingness then of the inner knowing thrown up in the air—don't worry, Fido will catch you. Sooner or later Fido will remember having thrown you up into the blue, inner knowing. Galumphing, in the sense anthropologist Stephen Miller attributes to the word. We galumph the whole person into discovery: "Oh, there's something I've thrown up in the air. It kind of looks like me." Now, does one really galumph though without ever letting the limbs touch the ground? Making a toy of our gait, as chimpanzees appear to do. Frequently I find myself talking with my inner chimpanzee. We like to galumph together.

Homology of Silence and Cries

2009-06-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

Montiglio tells us, speaking of ancient Greek tragedy, "Silence often heralds a sudden, and sinister, transformation of one's being, such as the emergence of a pain that cannot be told but only cried out" (Silence, p. 224). Silence and cries represent an homology, rather than an opposition, because both signify the collapse of the logos (p. 225). (I can't help think that attention to the syntagmatics of silence and crying would tell us something more.) Silences, too, are heavy and physical, carried by the body that cries or that will cry. Greek audiences, Montiglio reasons, shared an interpretation of silences "as preludes to destructive outbreaks" (p. 220). Do these vocal outbursts genuinely fail to communicate anything whatsoever? How much space do we want to allow for the incommunicable? Is anything human lastingly unintelligible?

Two aspects of Cassandra's silence apply more generally to the tragic representation of silence. First, breaking silence does not mean making contact; on the contrary, the silent character moves from silence to an incomprehensible and solitary language. Second, silence gives way to a resonant and exuberant voice that overcompensates for its absence.

(p. 216)

Comportment Within the Question/The Question as Dance

2009-06-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Jacky gives us a startling juxtaposition: "Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe" (Rorty); and "Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. The shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other." (Adorno). Before the questioner can be summoned into questioning there is the shudder of being touched by the other. Questioning is a possibility of being touched by others, one of its modalities. Knowingness, then, does not belong to the questioner as the questioner operates concretely, shuddering, touched; knowingness rather appears, objectively, as an attribute of reified consciousness, or, perhaps, the state of a damaged soul. Aesthetic comportment, yes, but also the inquisitive comportment is defined by the nourishment of a capacity to shudder. The farther we get from reified consciousness the closer we approach the question in its concrete essence. Obviously? How do we describe the comportments of the body-question open to the shudder, the questioning that draws the body within the question? Do we set out from tropes of balance, knowingly, of balance between request and demand, seeking and finding, addressivity and responsivity, poise and comedy? Whether or not we regard other people as transcendent, can we sketch out a sense in which the question is imminent among others if not to ourselves? Or does the question by nature, as a thing of calls and responses, seek out our transcendence? Could the question seek out our transcendence without causing us to shudder? What is the distance between being capable of transcendence—being capable of receiving the question, perhaps, of heading into it—and living transcendentally? What exactly would dance transcend?

Kaleidescopic Consciousness

2009-06-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Dissapointingly, mildly, Daniela Vallega-Neu's The Bodily Dimension in Thinking makes no reference to Erwin Straus' work on the upright posture. I'm reminded of Straus by Dylan's latest post (in a series of excellent posts on the theme of embodiment) which specifically explores a relation between thinking and standing. Some cursory googling on Straus unearthed a real find, a book which will move to the top of my wish list: The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood, by Eva Maria Simms.

Uprightness requires resistance against gravity and the constant work of opposing its pull. Human walking is arrested falling: a carefully balanced play between letting oneself fall forward and arresting the fall through the movement into the next step. It requires the courage to let go of the father's hand or the table's edge and risk hitting the floor. It is truly amazing to watch an infant fall and pick him- or herself up over and over again in order to be upright. And how exciting it must be for a toddler to cruise th[r]ough the living room, initiating movement forward but then be carried along by its velocity! Without motility, the upright posture is hard to maintain. We cannot stand still for hours on end, and every night sleep forces us to give into gravity and recline: "in sleep we no longer oppose gravity; in our weightless dreams, or in our lofty fantasies, experience becomes kaleidoscopic and finally amorphous" (Strauss 1966/1980, 142). The posture of the body determines the quality and range of attention and activity. Letting go of uprightness restructures the experienced world, as every bed-bound hospital patient knows. We become dependent on others, unable to care for ourselves, and we easily fall into reverie and sleep. The horizon of the world closes in around the bed, and the beckoning "action space" is lost in the fog of amorphous and fragmented events. With activity restricted, attention tends to wander and lose its focus: it becomes kaleidoscopic.

(p. 37, Simms' emphasis, my bold)

Do we feel the ebb of momentum as we lie flat on our backs or stand perfectly still? Do we become less playful in these dilated moments, or does another kind of playfulness come to hold sway, something removed from all equipoise?

I find a tranquility in walking, I must admit. Just for kicks I will think about the question while walking, and also while in triangle pose (trikonasana), and compare my thoughts.

The Eidos of the Question

2009-06-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

"It is a characteristic of the philosophical interrogation," Merleau-Ponty says (Visible, p. 160, in Barbaras, Being, p. 88), "that it return upon itself, that it ask itself what to question is and what to respond is." I note how Merleau-Ponty includes response in his characterization of the philosophical question. Questioning proceeds from speech, which I tentatively define as both expression and response, that is, as a modality of intersubjective life, which patterns its inner dynamic. Here's a question, then, about the definition of the question: Does the question necessarily express anything?

Is it possible that the question necessarily expresses doubt? Does doubt express anything? What does doubt have to do with the eidos of the question? Barbaras states that doubt is shown by Merleau-Ponty, in his critique of Descartes, to be "inadequate to the sense of philosophical interrogation" (Being, p. 89). He means Cartesian doubt, it must be made clear, and I reckon the meaning of "philosophical" deserves to be explored a little. We can keep the question in mind, however, redefining terms as needed.

Isn't there something deliberately weak, from a philosophical viewpoint, about inquiring into the eidos of the question? There may be some call for a defense of a postcritical eideticism, a call for some kind of philosophical statement. What do we mean, though, by philosophy? What makes a statement or a question philosophical? Philosophy is always a return from constructa to lived experience, Merleau-Ponty says ("The Philosopher and Sociology," Signsp. 112). Philosophy does not rest still with social theory but plunges into the intersubjective world–in the mode of questioning? What sort of an engagement is that? It would by the definition given above be intersubjective or coexistential. Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty continues his thought, "has a dimension of its own, the dimension of coexistence–not as a fait accompli and an object of contemplation, but as the milieu and perpetual event of the universal praxis" (p. 113). Universal praxis. Do we need to perform an eidetic reduction of the praxis of the question along the way of inquiring into eidos of the question? How do we make the return to lived experience—as if something about our reflections or our ideas hadn't been living. Curious. Did we ever leave lived experience expecting to learn something in return? Our questions inhere in ex-pectations?

Merleau-Ponty argues that Husserl's promotion of the Lebenswelt to be the central theme of phenomenology is not inconsistent with certain earlier thinking about eidetic intuition as confirmation of experience. But hasn't the eidetic shifted meaning? Should we recognize some tergiversation in phenomenology's grappling with the eidos? Would that be an adequate reason to turn our attention completely away from the eidetic?

