Saturday, June 13, 2009
Dissapointingly, mildly, Daniela Vallega-Neu's The Bodily Dimension in Thinking makes no reference to Erwin Straus' work on the upright posture. I'm reminded of Straus by Dylan's latest post (in a series of excellent posts on the theme of embodiment) which specifically explores a relation between thinking and standing. Some cursory googling on Straus unearthed a real find, a book which will move to the top of my wish list: The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood, by Eva Maria Simms.
Uprightness requires resistance against gravity and the constant work of opposing its pull. Human walking is arrested falling: a carefully balanced play between letting oneself fall forward and arresting the fall through the movement into the next step. It requires the courage to let go of the father's hand or the table's edge and risk hitting the floor. It is truly amazing to watch an infant fall and pick him- or herself up over and over again in order to be upright. And how exciting it must be for a toddler to cruise th[r]ough the living room, initiating movement forward but then be carried along by its velocity! Without motility, the upright posture is hard to maintain. We cannot stand still for hours on end, and every night sleep forces us to give into gravity and recline: "in sleep we no longer oppose gravity; in our weightless dreams, or in our lofty fantasies, experience becomes kaleidoscopic and finally amorphous" (Strauss 1966/1980, 142). The posture of the body determines the quality and range of attention and activity. Letting go of uprightness restructures the experienced world, as every bed-bound hospital patient knows. We become dependent on others, unable to care for ourselves, and we easily fall into reverie and sleep. The horizon of the world closes in around the bed, and the beckoning "action space" is lost in the fog of amorphous and fragmented events. With activity restricted, attention tends to wander and lose its focus: it becomes kaleidoscopic.
(p. 37, Simms' emphasis, my bold)
Do we feel the ebb of momentum as we lie flat on our backs or stand perfectly still? Do we become less playful in these dilated moments, or does another kind of playfulness come to hold sway, something removed from all equipoise?
I find a tranquility in walking, I must admit. Just for kicks I will think about the question while walking, and also while in triangle pose (trikonasana), and compare my thoughts.
Labels: infancy, kaleidoscopes, locomotion, posture, Simms, Straus, Trigg, Vallega-Neu
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
Sunday, October 07, 2007
I want to follow up on one of Nancy's ideas in a sober voice. He says that in the experience of freedom that is thinking as freedom, we know that in every thought there is an other thought, which is the burst of freedom (The Experience of Freedom, p. 59). This reminds me of Tengelyi's discussion of the wild sense, the spontaneously emerging shard of sense that appears as other than belonging to one's life history determined according to a retroactive fixation of sense. Dylan, who has begun reading Tengelyi's The Wild Sense, notes a difficulty in the distinction Tengelyi has drawn between singularity and self-identity. Nancy, of course, has had a few words to say about singularity, but so far his thinking is a little opaque to me. It's fair to say that his thinking about singularity is existential. Ex-istence, he says, "signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is 'itself'" (p. 14, Nancy's emphasis). If we put these two ideas together, the argument would seem to be that singularity is given by that which is other in thought, an other that is not thought but that thinks thought itself. (This strikes me as a thinkerly way of approaching existential singularity) Nancy speaks of a hither side of difference: "a difference of being in itself, which would not simply convert being into difference and difference into being (since precisely this type of conversion between pure substances would become impossible), but which would be the difference of its existence, and in this existence, inasmuch as it is its own essence, the difference and division of its singularity" (ibidem). Nancy's singularity is tied to essence, and even though essence is understood existentially, it appears to be a markedly different approach than Tengelyi's. And yet Nancy speaks of the division of the singularity of existence. So far in this work he has not thematized plurality, but the idea seems to be nascent, presaging a dominant theme of Being Singular Plural. This idea of a division or a difference in singularity does not seem far from what Tengelyi means by the positionality of singularity, despite the noticable differences between their two approaches.
In the last decade or so the problem of singularity has been noticed in many corners, but the thoughts around it still appear to be inchoate. The later Nancy (along with Adriana Cavarero) insightfully conjoin the problem of uniqueness with the problem of plurality, and I believe this conjuncture is an implication of Tengelyi's approach as well. Of course Luce Irigaray deserves credit for treating plurality as an ontological problem, though her works are not cited by these other authors. (I mean to take up To Be Two again before too long). The question of finitude seems to be a problem for plurality; can a world consist of as many nows as it takes to make a world? I'm sure I'll be rereading Being Singular Plural again too.
Labels: Cavarero, freedom, Irigaray, Nancy, plurality, Tengelyi, Trigg, uniqueness
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tengelyi, following Marc Richir, speaks of vibrations of sense exhibiting a constant surplus of meaning, a boundless multitude that can be referred to as apeiron (The Wild Sense, pp. 80-81). Presumably then Tengelyi would translate apeiron as "infinite." However, he says that the most significant characteristic of newly emerging shards of sense is their undecidedness (p. 85). What sort of temporality does the indefiniteness of sense in the making imply? Tengelyi reviews Husserl's idea of the primal impression as presented in the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, and as interpreted by Emanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. (See Dylan Trigg's post here for a quick visualization of Husserl's analysis). Tengelyi is concerned with the primal impression's strangeness to consciousness, and its quality of initiality. In his interpretation of Husserl's analysis of temporality the quality of initiality is evident in the primal impression's disruption of "the order of time organized by intentionalities" (p. 59).
