Friday, October 10, 2008
Edward Casey imagines a distinct variety of silence, a soundlessness that is not a strict silence but "an amorphous auditory state in which no specific sound is heard" (Imagining, p. 27, his emphasis). Let's flesh out this image and study it. Imagine an amorphous auditory envelope in which one can sense the presence of voices, one feels enveloped in voices, yet no specific voice can be heard. An intimate bustle, intimate and slow. Something like breathing, irregular, vague, on the cusp of being respiratory. Murmurs. Subvocal vibrations. An infrasonic, glacial ebullience. Swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. (Our images not nearly our own, we borrow freely from cultural memory.) Splashes of voices, mere splashes without any clear sense of being animated, or of having sense at all. What can we learn from such an image of a voicelessness, or such images, such a flow of imagining, if we can talk about flow while suspending a question of continuity?
Casey cites Bachelard on "the need to animalize which lies at the origin of imagination" (I might say the need to animate, or even the desire to animate.) Bachelard continues, "The primary function of imagination is to make animal forms" (Lautréamont, p. 51, IN Imagining, p. 30). The connection between the animate and the form brings to mind a passage from an interview of Michel Henry that Michael Tweed translated and Shahar blogged about. Henry says (my bold):
A form is not actually a kind of exterior entity, but the expression of a force. The point, straight line, broken line, etc., are the expression of specific forces that occur in different ways, continuous or intermittent, in the same direction or changing direction. And the theory of forms, which refers to forces, refers at the same time to subjectivity, because the forces inhabit our body, our lived body, our subjective body that is our actual body. Consequently the world of forms is, in some way, a coded universe the true meaning of which amounts to the play of forces within us, hence to life, for the living body is a body that is made of forces: such is the origin of painting. Further, it is an invisible element, the invisible force with which the living body is identified, that is the principle of the composition of a painting.
So, incidentally, we might think that forms are already animated, animalized, animal, or on the verge of becoming animal, i.e. dynamic. Perhaps we are speaking of an animot voicelessness–yet we have before us precisely an amorphous voicelessness. Is there a dynamism without forms? Would such amorphousness perhaps be chimeral, a blending of for(ce)(m)s rather than a negation of for(ce)(m)s? Does our voicelessness under study here reveal in any discussable way a desire to animate? What would wildness mean if it weren't animated? A journey behind the back of forms–but how does it feel, this voicelessness?
Casey says that for humans "the voice seems to be intrinsic to the human body and not just an accompaniment of it" (pp. 32-33). It's hard to imagine a disembodied voice, he argues. Is it hard to imagine a disembodied voicelessness? Imagine a body without gestures, the body as womb perhaps. Now imagine an amorphous collaqueation of bodies without gestures, bodies without voices. This image of bodies without gestures accords with my image of amorphous voicelessness, but before agreeing that it is indeed easier to imagine an embodied voicelessness than a disembodied voicelessness I'd want to make sure that being without gestures doesn't represent a kind of disembodiment. Perhaps it even represents a kind of de-animation, an inversion of the basic function of imagination. Wouldn't that also be a power of the imagination? Can't we imagine with our whole bodies being outside of our bodies? There are limits? Silence, perhaps, is such a limit. Our dubious silence of the indistinct voices takes place at a border between the felt body and silence. Perhaps it is a shadow place, or even a shadow silence. And whose silence would that be? Now that the thought is out there, can you imagine it as either belonging or not belonging to anybody?
Thus a paradox of unwilled spontaneity, an imagination that imagines itself as other, may be at play in the image of voicelessness. In speaking about the relative spontaneity of an image, Casey has three things in mind: (1)its unsolicited arising, its feeling as if it effortlessly appeared, (2) its instantaneous, and (3) its capacity to surprise (p. 34). He regards the first as most crucial. Possibly we merely forget that we have called upon the imagination, that we have in fact solicited an image, and this forgetting allows for the illusion of spontaneity. However, what if the "illusion" of spontaneity is a necessary precursor to our imaginings? Or simply another way of saying how we imagine? We let our imaginations run wild. We let them function. We let spontaneity be, and this letting be of spontaneity takes the form of images. To let be is decidedly not to will. To will a spontaneity would be to will it out of existence, out of all irreality. The image is an unclaimed spontaneity. If it is called for, it is called for by a surprise that it creates the conditions for. Spontaneous voicelessness vanishes in the instant it reveals itself as surprise, at the border between the emergence of a human voice and an amorphousness. Voicelessness is a image from an unclaimed life, from the wild.
