Simha Arom agrees with Jean Molino's definition of the musical: "Whenever sound is shaped and recognised by a culture, it is musical" (quoted in African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, p. 147). By this definition we could, though it would run counter to the task Arom has appointed to himself, hear language as musical. We would stumble into trouble on a few points, for instance on the question of differentiating language from culture, which might also call into question the differentiation of language from music and with that the whole project of differentiation, perhaps especially as it is conducted in tandem with a project of thinking by analogy, or amidst analogy.
Sometimes every word is troubling. I probe into words and wonder about the transmiguration of forms and also their persistence (and also the and also), and I do so, in part, because words are tools I think with, and perhaps that gives me trouble. I am troubled by thinking with. What does it mean to think with, or to think by? Thinking about thinking with, in a wee hour, a bout of psychasthenia welcomes another inhabitant of the horizon of thinking. Is this the figure of a muse? Trouble itself? A list of troubles: music, culture, recognoscence, shape, sound.
The musical. You could hardly be blamed for objecting to the personification of thought's other, or, whether or not it means the same thing, its with. (Before we cast ourselves as the feminine of thought, a distinct alternative, we should settle the matter of personification.) We don't yet know what a sonus is, so perhaps it's premature to think of carrying it through, though we may yet find ourselves doing something like that, carrying a sound through to music, or possibly by music. (The interchangeability of by and with?)
Does music call forth sound? Sound may have its own raisons d'être, but what are its reasons for being musical, for being shaped and recognized by a culture as such? Does music dramatize? Does it have its theatre of the labyrinthine and its masks, for perhaps resonance is the destination of sonance and also its journey and its origination, a calling forth. Music's calling forth of sound would be less spectacular than Dionysian, we can imagine, but nevertheless it plays in the same amphitheatre as spectacle and also chorus, the double theatre, the labyrinth of threads and dancers. Its purpose obscure, its dramaturgy amounts to this: a calling forth to airs. The singer's mask, the resonance with listeners and listening, what Nancy refers to as the whole articulatory cinema of the voice (which we insist on calling its theatre, sung and staged before it is cut up and framed, but, here Nancy is most insightful, drawing the face), which is not around the face like an atmosphere, but labyrinthine, that is to say connected to the hip bone, to the knee bone, to the ankle bone to the ball of the big toe, grounded in poises: airs. A ball of airs: entrée, adagio, variations, coda. The disco of words (poussette of the breath) never ceases to astonish, to vary forms that defy pronunciation and at the same time rasp true: larynx (λάρυγξ), diaphragm (δια- + φράγμα), a form which invites us to anatomize the ancient, phrenes (φρένες), and hence phrenasthenia, a weakness of frenzy, of the Dionysian, or of Mynde, a coming unpoised, disequipoise—how quickly the figures recompose themselves.
Culture (adagio). The truth of culture is that it is not a person. To even call it an it is deceptive. Were we to conceive of culture as an it, as a neutral person, we would recognize a defining characteristic: it takes its time. What we affectionately think of as ancient Greek civilization is still becoming civilization, still becoming Greek, still becoming ancient. It takes its time. It veritably drawls. We speak of cult-ure (Kult-ur, though we might have to reclaim a meaning) to call attention to, rather than an instance of caring, an activity of care, an activity that extends even beyond the seasonal, though we can use the seasonal to remind us of the time it takes, to get a foothold on what it means to take time, what it means to till. To think by culture is to become a witness to the intermarriage of the fast and the slow, and to let things into and out of our hands. Culture is not nurturing. It has no womb, no matrix, no biomechanical integuments of its own. It is precisely nurtural. It is in our hands, and, alternatively, out of our hands, or so to speak. It can't be dissociated from passage. That is, it takes its time.
Recognoscence. You know the dilemma. You recognize it. To know is already to know with, already and also again. Turn it on itself again: to recognize is already and also again to recognize by culture. How will you recognize the muse?
Shape. Would a departure here be on a theme of variations? Depart we must. The thought must occur that plasticity itself is a metaphor—feel free to worry about which way the action flows, about what it means to shape by culture. Let's leave form aside for a moment and pla-y with shape. To shape is to skop, and it is skopping (the activity of skops, commonly misspelt as scops) that nurtures its meaning. (Is skopping an end in itself? Wait, please.) Perhaps to nurture is to blur a line between helping along and allowing to be; perhaps it strikes a balance. The skop steps out of the synkairotic, skip skop, and so gives passage to it. The skop becomes, through donation, all about passage, passage through and through. The skop is all over that thing, a virtuoso of passages.
Sound is how we know the world has depths—or, rather, before we can know what a world might be, sound is how we know depths. It would be stupid to consign sound to surfaces, though it would be equally stupid to deny the surfaces their due. Sound unravels the how of depths. The howl is the sound of sounds on the slow, the slow tongue. The slow tongue calls forth the drawl, the ripple of the howl. Does the howl have a bottom? What is the nurture of our inquiry? To hear the howl of existence in a ripple, to know disturbance at its reaches: to sound sound as a double resonance, without priors, a true rap. It was already and also again called forth by passage, the door held open by the figure of the skop, and maybe in that double theatre the figure was doubled too, and you could feel the vibration of trouble itself. Sound.
Labels: Arom, labyrinths, Molino, music, Nancy, shape, sound, Terpsichore, vibration
Does the synkairotic have an inception?
Agamben helps us to say about time what has been on the tip of the tongue. He begins:
Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also—and above all—to 'change time'.