The time of the reality which becomes available as a destinal event gets unfolded along the lines of the conflict between. . . the retrospective and the progessive temporalization. Consequently, this reality appears as present which has never been future, since only after this reality has commenced and has thwarted the previous expectations do the expectations start to take any shape at all–those expectations which are able to harmonize with it.
(p. 84, Tengelyi's emphases)
In a similar vein, he argues that if time is determined by intertwinement of the exigency of the past and the promise of the future, Marc Richir's chiasmus of retention and protention, then a third thread must be added: the belief that reality may at any time rip up the texture of intentional time, creating a space for a present that has never been future because it conforms to neither exigency nor promise, but precisely thwarts. This belief is an "empty horizon" that, when a destinal event takes place, "will be rich in premonitions which can be grasped in their reminiscences" (p. 88).
So what does Tengelyi mean by "destinal event"? He also describes this as a radical turn in life history. I wonder if "critical event" wouldn't capture his meaning, but he means to understand the destinal event in terms of a process of sense formation and its temporality. The "radical turn" or "destinal event" in life history "designates a sense formation which starts by itself, takes place without any control, as if it happened "underground," creating, simultaneously, a new beginning in life-history" (p. 81, my lack of emphasis). Sense formation creates a new beginning in life history by shaking or shattering "the dominant sense fixations which carry our self-identity, thereby giving rise to a split in the self, while, simultaneously, it makes a new sense available, which in turn will make it possible to anchor self-identity anew" (p. 82, Tengelyi's emphases). Not every event of sense is capable of shattering a dominant sense fixation. To become a destinal event a new sense must cross a certain threshold of difference (p. 88). It must be not merely strange, but really strange.
I had begun to think, clumsily, that possibility was contained in practice. Another way of approaching the problem is to say that possibility is contained within the real, or, perhaps, that the real exceeds its possibility. Following Levinas, we can ask whether a reality that precedes every protention (a present that was never future) also precedes its possibility. Reality here is meant in a special sense. We might call it the strangely real.
The "real" (le réel): it is by no means accidental that this word is put between quotation marks. The "real" is not talked about in the sense of an ordinary realism. Primal impression proves to be "primal source," "primal generation," or "primal creation" insofar as it gains significance and prevails in opposition to the "spontaneity" of the intentionality of consciousness constituting time. This "in opposition" does not only express a kind of contrast but a belonging together as well. What is real for us is real in consciousness. Husserl is right: the idea of a reality independent of consciousness is the product of a mere abstraction, or even of our forgetting about ourselves. Yet he is still not right: consciousness reveals a reality which prevails in opposition to the interplay of the intentions of consciousness, thwarting all expectations, countering all designs, "preceding and surprising the possible"; in consciousness–to put it in another way–such a reality gets organized whcih declares its independence from consciousness in this very consciousness itself.
(p. 72, Tengelyi's emphases)
When Tengelyi speaks of the initiality and the undecideness of the really strange sense (my words) being submerged, buried or pushed aside, I can't help but think of the traumatic experience and the psychological strategies for coping with trauma. Tengelyi means, however, to emphasize the other side, as it were, of the newly emerged sense, the side that is met with initiative, undertaking and adventure. The to be open to the really strange in experience is to be ready for adventure, to be open to allowing one's fixations of sense to be shattered. Why not go the distance and claim that reality is strange, staking out an extraordinary realism of the undecided?
Husserl says that "where there is a new experience a new science must arise." Perhaps the really strange–I hesitate to say the impossibly strange–rather calls for a poetics; however, the estrangement of the real from the subject of sense formation suggests yet another approach may be necessary. We'll see whether Tengelyi's diacritical method of phenomenology sheds any light on the strangely real when we tackle his thinking on the experience of alterity.
Labels: Anaximander, Henry, Husserl, Levinas, phenomenology, Richir, strangeness, temporality, Tengelyi, Trigg
Monday, June 11, 2007
How can we experience nothingness? Or, better, perhaps, in what way is nothingness available to experience? Marion says that profound boredom is a way to experience nothingness. Trigg points to silence as a way nothingness can be experienced. Both Marion and Trigg, each in their own way, are reacting to Heidegger. Barbaras' discussion of nothingness confronts Husserl directly, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Patoĉka, Granel, and Bergson (informed by Deleuze). Now, Barbaras says that "to desire is to focus on reality as absent, and it is therefore to refer to nonbeing as such" (Desire and Distance, p. 55); yet it is not altogether clear to me that Barbaras is saying that desire is a way to experience nothingness. He may be saying that nothingness can be felt and thought in ordinary perception, but not directly experienced. Or he may be saying something altogether different. Before I unpack this, I want to look at Barbaras' critique of Husserl.