Labels: Bachelard, Casey, imagination, silence, spontaneity, surprise
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Can a harmony be renewed? Renewal may be the only temporal mode of existence open to harmony, if that's possible. Here I'd like to think renewal beyond a reiteration of the dubiousness of repetition and, what goes hand in hand, a reaffirmation of the evanescent. The thinking of renewal must itself be renewed. We really should be speaking of a double evanescence here, and asking whether an evanescence can be evanesced, for as surely as every tone eventually fades away, the harmonies a tone wends through and wends again through also fade (which is not to pre-emptively deny harmony's wendings and wendings again). When we ask about the modality of a harmony's evanescence, and question the play of transitivity in its relation to tone, we are on the verge of revealing a terrific fact of evanescence, which might have eluded us had we approached evanescence directly. That evanescence must be renewed? No, we are only beginning to glimpse what evanescence has in store for us. Is the evanescence of the evanescent, the evanishment of the evanid, primarily a mimetic operation or a meontic operation? You see, once repetition has abandoned us and mimesis reverberates merely as the reverberation of reverberation, we might turn to meontic renewal as the remaining possible modality of the evanescence of the evanescent. Well, by all means let's not make too much of a fuss over τό μἠ ὅν, the meon(t)ic. If meontic renewal is the way the evanescent is evanesced that's not to say it's all that and a bag of chips, any deflation of mimesis and such notwithstanding. If the evanescent in particular is partial to meontic realizations (irrealizations, if we don't mind being twisted around), that tells us about the evanescent; we cannot be sure it tells us anything about all things touched by evanescence.
Harmonies captivate us because they are felt. Try to say what those feelings are, and the thought may sneak up that harmonies are felt because they captivate. The rational position is to remain agnostic on the question of whether evanescence liberates or imprisons—but are our feelings there to be ignored? Are our ordinary encounters with harmonies predicated on sedimentations? That is, are our experiences of harmony experiences of sedimented beauties, beauties we did not ourselves arrive at through our own intuitions? Well, there's no denying that sentimentalism is a force in the world of harmonies. If we do say that harmony can happen only as renewal do we mean that all the forms of harmony that may be experienced are already sedimented? Without going so far as to claim that Occidental music theory has exhausted all possibilities of harmonizing, we might recognize that we don't quite feel anything in the total absence of the sedimentary. What would it be like to feel sedimentation at its source? Would it be like a fading away, a renewal, or maybe a synchrony of both feelings? There's no denying that sedimentarism is a force in the world of harmonies. But is re-activation of the sedimented all that could be meant by renewal? Another possibility remains to be explored: perhaps our ordinary encounters with harmonies are predicated on fadings.
What if instead of the durations of tones (and harmonies) we spoke of intensities? I share Bachelard's skepticism of durations, and seek to explore gaps in the harmonic, though I have not quite internalized his metaphysics to the point where my talk of intensities would dwell in the same habitat of meaning as his. Since I am brushing up alongside Bachelard here, dig what he says regarding temporal consolidation: "the posing of a form and material intercalation are the two inevitable moments of all coherent or rather cohered activity, of all activity that is not purely and simply made of accidents. Only this kind of cohered activity can be renewed and can constitute a precise temporal reality" (Dialectic of Duration, p. 96, my bold). Well, you see what my initial question attempts to renew. I don't regard this matter as settled. So the question of what sort of activity can be renewed persists in the question of the harmonic evanescence of intensities. Are gaps in intensity felt? Coherently? Does meontic renewal have anything whatsoever to do with forms? (Are feelings and forms opposed, or do they perforce work in tandem, coherently?) What can we say about the temporal reality of harmony? Is harmony an activity, and, if so, is it an activity in the way thought is an activity?