When the recognition of the life-world, and thus too of language as we live it, becomes characteristic of phenomenology. . .this is only a more resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the the truth about language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation and first formulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our life and bound to their concrete structures–that "Logos of the aesthetic world" already spoken of in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. Husserl will only be bringing the movement of all his previous thought to completion when he writes in a posthumous fragment that transitory inner phenomena are brought to ideal existences by becoming incarnate in language. Ideal existence, which at the beginning of Husserl's thought was to have been the foundation for the possibility of language, is now the most characteristic possibility of language.

(p. 105, my bold)

A warning from Barbaras, who argues that the phenomenon of speech calls for a phenomenological reduction, "a reduction that allows us to understand the world on the basis of this possibility, that is, to understand the world as sense. By characterizing sense in terms of positive meaning, however, the philosophy of essence testifies just as much to its misunderstanding of speech. It considers the expressive operation as something completed; it forgets operative speech in favor of constructed speech. Instead of interrogating the emergence of language in the world, it naively gives itself language in the form of the world" (p. 109).

If there is something circular in the idea of the philosophical question, there may equally be a circularity in the idea of the question. Well, the question does not ask itself. That too is its eidos, or an aspect of its eidos, which must be "held and understood within the openness it unfolds" (p. 106; NB, Barbaras is speaking of "the absolute" here).

Finally I'll say a word about doubt, which may pertain to Cartesian doubt, or other forms of doubt. It is possible to sustain, as a kind of doubt, a hypothesis of the hypothetical which is irreducible to a negation of any given existence, but rather simply an indifference to any secondary claim about existence that hasn't been tried; a doubt which parenthesizes in lieu of either affirmation or denial. I am aware of the criticisms of this position, but am not yet convinced by them. Perhaps we should learn what doubt really is before deciding whether or not the question necessarily expresses doubt, philosophical or otherwise. Must one detach oneself from doubt in order to study doubt? Must one negate the experience of doubt in order to ken its essence? (We would be speaking of "morphological," inexact essences; that much we take from our readings). And wouldn't we have to ken the essence of doubt in order to answer any question of its necessity as a precondition, perhaps, for the question, the experience and the idea of the question. "The very being of the question," Barbaras writes, "excludes the possibility that the question remain without a response, gaping toward a transcendence" (pp.89-90). As I interpret him, Barbaras is speaking specifically of the Cartesian question, such as it is as a kind of commonplace, the question of the existence of the world, and he means to be critical. Is it possible for a question, any question, to remain without a response? Is it possible that the question inheres in response whether or not it is possible for a question to go without a response? That I suspect is true, but to appreciate its truth one must interrogate the way of asking questions, always returning from the constructa to the lived experience, the experience of the question.

Synapsis of the Muse

2009-06-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

"The muse is the living voice, as each of us experiences it, of intuition. Intuition is a synaptic summation, our whole nervous system balancing and combining multivariate complexities in a single flash" (Free Play, pp. 39-40).

The synaptic describes the space between touches, the between that enables touch, that touch means. Touch also means the traversal of that space. How is it that touch is brought into that space, for an instant, that space just for touch?

Over and over we meet with a question of shared experience, a question of how experience could possibly surpass the bounds of self, the returning vibe, even as it reinforces them, harmonizes them, evokes the selfsame vibe. Intuitably the synaptic is musical, replete with sweet voices, musical with repletion. We desire to speak with the sweet voices.

Music for us is the loving voice of intimation, of listening wrapped into itself, repletorially, listening, completely open to the announcement to the world of the world, the world that appears instantly in its announcement, of voices on the street below, rising voices of the unsummed love. We desire to speak with the musical voice. The voice of the muse is instantly recognizable as being other than our own, though it resounds within us and without us, multifariously. We share in its vibrations. Synapsis.

Ape Gestures and Language Evolution

2009-06-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

Ape Gestures and Language Evolution, by Amy Pollick and Frans B. M. de Waal. From the discussion of the results:

Our data strongly support the gestural flexibility hypothesis according to which our closest primate relatives use brachiomanual gestures more flexibly across contexts than they do facial expressions and vocalizations. Gestures seem less closely tied to particular emotions, such as aggression or affiliation, hence possess a more adaptable function. Gestures are also evolutionarily younger, as shown by their presence in apes but not monkeys, and likely under greater cortical control than facial/vocal signals (see Introduction). This observation makes gesture a serious candidate modality to have acquired symbolic meaning in early hominins. As such, the present study supports the gestural origin hypothesis of language.

Reading Resides in the Voice and in the Hands

2009-06-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

Dermot Moran, commenting on Merleau-Ponty (blogged about at However Fallible and Perverse Egalitarianism), argues that seeing is tactile, that even when our gaze moves from one thing to another, "we do not drop into the invisible." After a thing drops from visual focus there remains a background of the visible, analogous to a tactile background that remains after something has been touched. Moran then presents what appears to be an exceptional case. "Reading is a kind of seeing that has transcended the seeing of the letters and marks on the page and resides in the pure incorporeality of the meanings," he says. I, having expressed the view here that reading is coporeal, will offer a few words to elaborate my sense of reading and then, hopefully, further a critical appreciation of reading.

Instead of the transcendence of our bodily experience of written signs–there are reasons, such as the eye strain Moran cites, to believe that such a transcendence could never be perfectly accomplished–we should think of rough transpositions from one bodily mode of experience to another. Reading represents a practically silent transposition of the visual into the vocal, or, in the case of those who read sign language, a practically motionless transposition into the manual. Naturally one can read aloud or gesturally or both, and one can respond demonstrably as one reads, affirming or denying, testifying, commenting, revising, thinking, speaking. All reading passes through the faculty of speech, which resides in the body and its assuetudes. In fact it has its genesis in assuefaction, the faculty of faculties, so to speak, and this being the case it never transcends bodily experience.

Reading never transcends bodily experience. The idea can be critiqued. Obviously. I've raised the problem of the noetic faculty before, which according to some views would be a transcendent faculty, presumably, being transcendent, transcending even assuefaction itself. Quite a conundrum, given certain definitions of noesis. A version of the conundrum appears to be presented to us by Moran's idea of the pure incorporeality of meanings. Does it make sense for me to talk about a faculty for speech separate from a faculty for language, pure language, which according to many reasonable definitions allows for, indeed demands, the disembodiment of meanings? I've sometimes taken the view that the incorporeality of meanings is such a fantastic notion that those who propose it bear an onus to explain it. I've spoken of *language. Have I blinded myself to a reality of language? Of thought? How do I know what a body is? What burden do I bear?

The case of reading does not appear to a simple matter of transcendence into pure incorporeality. As in the past, I ask that you attend to your own experiences of reading as you think about the issue. As much as the eyes, reading resides in the voice and in the hands.

Blow Top Blues

2009-06-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Resumption of the Drama

2009-05-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

"Infinite being, that is, ever recommencing being—which could not bypass subjectivity, for it could not recommence without it—is produced in the guise of fecundity" (Totality, p. 268). Levinas explains that his concept of fecundity denotes a future which is both mine and not mine, not a future of the same, but an adventure for me (ibid.). It is both a possibility of myself and of the Beloved, and as such it "does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity" (p. 267, my emphasis). Is there a significant dialogic essence of the possible, or a polylogical dimension of the "can" (the originary importance of which I Levinas would reject in the form of the "I can," the living body)? Is there, alternatively, a meaningful polylogic ethos of possibilities? My departure from Levinas may be radical. I'll get back to it.

