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.
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?
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.
"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?
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?
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.
Jacques Rancière says, "Understanding must be understood in its true sense: not the derisive power to unveil things, but the power of translation that makes one speaker confront another" (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. pp. 63-64). If I ask for an end to confrontation–I may not ask alone; to name one name I may have Corradi Fiumara to hold my hand–will you accept that as my translation of Ranciere's idea? Is there a nonconfrontational way of facing one another, or a completely nonconfrontational addressivity? A lapidary addressivity? A simple bringing into contact? (In any event, Rancière himself thinks somewhat along these lines, proposing an alternative to the metaphorical equation of reason with combat.)
And what of my translation of translation? Is there at work in translation a power that asks? A power that asks one speaker to listen to another? Give up power, I hear?
I have a will to translate salto mortale. What would it say to delay leaping into it?
Have I ever denied your acrobatic powers?
Let me catch you with my arms of nonaggregation:
One can say, if one likes, that truth brings together. But what brings people together, what unites them, is nonaggregation. Let's rid ourselves of the representation of the social cement that hardened the thinking minds of the postrevolutionary age. People are united because they are people, that is to say, distant beings. Language doesn't unite them. On the contrary, it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate—but also puts them in a community of intelligence. Man is a being that knows very well when someone speaking doesn't know what he is talking about.
(p. 58)
Do I understand irony correctly?
What a happy troupe we are, we who are distant.
It is because we are distant that we identify with the funambulist. But we empathize as well as identify. We hold our breath. We gasp. Would we empathize if we were up there on the same rope trying to hold our balance? That is, must we find a moment for empathy, or are empathies immediate? Are empathies immediately distant?
Don't credit me with too much irony, by the way. Please.
Words are doors to the soul. Have I ever been through those doors? Imagine a door marked Gregarious.
Words about the poetic virtue:
The impossibility of our saying the truth, even when we feel it, makes us speak as poets, makes us tell the story of our mind's adventures and verify that they are understood by other adventurers, makes us communicate our feelings and see them shared by other feeling beings. Improvisation is the exercize by which the human being knows himself and is confirmed in his nature as a a reasonable man, that is to say, as an animal "who makes words, figures, and comparisons, to the story of what he thinks to those like him." The virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing. "Knowing is nothing, doing is everything." But this doing is fundamentally an act of communication. And, for that, "speaking is the best proof of the capacity to do whatever it is." In the act of speaking, man doesn't transmit his knowledge, he makes poetry; he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates ans an artisan: as a person who handles words like tools. Man communicates with man through the works of his hands just as through the words of his speech: "When man acts on matter, the body's adventures become the story of the mind's adventures." And the artisan's emancipation is first the regaining of that story, the consciousness that one's material activity is of the nature of discourse. He communicates as a poet: as a being who believes his thought communicable, his emotions sharable. That is why speech and the conception of all works as discourse are, according to universal teaching's logic, a prerequisite to any learning. The artisan must speak about his works in order to be emancipated; the student must speak about the art he wants to learn. "Speaking about human works is the way to know human art."
(pp. 64-65)
I hold open a door to your adventures. Can I hope for more than vicariousness? I wouldn't risk standing in your way, or tripping us both up, for the sake of a merely vicarious adventure. What are the true poetries of shared feelings? Rancière points down the "long path of the dissimilar" (p. 67)? The poetry is not the dissimilar but the path.
What do we know through the poet? Whom do we know? A person not content to feel, but who must impart feelings.
Instead of translation and counter-translation I will speak of panecastic translation, a translation in which each party brings something to the work of translation. Panecastic translation is a dialogic breach, a working of the gap between feelings and expressions. Panecastic translation assumes that each and every utterance is translatable. It may then resemble a form of piracy.
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.