Bachelard revisits an idea presented by a certain Georges Urbain that melodic sequence is completely dependent on harmonic sequence, that even in monody there is no note that is not accompanied if only in the aural imagination (p. 130). Well, maybe this is both completely true and completely false. We need to ask what it means to accompany, and what it means to renew a harmony. We have really just begun to test the possibilities of harmony, and we might be well served to wait a few millennia before reaching any conclusions. The fact that harmony is comping—we don't deny it—in no way dims the insight that harmonies may be arpeggiated or even melodized, that is, we needn't forget that the synchronic/diachronic is a two-way street. The synchronic intensifications sounded within a harmonic irreality do not at once cease being melodic for having been brought under a coherence, if such they are. Perhaps Bachelard is not in disagreement? He says that "a homogenous process cannot ever change. Only plurality can have duration, can change, and can become. The becoming of a plurality is as polymorphous as, despite all simplifications, that of a melody is polyphonous. The duration of sound is dialectical in every direction, on the axis of melody as on that of harmony, in intensity as in timbre" (ibidem, my bold). Is a harmony merely a felt coherence, or the form of a coherent activity, or are gaps in intensity also felt, providing a silent accompaniment to every harmony? Is the intensity of tone dialectical in every direction? Again, we wouldn't want to make too much of a fuss about meontic renewal. My feeling is that sounds sound in every direction, fade multivalently, intensify polymodally. Given the plurality of modes of the intensely irreal, the meontic gesture oughtn't be reduced to a unidirectional negation, though of course we would need to say something about the irreal and perhaps how it got that way. If the irreality of the harmonic act acquired its irreality from a process of renewal, then neither negation nor affirmation will get to the bottom of harmony, if it indeed is not bottomless, at least so far as we may speak of its meontic renewal.
What's it like to feel a harmony exactly at its vestige? We're going to have to return to the gap in intensity and think it through in light of Dylan Trigg's Aesthetics of Decay. For now can we begin to describe an intercession between a gap in intensity and its experience as a gap? What sort of repercussions should we be listening for? Is the proper analysis of harmony hermeneutics? What would a pure meontics of harmony sound like?
Labels: Bachelard, eternal return, harmony, irreality, plurality, Trigg
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Bradypsyche is one of Bachelard's neologisms, meaning of course a slowness of thinking or of mind. The antonym, I presume, would be tachypsyche. Now that these words have arrived in our language they have become indispensable, for the tempo of our thinking governs its rhythm, and rhythm generates meaning more deeply perhaps than the content of expression—oh, my feet are tangled up in forms and formlessness. If I could drop a question in the midst of thinking—formal thinking, informal thinking, the question must be dropped—I would do so rhythmically, that is, I would dance the question, reel the question completely around forms, without regard to whether such a dance passed through forms or threw them away like yesterday's pop.
I recall that Corradi Fiumara quotes Wittgenstein thusly: "Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly" (in The Other Side of Language, p. 134, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis). She goes on to discuss the uses of style by Wittgenstein in order to regulate the pace of thinking, and to recommend a slowness of thinking.
If you will forgive me a moment of jollity (or unabashed vanity) I'd like to say a word about my own phraseology and, in particular, my use of commas. I have recently grown fond of the Oxford comma, though my fondness hasn't quite led me to be consistent in my usage. I like the Oxford comma because it imparts clarity, but chiefly because it allows one to take a breath, and sometimes one wants to take a breath for the sake of getting a thought just right. The precise meaning that should be given to the comma in my blogging is "pause," though you may imagine me saying something like "Please, pause for a moment. Take a small breath if you need to. There's no rush." I'm evolving a commatic style because I imagine that breathing is not intercalated into thinking as something extraneous or accidental, but is thoroughly and essentially raddled with thought. Thought and breathing are intertwined, as they say.
I should pause for a moment to reflect on tachypsyche, because it seems omnipresent in daily intellectual life, as if a fast pace of mind has become more vital to thinking than actual thinking, and, speaking for myself, because it is all too easy to blog off the reel. I don't want to live in a world of monotonous tempo, fast or slow, speeding or slowing. Ideally one should be surprised now and then by the tempo of one's thought. Even a slow thought may surprise, even a thought on the reel. Bradypsyche would mean little if it did not carry this potential to surprise.