("Time and History," Infancy and History, p. 91)
Agamben finds in pleasure an experience to accompany a revolutionary conception of history. What is the time of accompaniment? Should we also look for it in καιρός, or the kairotic grasp of time. Agamben says, "within itself the cairós distils different times ('omnium temporum in unum collatio') and within it the sage is master of himself and at his ease, like a god in eternity" (p. 101-102). If the kairotic (rather than the thinker—as usual the sages have all the fun) actually does bring together all times, or all conceptions of time, then it would not only be useless to speak of the synkairotic, it would be absurd. Surely there was a paradox in this conception of the kairotic to begin with: how can kairos bring together all times and be a time itself? And further, oughtn't we historicize kairos? Oughtn't we question whether kairos/καιρός belongs equally to the Ancient Greeks, the Stoics and the Post-Industrial Europhones? At this moment, when it is uncertain whether the kairotic can carry all that has been put upon it, dare we anticipate that the synkairotic will fare any better, that it will after be able to carry what we need the moment to carry? Oh, but according to one reading of Seneca to totally inhabit the kairos would mean to anticipate its future, and to dwell in that anticipation; yet perhaps it is in the nature of the moment to allow the future to be. Should we worry about a revolution of the moment sliding into a revolution for the moment? Any time now the whole affair might be dismissed as vicissitudinal, and we ourselves might collapse into vicissitudinarianism. Indeed. Well, the synkairotic is necessitated not merely by the wobbliness of the kairotic but also at the same time by the wobbliness of the synchronic. Amidst all this wobbling superfluity may be the least of our worries.
If the kairotic is a bouquet of times, the synkairotic is the economy of cut flowers. From gardens to homes and every boutique (apothec/ἀποθήκη) along the way: snip, snip, snip. The synkairotic brings together, but it also cuts, and it lays away. The synkairotic neither merely anticipates nor allows the future to be, but it also lays it away.
"The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." (We'll see where Arom takes Jakobson's (and Bachelard's) ideas soon enough.) There is yet another need for the emergence of the synkairotic. Pleasure and enjoyment must be joined, as must jouissance and orgasm. At the same time, any genuine revolution must be synorgasmic. The syncherotic function projects the enjoyment of polyvalence from the axis or selection into the axis of combination. Or something like that. Times change as fast as play. Ultimately I may come to embrace the vicissitudinal, without resentment if not without a tinge of sadness. How will I begin to describe the embrace of the synkairotic?
Labels: Agamben, Arom, Jakobson, jouissance, kairos, Seneca, synchrony, time
It was a mistake for me to have said that isochrony is wrong. I should have restricted my criticism to a characteristic abuse of time, or of a way of being overcome by measurement. Surely isocrhony has its uses.
Bachelard says, "The time of thought is in fact so superior to the time of life that it can sometimes command life's action and life's repose" (The Dialectic of Duration, p. 102). One can disagree with this statement readily enough. However, isn't the modern discomfort with isochrony predicated on just such an intuition? On what grounds would one object to the superiority of the time of thought? Is it the mind that revolts at the proposition of such a superiority?
One of Bachelard's riffs on Pinheiro dos Santos' unpublished Rhythmanalysis:
If a particle ceased to vibrate, it would cease to be. It is now impossible to conceive the existence of an element of matter without adding to that element a specific frequency. We can therefore say that vibratory energy is the energy of existence. Why then should we not have the right to place vibration at the heart of time in its original form? We do so without any hesitation. For us, this first form of time is time that vibrates. Matter exists in and only in a time that vibrates, and it is because it rests on this time that it has energy even in repose. We would therefore be forgetting a fundamental characteristic if were to take time to be a principle of uniformity. We must ascribe fundamental duality to time since the duality inherent in vibration is its operative attribute. We now understand why Pinheiro dos Santos has no hesitation in writing that 'matter and radiation exist only in and through rhythm' (volume 2, section I, p. 18). This is not, as is so often the case, a declaration inspired by a mystique of rhythm; it really is a new intuition, firmly based on the principles of modern wave physics.
(p. 138, Bachelard's emphases, my bold)
Is existence capable of revolution? The question What is capable of revolution? strikes me as wrongheaded in that it would be better to ask who revolts (and who commands), yet we should wonder what is meant by "existence." We should take it upon ourselves to existentialize rhythmanalysis, to follow that path whithersoever it leads, or to lead it whithersoever it follows. Shall we resist dipping our toes into the cosmos? Water symbolizes mystique. Does it also provide a means for comprehending clarity? Tremendous experiments will be conducted. Toes will be dipped.
To begin to meander in an out of Bachelard's text, is the following formula too uncomfortable for vamping (or imaginary vamping as the case may be): ((rhythm)2(rhythm)3)2? If emergent rhythms are comfortably achieved (with practice), would that be precisely because one can assume tacit isochronous pulsations? Or, would it be the case that a stricture against making isochronous pulsation explicit enables the synchronous expression of alternative isochronies? Does a polychronic facility signify a mastery of disparate isochronies, or does it follow its own path? (I'll be rereading Simha Arom's African Polyphony and Polyrhythm shortly so I'll get back to the idea of isochronic pulsation in music in future posts.)
How should we question generic isochronic periodicity, if there is such a beast? The freedom to vary tempos in daily life is essential to good living. For all the good that regularity can accomplish, to live life at a single pace amounts to passing the time under hypnosis. Is life lived within a single horizon, on a single plane without superiorities or inferiorities, also a kind of hypnosis? Would we be able to endure a life totally stripped of hypnotic moments? That is to say, perhaps rhythm is only possible as (rhythm)2, and so on.
Labels: Arom, Bachelard, existence, exponential reflexivities, Pinheiro dos Santos, rhythm, synchrony, vibration