Corradi Fiumara imagines that listening might be silly, and, borrowing a metaphor from Wittgenstein, affirms philosophical silliness in the fertile valleys as opposed to the barren heights of cleverness (The Other Side of Listening, p. 194). She links silliness to the idea of a secret philosophy (like a "secret article"), which she surmises must be what Kant had in mind when he said, "And since the class of philosophers is by nature incapable to forming seditious factions or clubs, they cannot incur suspicion of disseminating propaganda" (Political Writings, p. 115, in The Other Side, p. 195). That is, it's an open secret, so if we were to criticize a philosophy of secrets we would have to bear that in mind. As for silliness, I gather Corradi Fiumara takes this to be a strength of philosophers though it can only have a "secret" relation to power.
There are crocodiles in the green valleys of silliness. Corradi Fiumara is aware of the crocodiles. She holds that an honest appraisal of our phylogenetic history is necessary if we are to avoid becoming victims of our reptilian brains. Paradoxically, she says, the disavowal of the reptilian brain in rational discourses allows for its predations (p. 186). I'm not so optimistic about our ability to evolve to a deeper valley of silliness and thereby avoid being devoured by crocodiles. Cliquishness is a powerful force in human relations for reasons that may have little to do with the reptilian brain, so even if you tread carefully there is always a danger of being thrown to the crocodiles by your fellow primates. Despite my reservations, I have enjoyed reading Corradi Fiumara's critical reflections on intellectual discourse and I admire her willingness to embrace listening even if that means appearing to be silly.
Corradi Fiumara writes, "As a result of an attention restricted to symbolic levels of discourse one can let listening to a 'concrete' language slide away an thus risk losing the chance for an authentic dialogic confrontation" (The Other Side of Language, p. 178). On the theme of confrontation, she is echoing Canetti and also Buber. What she means by "concrete" is a little difficult to pin down. She seems to be talking about an emotional relation to language, but she offers the following definition of concrete expression: that it's "intent upon eliminating inner events which can not be contained" (p. 169). Further:
Concrete language might be characterized as an 'acting out' intended to alleviate inner tensions which can no longer be handled in a purely symbolic form. The negation of reality and the projection into the interlocutor of aspects of one's own ratiocination predominate in this type of 'language' in which, evidently, the tendency to transform discourse into an emotional discharge tends to prevail.
(p. 170, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis)
That's a funny a way of talking about emotions, though Corradi Fiumara apparently means to describe a more specific psychological process. However I want to talk about emotions more broadly, and for that reason I would object to putting "language" in quotes. Language is emotional as well as symbolic and false, and frequently all of these things at once. Dialogue is risky, but it doesn't merely risk thought; it risks the whole person. That I think is at least implied in what Corradi Fiumara is saying here (elsewhere she is more explicit). Inasmuch as language is its medium, dialogue also puts at risk whole communities.
Dialogue considered as a means to truth, whether conceptual or emotional, would be anything but ideal. The ideal dialogue is pure phatic communion, or, rather, a phatic adventure. Such truths as are found in dialogue are aleatory, perhaps transitory. The endurance of concepts is paltry compared to the spirit of phatic adventure.
Corradi Fiumara's maieutics of listening seeks to enhance the creation of language and the growth of the whole person, freeing "humans in the making" from the constraints of using and imitating the languages that have dominant positions in the marketplace of ideas (The Other Side of Language, p. 167). She reminds us that Socrates tells Theatetus that midwives are prouder of their skill in forming unions than they are of their skill in cutting umbilical cords, and he distinguishes proper matchmaking from pandering. Corradi Fiumara skirts around the issue of whether childbirth is actually less painful than philosophical dialogue, as Socrates says. I raise it because I want to question the real consequences of bringing thinkers or concepts together.
The decision to go to war in Iraq was a bad idea with horrible consequences. From its inception to the vote to authorize the use of military force, public institutions of dialogue failed to properly evaluate the idea of going to war against Iraq. Voices of dissent were not properly heard. That is to say, I don't believe the subsitition of good ideas for bad ideas can enduringly protect a polity from making poor decisions. A culture of genuine dialogue provides a defense against making horrible decisions, but, paradoxically, it requires and even encourages the airing of horrible ideas; it requires, among other things, that we have public spaces set aside for the free play of ideas. Although I'd like to remain open to other views, I am taking a position against the proposition that the play of ideas is a waste of time.