Have we found, in infinite being, a remedy to the vexation of repetition? Levinas speaks of the cessation of the tediousness of the reiteration of the I, but not the cessation of the reiteration. "The diverse forms that Proteus assumes do not liberate him from his identity," he insists (p. 268). He continues, "In fecundity the tedium of this repetition ceases; the I is other and young, yet the ipseity that ascribed to it its meaning and its orientation in being is not lost in this renouncement of self. Fecundity continues history without producing old age." A marvelous concept to be sure, and perhaps not only that. Levinas finds that senescence, conceived in continuity, manifests a limitation on the infinitude of being in the form of the past. I'll hold off criticism on this point a moment longer. The theme of the monotony of identity noted here is one Levinas repeats in his conclusions (p.304). Breaking the monotony of identity ties in with the absolute necessity, in Levinas' eyes, of discontinuity established through death and fecundity.

Levinas is keen to recognize discontinuity at the core of ipseity. In the context of outlining his concept of childhood and filiality, he argues that resuming the thread of history, which must be regarded as distinct from continuity, is marked by an originality "attested in the revolt of the permanent revolution that constitutes ipseity" (p. 278). He speaks at length on temporal discontinuity:

Time is the non-definitiveness of the definitive, an ever recommencing alterity of the accomplished—the "ever" of this recommencement. The work of time goes beyond the suspension of the definitive which the continuity of duration makes possible. There must be a rupture of continuity, and continuation of across this rupture. The essential in time consists in being a drama, a multiplicity of acts where the following act resolves the prior one.

(pp. 283-284)

Now, here is where I find Levinas truly challenging my predilections: for me the face to face could be described as a modality of coexistence; Levinas believes nothing of the sort:

To say that universality refers to the face to face position is (against a whole tradition of philosophy) to deny that being is produced as panorama, a coexistence, of which the face to face would be a modality. This whole work opposes this conception. The face to face is not a modality of coexistence nor even of the knowledge (itself panoramic) one term can have of another, but is the primordial production of being on which all the possible collocations of the term are founded.

(pp. 304-305)

Levinas' critique of panoramic being comes as he bypasses existential phenomenology in favor of an ethics, perhaps an ethics at the limits of philosophy. At bottom of the face to face there is goodness in place of either being or nothingness, which "consists in going where no clarifying—that is, panoramic—thought precedes, in going without knowing where. An absolute adventure, in a primal imprudence, goodness is transcendence itself" (ibid.). He takes a strong position, which I sympathize with, against a certain style of existential phenomenology. Before I would follow him, however, I would be concerned about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A criticism of panoramic being could conceivably leave existence unscathed, criticisms of the clarifying work of existence can't make appearance go away, and rejecting a certain notion of pre-understanding doesn't make hermeneutics uninteresting. There are other modes of pluralism and other possibilities of existentialism besides those on offer in the pages of Totality and Infinity. Nonetheless Levinas has inspired me. I respond to a call to think repetition as operating within a temporality of limited scope, whereas the most vital temporalities take their shapes from the dramatic encounters with other persons. In a future post I will explore variations of the synkairotic encounter while keeping open the question of coexistence, as much as that's possible given my predilections.

Addendum. In a footnote to a passage in which he discusses the difference between his sense of "revelation" and "disclosure" (touched on here), Levinas tells us how he would have us interpret the term "drama":

In broaching, at the end of this work, the study of relations which we situate beyond the face, we come upon events that cannot be described as noeses aiming at noemata, nor as active interventions realizing projects, nor, of course, as physical forces being discharged into masses. They are conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term "drama" would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would have like to use it when, at the end of The Case of Wagner, he regrets that it has always been wrongly translated by action. But it is because of the resulting equivocation that we forego this term.

(p. 28, note 2)

A Continuous Stream of Emerging Pattern

2009-05-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

Nachmanovitch speaks of the improvisor "operating on a continuous stream of emerging pattern" (Free Play, p. 32). He asks:

What, then, is this seemingly endless stream of music, dance, imagery, acting, or speech that comes out of us whenever we let it? To some extent it is the stream of consciousness, a river of memories, fragments of melodies, emotions, fragrances, angers, old loves, fantasies. But we sense something else, beyond the personal, from a source that is both very old and very new. The raw material is a kind of flow–Herakleitos' river of time, or the great Tao, flowing through us, as us. Mysteriously flowing through, unstoppable and unstartable. At its source, it does not appear or disappear, does not increase or decrease, is neither tainted nor pure. We can choose to tap into it or not to tap into it; we can find ourselves unwillingly opened up to it or unwillingly cut off from it. But it's always there.

(ibid.)

Doubt would be a shape latent in the moment, a shape to be released, if only I knew how to talk to the moment. Should I couple doubt to paralysis as if that were a bad thing, a blockage? Should I let it emerge strongly or weakly? Doubt, sweet doubt, I will sing your praises. I as paralysis.

Continuous Sound over Silent Breaks

2009-05-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

"From its very beginnings," Montiglio says, "a structural aspect of Greek drama has favored continuous sound over silent breaks: the nearly total absence of empty scenes. Permanently inhabited by the chorus, the stage is filled with its visible and audible presence at the end of each episode" (Silence, p. 160). The image of the drama parallels the image of speech even as one informs (interpolates) the other. Today instead of imagery I'll speak of cosmology, a cosmology of the continuous, the continuous drama, the continuous dialogue. Does a euphemistic cosmology by itself tell us anything about what it leaves unsaid? The unsaid must be interpreted. Too true. If we engage in cosmology–is that what we do? Do we do cosmology by engagement? If we involve ourselves, somehow, with cosmology, with the understanding that the said must leave room for response, that the unsaid must leave room for response, even quiet response, how do we account for our understanding? What kind of understanding is it? Cosmological? We have a cosmological understanding of cosmological understandings, we understand cosmology through cosmology. Ah, if that were true we'd be between cosmologies. Perpetually? Alternatively, one cosmology might dominate another cosmology. That's another cosmology. So is the question of the day "How are we instilled with cosmology" or "How do we move between cosmologies?" Are we able to routinely shake ourselves free of cosmology? Given certain cosmologies (the euphemistic cosmology, for example), would it always be sufficient for freedom from cosmology to merely stop talking about the world? This is dubious, but, if so, to free oneself would one have to specify which world of which one were no longer speaking? How?

Imminent Differences

2009-05-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

Barbaras tells us that the difference between fact and essence must be conceived as an imminent difference, "always already accomplished but also always on the way to being accomplished" (Being, p. 85). Would the difference between difference–haplopic difference?–and imminent difference be an imminent difference? Well, let's hear Barbaras out for a moment.