The value I have placed on surprise serves to tell us that the encomia of the comma are unfinished until the griot addresses the beginnings of thought, and thereby the question of new beginnings. Allow me. Allow me to set it aside for another day.
Labels: Bachelard, blogging, Corradi Fiumara, rhythm, tempo, Wittgenstein
Sunday, May 04, 2008
The thought occurs to me, and I won't say that it's either pleasant or unpleasant, that in lieu of discussing ideas what I actually do here is play with ideas. Playful discourse, discursive play—and so I begin by playing with the aimless, one of the many destabilizers that will play into this discussion.
In the back of my mind now is Gaston Bachelard's idea that "all rationalism is interrationalism." I favor pluralism and disagree with any equation of pluralism to dialecticism, but I find it difficult to assail the dialectician's position without confirming it, so I will be playing with these ideas instead of assailing them. Mind you, this is all in the back of my mind. I'll waltz with Bachelard's Dialectic of Duration anon. Today I'm going to respond briefly to Agamben's essay "In Playland" (in Infancy and History), which is wonderfully fun to read and in large measure an all around agreeable sort of text.
Agamben gives us the gist of his foray into play: "we can regard ritual and play not as two distinct machines but as a single machine, a single binary system, which is articulated across two categories which cannot be isolated and across whose correlation and difference the very functioning of the system is based" (p. 74, Agamben's emphasis). I might provisionally agree that play can't be isolated, though the provisional nature of the agreement cannot be stressed enough, and yet still question the existence of a single binary system, or more particularly its status as an object of thought or topic of discussion. In what sense would such a system not be a structure? Would a system's inclusion of event warrant making the claim, should our thought be called into question, that the system does not have the properties of a structure? Certainly there are reasons people speak of fluid, dynamic systems, or systematic processes and the like, and one of those reasons may be precisely to avoid confusion with structures. Yet in this case, in the case of the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to whom "In Playland" is dedicated, given all that is claimed of structure, pointing to a system outside of the existence of structure becomes a dubious gesture, even when the gesture appears to be authorized by Lévi-Strauss himself.
Let's examine the problem from a slightly different angle. If one were to speak of an interpolation of some entity or force with structure, just supposing, what qualities would the interpolated necessarily possess? What qualities would have to belong to the context of interpolation? (What qualities would have to belong to a context of an interpellation?) For structure to remain structure in such a context what qualities would it appear to impart? Alternatively, we might simply ask what properties must structure have in order for there to be metamorphosis, for metamorphosis is very much at issue.
Can culture rationally be isolated in the way Agamben intends? Agamben's binary systems are entirely coextensive with cultures in a Boasian sense, and this occasions the question of whether contemporary ethnography would endorse such a view. Provisionally, sure, we can isolate culture. However, we may want to introduce more than a few caveats before jumping to descriptions of the functioning of the cultural system, were that our aim, and we should want know about such caveats before deciding on questions of isolation. I don't doubt that culture can be isolated, for heuristic purposes, for instance, but I shall never tire of questioning how and to what purpose one isolates culture or any other phenomenon for that matter.
If anything can be isolated, and of course we would issue provisos, then we have to keep our minds open to the possibility that play can indeed be isolated with reason. Isn't this what we do for the sake of discussion? And perhaps also we isolate play for the sake of play, though I am not sure what happens to reason in that case. Is there something like a spirit of play that would animate our toys, fill our playgrounds with laughter, guide our most theatrical gestures, even the aimless ones? Does play have something to teach us about rationality? If there is a spirit of play, or a muse, surely she would smile, bemusedly, on an idle engagement with play, jealously guarding against interference from the forces of seriousness. Above all play demands to be played with. In subscribing to the position that the phenomenon suggests how it ought to be approached, I am conscious of making a move I might not want to make if I were coaching myself from the sidelines. Why, one could insist that play must be approached with seriousness, because dialectic demands it, or for some other reason.