Ideas can have horrible consequences without having the force of law behind them. However, it would be detrimental to the culture of dialogue to judge the consequences of a thought before it has been heard, or even before it has been thought. Perhaps we sometimes fear the consquences of ideas instead of directly facing our fear of horrible violence, subverting, along the way, any desire for a peaceful coexistence. If we examine our fears of violence, we may discover that fear is but one of our emotions, and desires are not without contradictions. Learning about our emotions, and assessing the entire range of consequences of thinking, requires that thoughts be heard.
I won't flatter myself that I'm anything like a good Socratic midwife, or that I'm not susceptible to making use of and imitating intellectual discourses that happen to be ready to hand. It would be desirable, though, to free myself for becoming. To that I end I am taking Corradi Fiumara's message to heart.
Corradi Fiumara insists that we should want to be able to find time for listening. We should not merely listen to others, but to our own inner voice. Exploring this idea, Corradi Fiumara says some interesting things about time. To begin with, she puts forward an idea of biological time in order to criticize a concept of time defined by a rationality that does not know how to listen.
With the technology of informatics and the achievement of 'real time', which constitutes precisely the annulment of the time spent in waiting, we move ever further away biological time, undeniably contained within the limits of birth and death and scanned by such rhythms as sleeping and waking, diastole and systole. Structured by a sequence of rhythms that are in evidence as early as in pre-natal life, biological time is conspicuously different from the concept of time created by western rationality: a time, that is, which has lost all rhythmical flow and only speeds up in a planar, uniform and unhalting way. It is a notion of time that can be integrated more easily with a technology of treatment than with the prevention of pathological states; two different views of time, linked to horizons that seem to diverge ever more and that render one another both alien and alienated.
(The Other Side of Language, p. 134)
Corradi Fiumara considers Heidegger's idea that time, as the basis of the possibility of selfhood, enables the mind to be what it is (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 196-197). She comments as follows:
An number of queries thus emerge: first and foremost whether selfhood represents an indisputable fact or a simple possibility of realization. And if it is really the function of time to make the mind what it is how can we know whether time fulfils its role and whether the mind exists as such; we must ask, therefore, if time is 'alive', if it works. Time, which can not be seen, touched or controlled by following it as we choose, is nevertheless capable of paralysing humans with boredom or disintegrating them with haste. If we actually believe that time 'enables the mind to be what it is', it is only fair to ask ourselves how we can have experience of it. And it, in our haste, our boredom, or other forms of deterioration, time fails us, the mind might cease to be what it is. And what might a mind be when it is no longer what it is?
(pp. 140-141)
It occurs to me as I write that I have an inner voice that holds me back and never urges me forward. It is the voice of an editor. Obviously I can tune it out. It can become boring, and if it sounds boring maybe that's because it's bored. Dreadfully bored. Other times it's much too hasty, to quick to edit. Well, I can't be sure. Is it me or my inner voice that's too hasty? Probably both. There's a reciprocity even in our deterioration, our getting down, which may or may not be getting down for real. Do I long to have an inner voice that wouldn't be mine? Would such an other voice be a disintegration, or a deeper integration? If I say I am mindless, it is only in the sense of not having a mind. My mindspace is shared with another voice. I mind it, and I don't mind it. I mind it, though I feel minding it doesn't completely block our getting down. But Corradi Fiumara has a point. If I'm going to get down with my inner voice, the last thing I want to be is arhythmical.
Most important of all is talking to unknown people. But it has to be done in such a way that they do the talking, and the only thing one does oneself is to get them to talk. When that is no longer possible for a man, then death has begun.
(The Human Province, p.243, in The Other Side of Language, p. 122)
I wonder if Canetti actually wrote "human being" (Mensch) instead of "man." Corradi Fiumara reads this passage and says that, conversely, "until we become capable of getting something unknown to talk to us we have not yet begun to live and interact" (ibidem). I recall that she also says there is "a whole world yet to be discovered, not of unsolved issues, but of relationships amongs things we know, of ways in which they might fit together" (p. 17). I'd like to see if these two statements can be reconciled, but I will focus on the person, and specifically, the unknown person.