Taking stock of this ontological "diplopia" cannot consist only in taking note of it; one has to conceive it. Each position, that of experience or fact, as well as that of the "in-itself" or of essence, calls the other forth in the very moment when it excludes it. There is a deep-seated instability in the philosophies of essence as well as in those of existence. Neither of the two perspectives expresses the total situation, and this is why each of them is led to pass into its other. But if there is a truth of this "to and fro," of this duality, this truth does not reside in the duality itself. It is precisely the unilateral form according to which each position expresses itself that determines its reversal into its contrary, so that if there really is a truth to the duality of fact and essence, it is not expressed in the very notions of fact and essence. The to-and-fro corresponds to a more profound situation, to an original mode of the presence of Being in which the duality is rooted, which almost inevitably calls forth a rigid oppositional formulation, but whose true meaning does not reside in this duality. In order to understand the ontological "diplopia," therefore, one must return to a relation to Being that stops short of the opposition between essence and existence, a relation of which the to-and-fro is like the distorting trace. What is at issue is to rediscover the soil in which the necessity of this philosophical alternation is grounded, a soil that can only be located deeper than each of the terms, whose "unilaterality" alone determines alternation. One must therefore overcome the relation of fact and essence as an oppositional relation in favor of a plane where it will turn out to be a unity. By overcoming the fixity of the terms in which the opposition is expressed, we shall overcome the relation as oppositional relation. The notions of fact and essence lead us to conceive their very relation as an external oppositional relation rather than as movement; the point, therefore, is to overcome the antagonistic dimension of the to-and-fro in order to grasp the passage to essence as proceeding from existence itself, and the passage to existence as proceeding from essence itself. We must understand each term as its own passage into the other–that is, we must locate essence short of its opposition to existence and existence short of its opposition to essence.

(pp. 83-84)

One imagines an arrhythmia of the busy moment, the veryish moment of simultaneous exclusion and invitation, without pause, of the always, already, always again, and almost done enjambed within a single breath, the total breath, which exhales and inhales at once. Alternatively one plays with a floatier to-and-fro, a space of more emancipated movements. One leaps and swings amidst an undetermined canopy of philosophical conversations, phasing in and out like fruitions, or just words, utterances, even the most solid of them situations of near total incompleteness. One breathes. If rhythm exists–rhythmosophy must never cease to question how it is that rhythm exists–it sides with the alternation between its imaginary existence and its real essence, between its making itself appear as absence and its making itself absent. It exists thus as absurdity and ecstasy, but never already quite both at once (in any chronometric sense of happening at once; there is the phenomenon of the rhythmic happening to imagine: absurd, ecstatic, synkairotically phased). The son clave is the model of this flipendicularity. The sudden harmonziations of any two voices are the roots the bass walks, in steps unlocked, steady as freedom, measured, the pulse; yet the incomplete situation hangs on the syncopations with the three-two, steady as anything until it passes into the two-three; the conversation of any two or more voices, of many unconstricted passages.

I=∫F dt

2009-05-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

"Impulse, like improvisation, is not 'just anything'; it is not without structure but is the expression of organic, immanent, self-creating structure" (Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 29). The Muse's voice will be heard as meaning and experience become infinitesimally divergent, that is, as they converge. That's one outlook. It's taught as part of an approach to improvisation which asks for, not uncommonly, a relinquishment of self on the part of the improvisor. Nachmanovitch says that the "mysterious factor of surrender, the creative surprise that releases us and opens us up, spontaneously allows something to arise" (p. 30). Not just anything, apparently, but the voice of the Muse. The voice of the Muse, though, represents a tiny bit less of a surprise than just anything. We are in truth being asked to surrender a tiny bit less of ourselves than we pretend. Our supplication isn't as supple as it could be, our openness not completely open. Could this be the condition on which we hear the voice of the Muse? If we wanted to, how would we go about making supplications to openness?

Zydeco Cha Cha

2009-05-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

"Every work of art is painting and statuary, immobilized in the instant or in its periodic return" (Levinas, Totality, p. 263, my bold). We need to ask whether rhythm opens us up to the infinities of other people. For me, rhythm is a manumission from stupid moods, a dynamic movement out of a dismal immobility which is marked by the throb of a mere will to subsist, and an anemic throb at that. Rhythm overcomes the dolorous–or alternatively dwells in it, it amounts to the same–or rather it presents the means and the inspiration, the method of breathing and bodily vibration and most vitally the feeling that propels through the horizon of the given, the blue given, in a motion something like transmutation; rhythm is less of a form that one imposes on life than a music that emerges, develops and sends, a music that gives. Listening to rhythm, making rhythm with my knives and pans, musical instruments or my feet, makes me alive to my infinition. I enjoy it. Would this ecstatic journey of the self through rhythm be a condition for an openness to your infinition? Or do I risk deceiving myself about what is truly called for by your face? Levinas says "the whole body–a hand or a curve of the shoulder–can express as the face" (p. 262). So let's take off our shoes and socks and dance. Let's dance to some Zydeco Cha Cha.

The statues too would join us. The statuary and the plastic would join the performing arts if only we knew when to grasp the skoppic, the improvisation of the shape, and its many returns, the clay of everyday language. We could see them moving towards us, the statues, the sonorous masks, expressing, ecstatic, performative, the marble foot. This expression must not be confused with the infinition of the other person. Is such expressivity not a condition, though, of the openness to the infinitions of other people? What do you say of your mobilities, the ones you put out in the open? Do you ever find that you give yourself rhythmically?

Voices Cast at the Margins of the City

2009-05-24T04:13:00.000-07:00

Montiglio tells us that Athenian orators of the fourth century, in contrast to Homeric public speakers, "want their voices to be made of a pure disembodied logos, and not of a powerfully resonant substance. . . .From being ligeia, their voice has become lampra (luminous)" (Silence, p. 148). She recapitulates and expands on ligus:

[I]n epic poetry ligus modifies not only the voice of good speakers, but also the song of the Sirens and the dirge of the Muses, thus associating different forms of expression on account of their clear and powerful resonance. As regards speakers, there is no incompatibility between the audible physicality of their voices and the clarity of their words. By contrast, in the classical age ligus is applied to specifically to kinds of music and utterances in which sounds prevail over words: the lovely melody of the aulos, but also, and more insistently, the voices of mourning.

(ibid.)

Ligus, Montiglio says, speaking still of the classical age, "describes voices that are cast at the margins of the city: that of the nightingale, a plaintive song reminiscent of barbarian rhythms; that of mourning women, like the Thebans who pour out their ritual cries over the dead, or like the Suppliants, barbarian women similar to nightingales, who cry out their lament with a barbarian voice"(pp. 148-149). The marginalization of voices ripples–no, the disturbance is deeper. Sundered from sound, wrenched from its body, the voice loses its capacity to legitimately express suffering in public spaces, paradoxically just as further suffering is imposed by force; subaltern dissent is stifled at the cost of a muted logos for everyone, and, consequently, a muted democracy. Passions, any passions, including the passions of the Muses, have become a threat to the web of orders: the political, the epistemic, the linguistic, the expressive, the noetic, all sustained now by not just a denial of vocal power but by a violent reification of speech and concomitant suppression of the real, a devaluing of the real in the economies of the recognized. Recognition. The irony of course is that the voice is the epitome of recognizable of personal expressions, gestures that tell who we are. If hearing consigns us the world and its contingency, as Cavarero says in echo of Jonas (For More than One Voice, p.37), then the deafness codified by excision of voices from the shared logos makes problematic any discussion of a shared world, except in the most rarified, least inclusive settings. I have to stop myself here. I don't want to rely on pre-established habits of thinking in order to assimilate what Montiglio has to say. The dematerialization of language means something to me personally, and I suspect the dematerialization of silence does as well. Silence feels.

Let's pick up again on Montiglio's discussion. Her interpretation of the conceptualizations of the vocal quality of ritual mourning is, naturally, informed by Nicole Loraux's study of ritual lament. She ties work to a conceptual dematerialization of the voice, and also, coincidentally, a dematerialization of the logos.