Agamben draws the following formula from his reading of Lévi-Strauss' La Pensée Sauvage: "while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events" (p. 73). My translated edition (from 1966, UCP) differs somewhat. The passage at issue would be the end of the chapter titled "The Science of the Concrete," beginning with the discussion of the Fox Indian funeral rites on page 31. On page 32 Lévi-Strauss talks about the disjunctive function of play as opposed to the conjunctive function of ritual and he says, "Like science (though here again on both the theoretical and the practical plane) the game produces events by means of a structure." In either case play, or a certain structured kind of play known as the game, creates events. Structure is transformed, or, having served a purpose, it slips behind the event; it allows the event its lambency. You see the danger of slipping straight into the binaries, though, don't you? Elision, elusion, illusion. Is it really play if this is the way it ends up, as the mirror of ritual, or as a machine part? I rather feel that play must involve an openness, and that means play must allow for play itself, which may not mean conclusively play all by itself, like you could pack it up and take it home with you and that would still be play, but would involve spending some time at play itself.
I want to introduce a few more terms, cautious of the danger of allowing them to form a "permutation group," that is, to be deployed in the service of myth rather than some other kind of thought I might rather prefer. Levi-Strauss' formula for myth, Fx(a):Fy(b) ⋍ Fx:Fa-1(y) ("The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology, p. 228) might serve as a model for how not to play with ideas if one is to play in the spirit of play, or, indeed, the spirit of ideas, or of thought, if we presume to speak of thought. Should we allow the structuralists to distinguish the diachronic from the synchronic, as is their custom, without questioning the commonplace implication that the synchronic is in fact timeless? Isn't timelessness, or achrony, sufficiently less than synchrony in any temporal sense so as to warrant its own concept? Is there room for polychrony at any moment in the thinking of the structuralists? Will the dialecticians allow us to speak of polylectic—why should bees have all the fun?—or will they take their ball and go home at the first hint of the many? For my part I will not assume that theses and antitheses exhaust the things that may be synthesized, which is to say I will not let the thesis be pre-emptorily defined in such a way as to prejudice the synthesis. I don't mean to dwell in a paradox of allowing a synthesis to precede a thesis, but rather I merely wish to avoid too much seriousness for fear of being dreadfully wrong about how to live, or, more immediately, how to enjoy the play of ideas.
When one looks to play for models of how to think (or how to live), among the terrible mistakes one can make is to regard a model as the model. Happily, playgrounds don't have just one kind of equipment which would model play for life. Alongside the teeter-totters are the swing sets, the monkey bars, the slides, the sandboxes, the balance beams, the jungle gyms, the merry-go-rounds and what have you. It is probably a grievous intellectual mistake to believe that a society's toys and games can't be played with. Societies might rather be heating and cooling instead of hot and cold, if those are the terms one insists upon, because it's not for nothing that people play. Does play impart something to structure, even, were we to accept the idea, in transforming structure into event? How do we think around transience?
Agamben cites Fragment 52 of Heraclitus (αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη), which, as he puts it, says that Aion is a child playing dice. Agamben doesn't cite Fragment 70 (perhaps because it's apocryphal) which says that human opinions are children's toys (παίδων ἀθύρματα νενόμικεν εἶναι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα δοξάσματα). The Italian word cianfrusaglie (trinkets, rags, junk) came up in my searches for ἀθύρματα. Although cianfrusaglie resonates with Lévi-Strauss' theme of bricolage, which Agamben takes up, I would be cautious about defending opinion in these terms, whose values we would be playing with, and not at all keen to see too rigid a separation of logos from opinion, which might be implied, and which I might have already leaned towards in my wish to avoid slipping into myth. (It's hard, I know.) Agamben says, speaking of the scraps that fall into the world of the child, "Everything which is old, independent of its sacred origins, is liable to become a toy" (p. 70). The essence of the toy, he tells us, is "the Historical in its pure state" (p. 71, my emphasis). Well, what isn't δοξάσματα? What isn't cianfrusaglie? How can we be sure that Aion (or the Diachronic) or the Historical aren't cianfrusaglie? Would it be horrible to be locked inside a world of cianfrusaglie? Might that be the question of play?
Labels: Agamben, Bachelard, Heraclitus, Lévi-Strauss, play, structuralism