Strictly speaking I doubt whether any person, over the course of a lifetime, can remain completely unknown. What we find in the unknown person is our own ignorance. On the other hand no person is completely known, at least not by us.
How should we behave towards a person who would rather remain incognito, a person who would rather not talk to us? Is disconnection also a connection we can discover? Is it important to attend to expressions of disconnection?
An obvious connection exists between disconnection and death. The connection between disconnection and life may be less obvious. There is also a relationship between forgetting and death. Remembering the forgotten person connects us to life, our own life which we find to be a coexistence. The dream of an absolute coexistence, however, may also be forgetful. The unknown person's freedom to disconnect reminds us, if we are prepared to listen, of our own freedom. Do we want to be able to speak of a freedom to be forgotten?
Freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself and of its decisions, evolving freely and in perfect independence from every obstacle. What would such an independence mean, if not the impossibility in principle of entering into the slightest relation–and therefore of exercising the slightest freedom? The linking or interlacing of relations doubteless does not precede freedom, but is contemporaneous and coextensive with it, in the same way that being-in-common is contemporaneous with singular existence and coextensive with its own spatiality. The singular being is in relation, or according to relation, to the same extent that its singularity can consist (and in a sense always consists) in exempting itself or in cutting itself off from every relation. Singularity consists in the "just once, this time" [une seule fois, celle-ci], whose mere enunciation–similar to the infant's cry at birth, and it is necessarily each time a question of birth–establishes a relation at the same time that it infinitely hollows out the time and space that are supposed to be "common" around the point of enunciation. At this point, it is each time freedom that is singularly born. (And it is birth that frees.)
(The Experience of Freedom, p. 66, Nancy's emphases)
I feel many people, many intellects, deserve to be better known. More widely known, but also better known. I'm sure the latter is a common sentiment among those who blog about intellectuals. I might say better not forgotten. Gemma Corradi Fiumara is a case in point, and I intend to blog about her more recent books as time permits. Do we better know an intellect by seeing her relation to other intellects, or can that also be a form of forgetting? Getting to know somebody may be a process that involves relating to others and also maintaining distances. If we restrict relating one intellect to another to a function of an introductory phase of getting to know an intellect, are we then left with the proposition that the perfect or mature knowledge of an intellect is distant? More healthy, I think, would be to see discoveries of relations as recurring moments (or "each times") of a long process of getting to know somebody. (Nancy would place continuity under suspicion, I would interrogate discontinuity further.)
Does remembering cover all the bases here, or is there an opening for the new? Do we ever need to be reminded that people are new to us?
As I've been reading The Other Side of Language I've been thinking that I should cultivate a habit of silence. I admire bloggers who maintain silences. Not the long silence of the abandoned blog, but the regular thoughtful silence between posts. I could alter my reading habits, read whole books before commenting instead of doling out commentaries chapter by chapter on several books at once. I could simply say less.
Corradi Fiumara says a number of things that cut close to the bone. She says, "When 'exploration' of inner life is undertaken without silence it is deformed into an involuntary parody of the 'life of the mind'" (p. 105). She says that the "continuous involvement with language might be considered an automatic, repetitive defense against the separation anxiety that silence can represent" (pp. 102-103). She talks about ways of avoiding genuine reciprocity, and says that among these are a saturation of the space of reciprocity with messages and "as a subsidiary avoidance measure, one can fling oneself into extremely rapid passages and ephemeral connections between the various thoughts as they emerge" (p. 103). That sounds like a description of mania, which is undesirable. And yet I must confess to a certain abiding love of the rapid passage and the ephemeral connection. It's a dilemma.