As Nicole Loraux has shown, the legal effort to reject the vocal expressions of mourning outside the public space is prompted by the political urgency to contain feminine lament, which supposedly upsets civic order by its unbridled affectivity. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the voice of the orator refuses to resemble these voices of lamentation: while the latter are all-sonorous, ligeiai, the former dematerializes by coinciding with the rational content that it conveys. In fact, lampros applies to the logos as well as to the speaker's voice; and persuasive speech, as Athena reminds us, is provided with eyes, with a gaze that emphasizes its rationality. This speech that wants to be manifest to the eye makes itself visible through an equally transparent medium: an immaterial voice, a pure "mirror of thought."

(pp. 149-150)

The nurturing of empathy leads to a realization that we not only acknowledge gaps in soulful encounters but that we feel our own impulse to respond to gaps. I speak now, to be critical of my own thoughts, from experience and from memory, which we may wish to regard in its physicality. Is luminosity an aspect of its physicality? Is it any less questionable for being embodied? Obviously I harbor doubts about the nature of my feelings, my impulses, my responses. Shall I cull the margins of the city for the secrets to my soul? How could that be empathy? Because it would represent a commitment to listening?

Die menschliche Weltunbegriffe

2009-05-23T02:38:00.000-07:00

The breach ( }∅{ ) evokes the destiny of the person–a chaosmic evocation–without ever saying definitively what that means. It speaks asymptotically to infinitions. The syncopation of infinitions, empirically attestable, finds its way through the breach. Rhythmosophy is the style of inquiry that prepares to both listen for and respond to asymptotic destinies. Rhythmosophy is one of the disciplines which illuminates only insofar as the person is integral to its guiding organon.

Temporality on a Model of the Gift Economy

2009-05-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Shahar blogs (naturally in a post one ought to read a few times in its entirety):

Levinas equates the Saying (to be opposed to the Said) with the immanence of the body, with the diachrony of ageing and pain, and with the sensibility of flesh. In contrast to structuralism, which synchronizes the relations between signs in an atemporal horizontal totality, Levinas posits the primordial relation with the other. In this instance, signs are given as gifts between interlocutors before they are fixed into impersonal structures. Time de-phases the identical.

My recent use of somebody's idea of the "unsaid" is similar to the Saying in that it points to the performance of the said, its illocutionary residue; its particular bias is textualist as well as dialectical. Levinas' formulation holds more promise.

Time de-phases the identical. Dephasis problematizes temporality, as if temporality could persist while Time (time's identity) passed underground, even beneath phenomenality, phasis, delivery. A model for this temporality is the gift economy, if only because it's already been described. Now, do we say Time, its reality bracketed out for the sake of exploring the problem of dephasis, neither phases in nor phases out the identical, its presupposition it would seem, but precisely deprives it of phase? Interlocution as the relation that absolves of the relation? We can use totality to undo totality at the "same time" we step outside it? Is this approach suggested by an inherited style of reflection, or perhaps guided by an eidos of reflection? Has structuralism justly been given a due?

I'm sure Kevin would have something to say about this dephasing of the identical, as evidenced by his commentary here. "The music of engagement is always richer than this." (I don't mean to deflect. Just curious.)

Two Pianists

2009-05-21T23:57:00.000-07:00

I've intiated a fascination with Edward Simon.

Recently I picked up Vijay Iyer's Tragicomic. Vijay is always worth listening to.

Lila (लीला) with Multiple Subtexts

2009-05-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

To extemporize is to surrender–in a single gasp–to both the ephemeral and the forever. To accomplish this paraphrasing of Stephen Nachmanovitch (Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, p. 21) I woke from a dream of being washed down stream, swimming against the current, losing strength, being drawn under. I woke with the realization that the stream was me, as in none other than me. Paraphrasing is so integral to my daily routine that I'm almost surprised by how wretched my paraphrases are. In fact my attempts at communication make me violently ill. "Stepping into the unknown can . . . lead to failure, disappointment, rejection, sickness, or death. . . . [W]e play undisguisedly with the fleetingness of our life, with some awareness of our own death" (p. 23). We signify. "Exterior to Time" means we surrender to a single breath, means we can step outside–outside parataxis–and play. We signify, playing the shadows of the paraphrastic. What sensibility is this?

The impromptu accedes to a remoteness from both passage and aporia–gasp#&150;a remoteness always ready (made ready by the impromptu impromptu) for its own remoteness, that is, a remoteness simultaneously born of the impromptu and pregnant with it, carrying the echo of the impromptu, immanent remoteness if you will. Sonorous access to infinition–dunt infinitions, sad to say. . . . Maeiutics and euphoria have yondered off to some other remotion, or other remotions. An imminent remotion.

"[T]o do art only for the high feeling of completion and connectedness in the moment of inspiration would be like making love for the moment of orgasm" (p. 18). He completes his thought: "The work of the improviser is, therefore, to stretch out those momentary flashes, extend them until they merge into the activity of daily life" (p. 19).

Another day passes. I apologize for a David Simon quality to yesterday's negativity, a frustrating, if momentarily gleany, one-sidedness. What I almost wanted to do was to begin anew a critique of the moment, a critique that extemporization prompts in my thinking, though such critique is not entirely foreign to me of course. Nachmanovitch actually says that in improvisation we accept the transient and the eternal. Does this imply that we could somehow say no to both? On the fly? I want to witness the birth of thinking. Do I want to feel it? What feeling accompanies my daily praxes, the rhythm of my play? What feeling is there in the breach?

Philosophers and their Shadows

2009-05-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

Barbaras comments on Merleau-Ponty's "The Philosopher and His Shadow," his own commentary on his reading of Husserl:

His approach to the history of philosophy is the heir of his philosophy of perception and intersubjectivity: just as the thing is not frontally and objectively possessed but rather grasped in transcendence in a lateral way, the thought of an author is not such that one can make a precise list of what belongs to it and what it has ignored. The relation of commentary is a modality of the intersubjective relation, of linguistics in particular. In dialogical experience, I do not communicate to another a thought possessed elsewhere. I think with him and make myself in his image; moreover, his thought comes to itself only be formulating itself and offering itself to me, so that there is no clear-cut distinction between what would belong strictly to an author and what the interpretation projects into the author. What defines a thought is what is was still seeking to say, its "unthought," which can be revealed only in a reflection which, on the basis of its difference, turns itself into the echo of the thought. Therefore, the rejection of the idea that one must subject a reading to objectivity in favor of the idea that one must attempt to explicate an unthought can be a higher form of fidelity.

(Being, p. 69)

I think with him and make myself in his image. Merleau-Ponty says, "I borrow myself from others; I create others from my own thoughts. This is no failure to perceive others; it is the perception of others" (159). The quotidian personalistic attitude towards the world, which we hope to be able to understand rhythmosophically, via reductions by a method of improvisatory rhythmic variation, does not in the first place imagine other people as other minds and then more or less as an addendum supply bodies and a sense of concrete material horizons to the image of the other. There is no constituting of a mind for a mind but of a person for a person. We imagine whole persons. If we were to follow Merleau-Ponty's lead, we'd find that the body, in particular, its status as "the viniculum of self and things" (p. 166), holds the key to grasping the intersubjective dimension of the personalistic imagination. On the model of touch, physical and personal at once, "[t]he physical thing becomes animate. Or, more precisely, it remains what it was (the event does not enrich it), but an exploratory power comes to rest upon or dwell in it" (ibid., my emphasis). If we grasp such an exploratory power through the grasp of the experience of our own free hands, are we thus employing a metonymic relation necessarily mediated by explicit cognitions? The question is that of imagining the whole person. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of shaking hands as a knowledge of the other, reasoning:

[W]e have here neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or "introjection." The reason why I have evidence of the other man's being-there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in that "sort of reflection" it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands "coexist" and are "compresent" because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. For Husserl the experience of others is first of all "esthesiological," and must be if the other person exists effectively and not as the ideal terminus or fourth term of a proportion which supposedly would come to complete my consciousness' relationships to my objective body and his. What I perceive to begin with is a different "sensibility" (Empfindbarkeit), and only subsequently a different man and a different thought.