Corradi Fiumara tackles boredom as a problem of benumbment in a culture of superabundant messages (The Other Side of Language, Chapter 6). "If we are not sufficiently open to listen to what might be called enigmatic and deep, nothing is left us but the boredom of remaining in the same theoretical frame; and the desire for a mutation, or disruption of structures, might even induce the 'conviction' that the latest trend will surely resolve our state of cognitive boredom" (p. 85). I notice her hesitancy to say "deep" outright (elsewhere she puts "depth" in quotes), but I think we're going to have to recognize a depth if we're going to accept the solution she offers to boredom. Her argument is that the passion for benumbent, if we can call it a passion, gravitates towards the indifferent and the indistinct, circling a kind of epistemic torpor that pulls in difference, choice and distinction (p. 84), and she suggests that the "continuous, irreducible desire for novelty might represent nothing more than an inadequate surrogate for our limited capacity for cognitive renewal" (p. 85). There's something of a paradox in this formulation of the problem, for if listening is the auditorium in which difference can be heard, it is also an aspect of genuine dialogue that accepts and sustains uncertainties (p. 91). We would have to tease apart the problem of indifference from the problem of uncertainty, perhaps allowing for an enigma of uncertainty.
The rationality we've inhereted sees any manifestation of benumbent as banal and artificial, having lost the means to confront it. "Perhaps," Corradi Fiumara muses, "the rationality of our culture is unable to recognize a passion for epistemic obscurity and torpor" (p. 86). If benumbment must be heard to be believed, what is it saying? Benumbent is "closely linked to a realtion of desire for, and fear of, annihilation" (p. 89). Instead of forms of life we might be speaking of forms of living death, of a curriculum morbi instead of a curriculum vitae (p. 84). A propensity to engage in dialogue does risk a kind of "cognitive death," the loss of a favorite thought of a style of thinking, but it neither seeks nor avoids annihilation; it simply risks it (p. 89). Does that speak to an indifference towards cognitive annihilation? It's a bit of an enigma.
Perhaps we can legitimately suspect that our linguistic games do not only represent intellectual pastimes or childish playthings but that they constitute, more than anything else, a way of keeping our 'minds' occupied and, possibly, of not seeing. Linguistic games might respond to an irresistible, paradoxical, need to close one's 'mind', to avoid unsolved problems and obscure forecasts and to hide, if possible, in an innocuous cultural torpor. We devote ourselves with inexplicable tenacity to learning ever more complex games, even though we are defenceless against the most serious forms of threat and absurdity.
A theme of surprise has surfaced in my recent readings. Nancy talks of the surprise of freedom, Tengelyi of the surprise of new sense, and now Corradi Fiumara speaks of the emergence of something with an "almost unhoped-for spontaneity" when we properly listen to the philosophical tradition (The Other Side of Language, p. 76). I think that something is meaning. All three authors discuss meaning in some way, but whereas Nancy and Tengelyi thematize experience as the opening onto meaning, Corradi Fiumara's discussion of experience (pp. 120-123) connects the surprise of the experienced event to an attitude of not listening, rather than aligning listening directly with the unexpected. In Corradi Fiumara's existential hermeneutics the "almost" is key.
Something "speaks," in Corradi Fiumara's opinion, if it is listened for, rather than their being something said that one would subsequently listen to (p. 72). Does her thinking take us beyond the hermeneutic circle? It's not an easy question. She speaks of a "connubial listening propensity" (p. 75) and a "propensity for conjunctions, possibly similar to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling by something'" (p. 78). I feel that "dwelling by something" is not the best guide for the problem of coexistence Corradi Fiumara's work poses. The idea of the connubial, if wed to an idea of the experience of listening as that which surprises, might offer an alternative to a paradigm of meaning according to which an interpreter constructs meaning out of an engagement that requires a prior understanding of the whole of the engaged. That is, while Corradi Fiumara takes notice of coexistence, and will thematize dialogue, I'm not sure she fully appreciates plurality as it relates to meanings. Perhaps she almost does. Perhaps she will surprise me.
Corradi Fiumara sides with pensiero debole ("weak thought") without acknowledging its weakness. She says that "the qualities of attention, tenacity, patience, respect, resilience, rigour and farsightedness that contribute to the development of 'weak' thinking constitute a way of relating that is based upon strength" (The Other Side of Language, p. 71). The real target of criticism, she contends, is not "strong" thinking but power, and she holds that the body of knowledge associated with power and violence is in fact quite fragile (pp. 68-69). So what would it mean to recover the "strength of the listening word" (p. 64)?
Logomachical culture chains us to dilemmas, enchantments and perversions that we can't cut loose from by means of alternative disourses. It would be utopian, Corradi Fiumara argues, to expect those who wield discursive power to disarm themselves and listen to those who yearn for a different kind of "noetic coexistence"; the best that can be hoped for in the culture of the deaf logos is a political turn-taking (p. 53). And yet she does hold out hope that proper hearing "might perhaps induce an evolutionary transformation in the coexistence of philosophical schools" (p. 54). On the one hand Corradi Fiumara says that the logos is speaking and hearing together, and on the other hand she is not proposing a discursive formation that would supplant other discursive formations. She says quite clearly, "No tradition of listening could be identified that draws upon or belongs within a specific institutionalized community" (p. 67). It's as if she were proposing an accomodation with discourses that didn't fall prey to their enchantements and their violence. She says that a force is released in listening that cannot be converted to a power without disappearing (p. 61).
"A listening atmosphere is not improvised," Corradi Fiumara says. "It is, on the contrary, the product of a strenuous process of conception, growth and devoted attention" (p. 60). When I say "improvisation" I mean a strenuous process of conception, development and devoted attention, but I take her point. She means that we need to cultivate a thinking that can sustain "the innovative concreteness of experience. Some of the myths that sustain culture can only be disenchanted by a way of thinking that may draw upon the source of its own strength, not so much in the form of an introspective isolation as in a solidarity of reciprocities that will allow for authentic listening" (ibidem, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis). She wants us to do away with the myth that the listener is stupid, unable to wield discourse and therefore unworthy of reciprocity. We have an ethical obligation not only to those who say something to us, but to those who listen (pp. 61-62). The figure of the unenchanted listener appears rather heroic in Corradi Fiumara's critique, and yet the unenchanted listener is not a solitary hero. The listener "is not isolated in the sense that he is connected once again to a network of vivid, moving and complex dynamics" (p. 61).
So I am back to the question of Corradi Fiumara's utopianism, such as it is. She doesn't offer an alternative discursive formation, or an ideal intellectual community. She does though hint at an alternative to Western culture, one that doesn't confuse strength and power, and recovers, in listening, "the primal vicissitudes of thinking" (p. 64). Since this is not a question of the introspective individual, how then do we cultivate a common attitude of listening outside of any cultural institution? Do we throw every new thinker back on the primal vicissitudes of thinking without calling therefore for an exclusion of the thinker or the vicissitudinous? Can we have a culture without institutions? I'm not sure that's what Corradi Fiumara is suggesting, but the question arises.
Gemma Corradi Fiumara reminds us that the "auscultation" of written texts has been limited to inhabitants of the Gutenberg Galaxy (The Other Side of Listening, p. 30). Given the number of books published annually, does it make sense any longer to speak of inhabiting the galaxy of books? In my corner of the galaxy there are hundreds of books, and tens of thousands in the nearest institutional library. I'm hard pressed to make it through one book a week, though I may consult many more. Nowadays an avid reader with a high book life number could make a dent in Project Gutenberg, but just a dent.
Can we still then speak of communities of readers? That may be a dishonest way to characterize academic intellectual spheres. Professors, translators, editors (one can hope), publishers, reviewers, librarians, students, bursars, airline attendants, code monkeys, authors: all their specialized, unequally valued skills and more are required to make up a contemporary intellectual community, or a minor bookish form of life. Perhaps the practioners of a particular bookish form of life agree upon a language, as Wittgenstein might say (Philosophische Untersuchungen I, No. 241). Are there more and more reading lists that don't contain within their pages all the language one needs to thrive in a bookish form of life? Do contemporary bookish forms of life accept more and more slippage in their languages? Along with every "These are the books you should read!" comes a "Those are books you should not read!" If I sit down to read The Libidinal Economy it will not be because anybody has recommended it to me but because I intend to enjoy it, which is another point I mean to get at. Can "These are some books you might enjoy" institute an agreement on a form of life sufficiently sophisticated for academic culture?