(p. 168)

The ability to feel, the exploratory power of the other person: these are vitally of the tactile; one almost has the sense reading these words that the whole person is composited from an imagination that is primarily sensual, rather than being abstracted from ways of being a person, sensuous, embodied, but irreducible to any single faculty, ability or organ. "Other persons. . . . are not there as minds, as "psychisms," but such for example as we face them in anger or love–faces, gestures, spoken words to which our own respond without thoughts intervening, to the point that we sometimes turn their words back upon them even before they have reached us, as surely as, more surely than, if we had understood–each one of us pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body" (p. 181). Well, here are some words I find difficult to absorb (which means I'll get back to them in some fashion, perhaps through Barbaras once again):

"Animalia are realities which cannot be given in a fundamental and original presence to several subjects; they enclose subjectivities. They are the very special sort of objects which are fundamentally and originally given in such a way that they presuppose fundamental and original presences without being able to be given in a fundamental and original presence themselves." This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior. But absence is itself rooted in presence; it is through his body that the other person's soul is soul in my eyes. "Negativities" also count in the sensible world, which is decidedly the universal one.

(p. 172)

Imagine that instead of simply carrying a wake of the negative as some necessary property or attribute, the person essentially puts negativity into play in the form of irrealizations which matter in the sensible world. So let's get back to this idea of making myself in the image of the other. I imagine meontically rather than mimetically, or, better said, the image of the image does not originate in mimesis, which nevertheless runs parallel with some kinds of thinking. Further, there is a methectic aspect to my irrealizations of animalia, one might even speak of an intermethexis. I can discern the interpersonal as a horizon of imagination, yet the image of the image eludes my grasp. It is not there fully for me. Not to too quickly shirk responsibility, but are these thoughts then by which I create others my own?

Inquiry is a Continuous Beginning

2009-05-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

I quote a paragraph from Merleau-Ponty's "The Philosopher and his Shadow" (in Signs) on the topic of epoché as the essence of inquiry. I'll return to the essay in a later post. The idea I want to play with here is how inquiry, any inquiry, draws the person of the inquirer into question in a movement like a return to self. What does inquiry look like once we continue to interrogate this reentry into the self?

Take for example the theme of phenomenological reduction, which we know never ceased to be an enigmatic possibility for Husserl, and one he always came back to. To say that he never succeeded in ensuring the bases of phenomenology would be to be mistaken about what he was looking for. The problems of reduction are not for him a prior step or preface to phenomenology; they are the beginning of inquiry. In a sense, they are inquiry, since inquiry is, as he said, a continuous beginning. We must not imagine Husserl hamstrung here by vexatious obstacles; locating obstacles is the very meaning of his inquiry. One of its "results" is the realization that the movement of return to ourselves–of "re-entering ourselves," St. Augustine said–is as if rent by an inverse movement which it elicits. Husserl rediscovers that identity of "re-entering self" and "going-outside self" which, for Hegel, defined the absolute. To reflect (Husserl said in Ideen I) is to unveil an unreflected dimension which is at a distance because we are no longer it in a naive way, yet which we cannot doubt that reflection attains, since it is through reflection itself that we have an idea of it. So it is not the unreflected which challenges reflection; it is reflection which challenges itself. For by definition its attempt to revive, possess, internalize, or make immanent has meaning only with respect to an already given terminus which withdraws into its transcendence beneath the very gaze which has set out in search of it in this attempt.

("Shadow," p. 161, Merleau-Ponty's emphases)

Let's suppose reentry into the self elicits an ecstasy, a coming outside the self. Do we reenter the same self we remember being inside–for surely we do remember something like being inside the self or it would make no sense to speak of "reentry" in place of entry. Can we see that from an ecstatic perspective? Let's question the continuity of reentrances. Could we sense a memory of estrangement called up by reentry? Or is estrangement a feeling we have about ecstasies, memories of ecstasies. A mood is set by reentry and far more. In saying "reentry" we have imagined a whole person, a person with a depth of history, memories, forgetfulness, an eventful world, feelings, imagination, style. Such repleteness may tell us something critical about inquiry itself. Nevertheless, have we not also created an obstacle to inquiry? Can the reentered self be questioned on the same grounds as the self that would have existed prior to any reentry, a personalistic self, perhaps; or does reentry call for a new logos, a newly entered conversation, one that recognizes the singularity of the person quite apart from any totalizing scheme? Do we find a malleated self at the horizon of reentry, its malleations possibly effected by reentry, or are we faced with the malleations of an image of self, the work of an imagination that might be mistaken for continuous were it not for its slips into ecstasy? I don't propose here that the imagination slips into ecstacy alone, although one can of course imagine a reduction to solitude and its vexations; I only mean to say that a philosophy of the imagination is not necessarily a philosophy of mind, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty gives that term in his reading of Husserl.

Le Corps Impropre

2009-05-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Ruse and ambush–Ulysses' Craft–constitute the essence of war. This skill is inscribed in the very existence of the body; it is suppleness–a simultaneity of absence and presence. Corporeity is the mode of existence of a being whose presence is postponed at the very moment of his presence. Such a distention in the tension of the instant can only come from an infinite dimension which separates me from the other, both present and still to come, a dimension opened by the face of the Other.

(Totality, p. 225)

The body exceeds the categories of a thing, but does not coincide with the role of "lived body" ["corps propre"] which I dispose of in my voluntary action and by which I can. The ambiguity of corporeal resistance which turns into a means and from means turns into a resistance does not account for its ontological hybris. The body in its very activity, in its for itself, inverts into a thing to be treated as a thing. This is what we express concretely in saying that it abides between health and sickness.

(p. 229)

I learned your softness through my body, alive enough, present enough, never fully inverted into a thing. As always, we will have to define the for itself for ourselves. Me, if I'm going to learn a metaphysics, a metaphysics of the supple, for instance, it won't be for the sake of circumventing the phenomenal. When I say epiphany I refer to the phenomenal, where I sojourn when I'm earthly. In this light to actually see the phenomenal is a gift. To feel your softness is a gift. Epiphany says that.