If listening involves an openness more fundamental than the openness of the question, as Gadamer suggests, then Corradi Fiumara's question of why this has this not been a topic of philosophical discussion acquires a certain probity (pp.28-29, citing Truth and Method, pp. 324-325). (I'll note that the if might excuse her from engaging in a pensiero forte.) Corradi Fiumara's philosophy of listening celebrates anomalies (p. 49). The anomaly of the openness of listening appears as anomaly from within a paradigm of hermeneutics; I'm not sure if she means to abandon the hermeneutic paradigm altogether, or, if so, whether there is a name for the paradigm that thinks listening. It may be consistent with a kind of pensiero debole. Corradi Fiumara notably makes frequent references to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as well as the works of Gianni Vattimo, and Priogine and Stengers. I'm unsure of whether she has a deep commitment to postmodernism; I'll wait to read her more recent books before probing that question further.
Corradi Fiumara draws our attention to the pleasures of auscultation with an argument that reminds of Kuhn's idea that discoveries cannot unequivocably be attributed to particular individuals at particular moments (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 55). She says:
In an open organization of knowledge, even the experiences of pleasure and displeasure might become intsruments of philosophical research as they no longer function as ends in themselves but are amenable to be used as intermediate passages towards a more complex equilibrium. An experience of pleasure may not be confined to the status of an occasion of enjoyment but may be transformed into the announcement or uncovering of unapparent features in the complexity of interactions. Similarly the notion of pain may no longer be relegated to the noncognitive level of frustration but may enhance an awareness of features and factors which cause disturbance. The less pleasure and displeasure are regarded as mere fluctuations of one's inner life the more they can be introduced and used in the enrichment of our philosophical concerns.
(p. 46)
Kuhn and Corradi Fiumara, in their critique of the individual and of the occasion, are operating under a shared ethos of late Twentieth-Century thought. Beyond that, I think Corradi Fiumara has appropriated Kuhn's critique into a metaparadigmatic thinking of her problem (which also speaks to a kind of ethos). There are, nonetheless, elements of a paradigm in her thinking: "complex equilibrium," "complexity of interactions," and elsewhere, a deterritorialization of knowledge (p. 51 and passim). Are these in harmony? That is, if we begin to think a deterritorialized pleasure of auscultation, are we still interested in equilibria, or are we interested in disturbance? Do the pleasures of reading precisely disturb the complex bookish forms of life even as these forms of life celebrate more and more fluid bodies of texts? Is pleasure intrinsically a more unsettling basis of agreement than vocabulary or "the texts themselves"?
I don't want to be an administrator of concepts, so it is always with some sense of relief that I find an attempt to administer a concept has failed. Neither do I want to sink into trepidation. How then should I share with you Corradi Fiumara's concept of listening?
There are two voices to Corradi Fiumara's thinking about listening: resistence to a logocentric cultural system, and "generative listening," a capability of response and questioning that is not dictated by the said, and does not conform to the style of a deaf logos (The Other Side of Language, p. 22). The two voices are a madrigal. An attitude of genuine listening does not discount attitudes stemming from divergent Weltanschuungen; it occupies no space but "in a paradoxical sense creates ever new spaces in the very 'place' in which it is carried out" (p. 19). Modern rationalism, Corradi Fiumara argues, is "sustained by an unknowing frenzy in the sense that it is not limited to the pursuit of new ways of its thinking but also tends to deny that earlier, minor or unsuccessful traditions ever existed. And, in order to avoid the labor of listening–a labour comparable to the germination of any real dialogue–a single tradition is recognized in which everything alien is considered irrelevant: the product of intellectual blindness or of an unwillingness to evolve" (p. 26). I'd like to say that no Italian humanist is alien to me without putting Corradi Fiumara in such neat little boxes. I feel that her philosophy of listening is speaking to me even though I don't concern myself much with stridently rationalist discourses.
An aversion–almost–towards listening to the rich multiplicity of 'reality' seems to be linked with a background of profound fears and to the resulting defensive postures that express themselves in a tendency to reduce knowledge in general to a set of principles from which nothing can escape. A relentless battle is waged as an attempt is made to organize everything in the light, or shadow, or the 'best' principles of knowledge: a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the 'territory' is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality. Listening thus comes to be an essential function in the attempt to indentify and monitor possible predatory aspects of our knowledge, no longer even capable of rememorizing or imagining the Parmenidean function of the 'shepherds of being'.
(p. 21)
It was of course Heidegger who said that the human being is the shephard of being (Letter on Humanism). On reflection, Corradi Fiumara is deeply indebted to Heidegger for her ecological thinking and perhaps her ideas of the spaces opened up by listening. This is not without irony when one considers the many voices that were silenced and the many voices that were sent into exile by Heidegger's National Socialism.
How has it come to pass that I should be able to regard listening as a kind of civil disobedience? Our intellectual culture suffers from a one-sided misapprehension of the logos, an emphasis on the saying to the exclusion of the hearing. So says Gemma Corradi Fiumara (The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, trans. Charles Lambert, Routledge, 1990). She begins, relying on Heidegger, with a rehabilitation of legein, a gathering at the root of logos from which hearing is not excluded but implied. Hers is a "tentative pursuit which keeps us linked with the complexity of humans; an effort to retrieve subordinate, minor dimensions and to explore those areas which provoke indifference or even repugnance in the clear logic of 'normal,' established thinking" (p. 3).
"The wearisome logomachies of our culture testify to a way of reasoning that is not sufficiently interested in 'heeding', and manages to express itself most of all in the deployment of controversies and invectives, often unaware that it is even trying to stir up contrasts" (p. 8). Corradi Fiumara isn't limiting her critique to modern communications. It's an awfully big apple cart she means to upset: "The world-view that encompasses our logico-metaphysical tradition has been 'transformed' at the historical beginning of western rationalism. The characteristics of that transformation can be seen in the propensity to render concepts increasingly abstract, thus leading to the disappearance of the multiplicity of relationships which had previously tied them to particular circumstances, and to their substitution with generalized relationships" (p. 12). I hear in this statement not a repudiation of rationality but a claim to a forgotten rationality. Would such a rationality also include the irrational, that which is repugnant to the clear logic of established thinking? In any case, Corradi Fiumara's rationality is also the rationality of an announcement. She sees the multiplicity of relationships tied to particular circumstances as an integration, and says this is linked to "a general idea of coexistence which is more ecological than logical in that it requires 'belonging' to our logos; it is concerned with domestic issues because there are no more foreign affairs" (p. 16). Is this general idea of coexistence too abstract? I'll be looking to see what particular circumstances she brings to the discussion.
.
At this point a number of contrasts between Corradi Fiumara and Kristeva are evident. Kristeva is analytic while Corradi Fiumara is synthetic. Kristeva sees in langauge, if I'm not mistaken, reenactments of a primal division. Corradi Fiumara sees in language a coming together. Whereas Kristeva sees the foreign as within, and advises us to acknowledge and live with our strangeness, Corradi Fiumara's ecology announces the obsolescence of the foreign. There are reasons to be skeptical of Corradi Fiumara's project. Nevertheless I intend to give her a full hearing. Such a hearing may require disobedience to a divided logos, as difficult to practice as that may be. It may also require silence. "'Rigour' and, conversely, misunderstanding are deeply rooted in the exclusion of listenening, in a trend which brooks no argument, where everyone obeys without too much fuss. These interwoven kinds of 'reasoning' lead us into a vicious circle, as powerful as it is elusive, a circle that can only be evaded with a force of silence that does not arise from astonished dumbfoundedness, but from serious, unyielding attention" (p. 11).
A parting thought: "There is a whole world yet to be discovered, not of unsolved issues but of relationships among things we know, of ways in which they might fit together" (p. 17).