συμβολον ηδη μοι

2009-05-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Montiglio interprets Pindar's poetics, supplying some broad thoughts about the materiality of sound according to the ancients. "Poetry is a sonorisation of the silent mind, and its coming to being depends on a restless movement of the vocal organ" (Silence, p. 95, her emphasis). And, worth noting in passing: "Reading out loud is a metaphor for both the execution and the composition of the poem. It is only through this reading that poetry comes to exist. Mental writing does not produce a nonrecited poem" (p. 94). Liquid sounds. Dramatic sounds. Sounds too powerful to be human. Did silence ever call to be animated? Somewhere a poem slips out of existence, into the silences that never give birth to conversation. Not even rereadings let us escape oblivion indefinitely. The poem knows that. Every poem secretly knows that. "The 'liquidity' of song, which takes us back to its oral origins, favors a thorough diffusion of the poet's voice"(p. 98). This would be a thespian voice, a persona attached to an arc ever near completion, the figure of sonorous presence, approximating total presence–cut down by skop as foretold. The voice of the ancient poet, though, is it not the voice of a rereading? "The voice of the Muses, which engages other voices in a contrapuntal response, seems to have the same capacity of spatial diffusion as the light; it is as tireless as the rays of the sun and spreads like dawn on the sea; it makes itself heard everywhere"(p. 97). Rereading is the silence of the said, or, better, it insists on the silence of the said, reads it aloud so as to put it to sleep, exactly a lullaby. The polyphonization of the unsaid, the said's remainder, rests on this sleep of the said within the rereading. What does the page symbolize amidst such tireless conversation? It too must be reread, polyphonized along with the rest of the unsaid. Symbolize?

Since the experience of poetry, in an aural culture, consists in the hic et nunc of its performance, the real or imaginary listener who wants to describe it follows the movements of its musical unfolding, just as we would describe a symphony following the succession of its resonances. Sappho seems indeed to be reproducing the many instrumental and vocal components of a true symphony, the subject matter of which is only mentioned at the end.

(p. 97)

Imagine a word too powerful to be human. Don't we do this all the time? Symphony, aural, resume, the silent mind. Imagine what it would take to voice such words, and only such words. To voice discretely, and only with the voice, the voice itself. Never happen. (Let "the vocal organ" be a metaphor for its never happening.) We call upon other voices–as if to converse? The experience of poetry has always been like hanging out with the daughters of Mnemosyne, the way we used to, when it rained. Would our aural materialism propose to explain away the touch of Terpsichore and her siblings, or her symbol? Unstring the Canon of the Nine? Step lightly, dear imaginary listener, in your interpretation of the boundlessness of musical voices, a boundlessness that coexists with the silent mind. The silent mind is a wild animal. The excursion of the poem means not to tame. Nor to bewilder. We are coming closer to saying what it means for the silent mind to stand for a material cause–the meontic efficiency of the symbol, incidentally, is nowhere near that of the ordinary sign. Do you suppose there is some balance to be struck between silence and restlessness?

Lagoon. Tortoise. Lagoon.

I threw myself at the shores of your tongue, restless you. What solace was there in sweet centuries we spoke them too. And we stole the silence of the said from the public library, its bright corners, musics, ours and Sappho's, who seemed never to have learned how to die, but fragment, fragment. . . taught us words like mythoplokos.

Gently Disturbed

2009-05-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

We've been enjoying Gently Disturbed by the Avishai Cohen Trio. Drummer Mark Guiliana reminds me of Leon Parker's playing on Jacky Terrasson's Reach, though his kit isn't quite so minimalist.

Here the trio plays "Remembering" (which isn't on Gently Disturbed).

"Eleven Wives"

Here's the Jacky Terrasson Trio with Leon Parker and Ugonna Okegwo. Lately Okegwo has been playing with Tom Harrell, among others.

Engagement with the Expressive

2009-05-13T01:12:00.000-07:00

Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty's turn to speech:

[B]y returning to the world from the phenomenon of expression, by grasping the very birth of sense instead of referring it straightaway to a perceptual ground, Merleau-Ponty gains access to the genuine figure of the world as soil or source of expression. Then, to the infinity of the telos brought to light in the expressive act, there corresponds the infinity of an archē. Insofar as it is the soil of the expressive movement, the world will have this infinite depth inherent in the fact that sense is never completely fulfilled. Because no expression erases itself in the face of a pure sense, because expression cannot claim to be nailed down in a full meaning, the world will be given only as withdrawal, as this "presence" which, through its obscurity, gives birth to expression without ever being absorbed in the expressed. Considered on the basis of expression, the world can no longer be defined through presence but as that whose being consists in exceeding every presentation.

(p.60, Barbaras' emphasis)

The rhythmosophic engagement with the expressive means this: the breach –}∅{, the sign which evades the instant archive–the improvisation of improvisations, does not wait outside correspondence. Its infinities do not hang around. (Infinities of broken limits.) The evanescence of infinities may touch on the teleological, or anyway feel the repercussions of telic logoi, without in any way ceding the power to onset radical causalities, causalities of middle voices and otherwise, harmolodically apperceived, that is, given a harmolodic temporality, as extensions of expressive movement. This is the grasp. It is the grasp where the grasp isn't everything. The door opened up by the breach, is it divarication itself? Straddle? It remains to rhythmosophy to describe the givenness of the world as plunge, and not to be submerged in this description.

Imagine a Face

2009-05-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

Scarry asks us to imagine a face. "It may seem than in shifting from the motion of skating to the motion of smiling, we have veered away from the subject of circles, but we have not, for when the face breaks into a smile, the mouth moves into a small upward opening arc" (Dreaming, p. 208). Levinas asks us to imagine a face that would break through the image of the face, a face that would appear above and beyond phenomenality. This metaphysical face that transcends appearances is a face that speaks.

To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form, to present oneself in a mode irreducible to manifestation, the very straightforwardness of the face to face, without the intermediary of the image, in one's nudity, that is, in one's destitution and hunger.

(Totality, p. 200, Levinas' emphasis)

If we could ever turn off the imagination, everpresent as life, we might be able to discern whether faces ever appeared without touching on images. The imageless appearance perplexes. Perhaps, however, it is intermediacy rather than the image per se that has vexed us so. What appears to be a phenomenon of the persistence of images may be an aspect of intermediacies, in which case we might prefer to approach an understanding of living with images, their betweens and their middles, before thinking we know what an image does to the point where we could identify appearances that weren't images.

I imagine the face of the beloved. Images appear. That much makes sense. Are appearances irreal? Is the face of the beloved any less a real face for appearing as an image to me? Well, it is not the face of the beloved until it speaks to me and breaks through its image? How long does that last? Are there pauses in conversation? Perhaps a mistake has been made by Levinas in isolating a purely phenomenal form. How many images in life are purely phenomenal forms? My ruminations on the imagination have led me towards the idea that the imagination, rather than being an activity I can easily start and stop at will, by a process that might generate purely phenomenal forms, is instead integral to my life at every moment. Its rhythm doesn't belong to the will in any unscrutinized sense of that idea. My imagination surrounds the spoken, interweaves, intermediates. Has enough been said about the betweens of the said, or the betweens of the said and the unsaid?

Ameibomei as Uninterrupted: Imaginary Speech

2009-05-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

The undertaking to thoroughly describe communicative, illocutionary silence necessarily requires working with an image of speech, if only to go around it. All images of speech are not reconcilable, though we may recognize any collection of them as all being ideas about speech, which if it doesn't approximate a reconciliation, at least suggests the possibility of one. In making such a recognition we may cede to an epistemic aporia about speech. We act as if we knew that certain ideas were ideas about speech, but we haven't yet been able to define speech, certainly not in a way that would make sense of contradictory propositions made about speech. Practically, as intellectuals, such as we are, we may well find ourselves in a defensive position regarding our grasp of speech. We put ourselves into question simply by noticing that two images of speech cannot be reconciled–but I am being hasty. Let's try to reconcile two views. First, there's my naive sense that conversation requires breaks in speaking, and that on that basis conversations can in fact be carried out episodically, over long hiatuses in some cases. Speech is rawly hiatal. This is an image of speech that conditions my thinking about verbal exchanges and interactions of all kinds. It is not the only image of speech one could imagine, live by. One could imagine a completely antithetical view. In the Homeric world, Montiglio tells us, "speech ideally circulates without ceasing" (Silence, p. 60). Montiglio uncovers a notion of something like a "speech economy," but one must wonder about the nature of speech as it would appear in such a system, and how its differences from speech according to the image of hiatal flows would illuminate the problem we have here with speech.

Homeric epic regards speech as the object of a continuous exchange. The verb for "to answer," ameibomei, literally "to exchange," inscribes speech within the ethic of reciprocity that should govern the behavior of heroes. But what is an exchanged word? First and foremost it is an entity that goes around incessantly, bandied back and forth without ever disappearing.

Outside the domain of speech, ameibomai signifies to alternate, to compensate. Emphasis is placed on the absence of any interruption during the movement. In Iliad 9, for instance, ameibomai means "to interchange watches": "They mounted guard in turn, and the fire would never go out" (471-472). Parallel to the constantly burning flame, the changing of the guard ensures continuity. No void is allowed: as soon as a soldier departs, another takes over.

(p. 61, my bold)

Montiglio has us draw a distinction between listening while waiting one's turn to speak, implicitly expected, and silence. To sit listening, for the ancient Greeks, belongs to speech whereas sitting in silence does not. Thus she leads us to the conclusion that "it is only to signify anomalies in an exchange that silence interrupts the verbal flow" (p. 62). It is the exchange which gives speech meaning and simultaneously calls for the entification of the utterance. Well, what exactly is our image of exchange? Do we have an image of exchange without a prior image of speech? Must we imagine the word that is a promise, sent forth on its journey, and yet, on the other side, interchangeable, a commerce? How does speech come to its other sides? In being imagined? If I said one needn't form an image of speech in order to speak I too would be asking you to imagine an essence of speech, "real speech," or "actual speech," unimagined speech. One doesn't evade speaking easily. Silence exists in relation to an imaginary speech, and this may be especially true if we are talking about something like a cultural construction of language instead of "The Idea of Speech"; imaginary speech, even praxiologically understood, tacitly informs even those operations that break from speech, provided, perhaps, that there exists something like a communicative intent, even one given through a purely rejective gesture, a blunt silence so blunt it's not even blunt. Imaginary speech is not metadiscourse, or, if you will, it is not merely to be explained as metadiscourse. Imaginary speech escapes itself. It delineates its silences. Yet silences persist, imaginary and inimaginary. Just as it practically remains possible to communicate between contradictory imaginary languages, notwithstanding the rise of minor misunderstandings or moments of miscommunication, that is, people who do not share the same image of speech may nevertheless communicate, so too does it remain possible to hold a communicative silence in reference to different images of speech. Well, this is a thesis. Possibly in such an instance one holds more than one silence simultaneously, for instance the silence that is continuous with the pause and therefore belongs to speech, and, on the other hand, the silence which speech defines as its disturbance. Of course we have already criticized this position. The silence that accomodates two images of silence is itself delineated by an image, a model, of communication.

Should we be guided by an image of speech that asks us to believe in questionable ideas like incessance and things that are only apparent, that never disappear? One imagines ghosts of words. Quite probably we would have to call upon an auxilliary image of silence just to make sense of the world of communication. And so we should ask about being guided by images that primarily serve other images, images that don't stand on their own, and won't therefore easily submit to scrutiny. Montiglio nonetheless scrutinizes. She does so without isolating, but rather by examining manifestations of phenomena across the spectrum of ancient Greek culture. Is her image of speech superior to the Homeric image her scholarship has uncovered? More interesting or more useful? Even the proposition that the contact between disparate images of speech engenders creativity in language, a tenet of dialogism, reflects an image of speech. It contests as well as illuminates. We must then put in question our communicative intentions. Are we now in dialogue with the ancient Greeks, who we say had an image of uninterrupted exchange at the heart of speech? What do we mean to say by our engagement in classicist discourse? Will we finally be able to reach the point beyond which there is no discourse, no understanding, because we have already understood, the point where silence intervenes? Was it never our intent to understand? If not then would it be fair to say that we are drawn to the image of the uninterrupted flow of speech, that it is so seductive in fact that we should question the position we've taken with regard to it, and thus put into question our own image of speech, the one we must explicitly hold in order to effect a criticism? Do we really yearn for a speech that isn't mythos? Do we ever really practice such a speech?

For the Intimacy of Ideation to be Grasped

2009-05-05T21:14:00.000-07:00

A twist on the problem of the phenomenality of the Other: "For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced in the oecumenia of being the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. This simultaneity is not an abstract construction of dialectics, but the very essence of discretion" (Totality, p. 155). I don't believe it's so easy to escape dialectics. I say that despite not understanding exactly what Levinas means by "discretion," which I take to function as an antithesis to dialectics. When I say that human contact does not presuppose ideation–the imagination of an other self, for instance, and all that implies– I too am proposing an alternative to dialectics or any comparable totalizing system of thought, though in seeking to hew to the actuals of coexistence I've not yet arrived at a position on the experience of other selves, and, in dodging this issue, I know I'm not giving ideation a fair shake. This is quite damaging. At stake in the problem of the phenomenality of other people is a sure enough understanding of some ways in which experience is shaped by ideation. A caveat: I, who defend the reality and philosophical relevance of the person, don't maintain that ideation is the work of windowless monads or isolated psyches–despite the fact that solitude and loneliness, topics that authoritative thinkers of the present seek to avoid, have emerged as challenges for me–and as much I would resist reducing ideation to dialectic thought (possibly an other of one's felt own understandings), I would resist reducing it to "cognition" narrowly conceived or "behavior" in its most reductive acceptations, that is, as something a monad might do. It might be presumed that ideation begins in coexistence, in living with. . . ; however, the opacities surrounding ideation are such that at this incipient stage of investigations I'd rather not presume to know ideation in any detail except insofar as one must make presumptions, imaginatively, for purposes of exploring various possibilities of ideation.

The Shape of the Human Mind

2009-05-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

"The Illiad," Scarry says (Dreaming, p. 202), "illustrates the observation made by Democritus and Plato that circles move easily in the mind, so easily that at times they seem the very shape of the mind itself." Circular movements come easily to the hominid imagination insofar as the hominid both understands movement directly and has the ability to move in circular fashion. The hominid gross anatomy, marked by some distinctive synovial joints, opens up possibilities of circular movement that are less expressed, one might say less emancipated, in other apes, though it almost goes without saying that all apes have interesting ball-and-socket joints. Naturally, positing a spherical shape of the mind hardly contradicts the observation that hominids make circular movements rather easily. However, I suggest that the mode of relation between joints and spherical images is not mimetic but methectic. Psyche does not reproduce its hidden image before itself in various modes but rather enacts its image in the modes it grows accustomed to, and possibly more. It participates in its own image. The extent to which the shape of the psyche is an habituation can be overstressed, but I find it worth noting anyway.

Against a Background of Prior Communication: "Left Alone"

2009-05-01T14:55:00.001-07:00