Barbaras argues that Husserl's idea of the époché is undermined by a principle of sufficient reason, which, following Bergson, he views as a false problem. Asking why something exists rather than nothing, Barbaras says, presupposes "that nothingness can precede something, that being can emerge on the basis of nothingness, which is tantamount . . . to reversing purely and simply the respective ontological status of being and nothingness" (p. 48). This, according to Barbaras, is the root of essentialist thinking, which he regards as non-phenomenological.
The natural attitude is situated on a deeper level that Husserl himself understood it to be; it consists not in the thesis of "unique spatio-temporal reality" so much as in the implicit positing of a positive nothingness that leads one inevitably to conceive of this unique reality as an ensemble of objects. Therefore the époché, whose function is to clarify the status of the thesis of existence characteristic of the natural attitude, to elucidate the true meaning of the being of this unique reality, can consist only in a suspension of this naïve idea, which is to say, the positive thesis of nothingness. Otherwise stated, what makes the thesis of existence problematic is not the thesis of the existence of a world so much as the determination of this world as an object. The naïveté does not reside in one thinking that there is a world there, but rather in admitting that it is governed by a principle of absolute determinability and that it can therefore be attained as it is in itself. It is in the objectivist characterization of the world that the naïve opposition between the in-itself and for-itself, between being and appearance, is rooted. Furthermore, the purpose of the époché is to rejoin the thesis of the world in its purity, precisely as a thesis of existence; it is meant to grasp spontaneously the event of appearance before it is concealed by the appearing, to capture the the pure burst of "there is." This is why it must suspend what gives rise tot he degradation of this "there is" in in-self (or in object), namely the thesis of positive nothingness; it does not consist in suspension of thesis of existence but in suspension of what compromises the access to the meaning of this thesis of existence
(pp. 56-57, emphases Barbaras')
The nothingness of sufficient reason, Barbaras argues, "can in no way proceed from an experience" (p. 51). Again, he says that the idea of nothingness "can in no way be based on an experience, because there is always something, the flux of things, because fullness always follows upon fullness" (p. 52). And furthermore, "all experiences are experiences of something; the essence of experience implies the meeting with something real, however simple or indeterminate it may be, so that an experience that could refer to something other than what there is (to nonbeing) would not be an experience (it would unquestionably be something like a thought)" (p. 52). This isn't altogether unqeustionable in my mind. It's possible that thought is a subset of experience, rather than being something completely distinct. (And I note in passing that intentionality is indeed an aspect of Barbaras' phenomenology, though he is talking about experience instead of consciousness).
Citing Bergson, Barbaras breaks the idea of nothingness into two parts: an idea of substitution, and a feeling of desire or regret (p. 52). But, he says, "[n]othingness is in reality a mirage, in triparite sense that it assumes the horizon of perception, represents a reverse image of the real, and is the expression of a desire at the heart of reality that does not lend itself to it. It vanishes therefore when consciousness seeks to approach and thematize it" (p. 53). So far, he seems to be saying that desire refers to nonbeing as such, but that nonbeing cannot be thematized, and cannot be directly experienced. Does this make sense? Barbaras says, further, that "[i]f desire can indeed be reduced immediately to the confrontation between a positive feeling and a full reality, then taking into consideration desire's meaning reveals precisely a mode of negativity within things that does not provide an alternative to their presence" (p. 56). This brings us back to the idea of perception being given in adumbrations.
In Husserl's phenomenology, "givenness by adumbrations is like the arrested image of the very emergence of being against the backdrop of nothingness, the threat to being by nothingness. Adumbrations are located in an extremely rigorous way between being and nothingness" (p. 58, emphasis Barbaras'). Barabaras, however, gives a different reading to givenness by adumbrations. "In reality, the fact the adumbrations are situated between being and nothingness can be interpreted in an entirely different way: the adumbrations would reveal an original mode of being, one more profound than the crude distinction between positive being and negative nothingness, a being-at-a-distance" (p. 58).
So then, I'm unclear. Does desire point to nonbeing as such, an idea that comes from Barbaras' reading of Bergson, of does desire point to being-at-a-distance?
Labels: Barbaras, desire, Marion, nothingness, ontology, phenomenology, Trigg
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
As per Deleuze's advice I'm beginning Difference and Repetition with the conclusion. His exposition of the eternal return (pp. 297 ff.) confounds me because the idea conflicts with some of my basic beliefs, and yet if I examine my beliefs they appear to be contradictory, and perhaps not well suited to the problem of repetition.
In the first place I believe in mortality. Everything that lives also dies, everything that appears also vanishes, everything that goes also stops. I believe this is the way of all things. Everything is finite. I understand that some people don't believe that everything is finite, but as long as a person believes that some things are finite they will be in pretty much the same boat as I am, or at the very least have some way of understanding my predicament. The belief in mortality is hardly exceptional.
I wouldn't necessarily want to believe in eternity; however, my belief in the finality of death entails a notion of eternity. To be dead is to be dead for all time. Preliminarily, there are two ways in which my thinking about eternity diverges from Nietzsche's. Firstly, I don't believe the past is eternal. The Universe and time as we know it has a beginning (about 13.7 billion years ago), and every event that can be verifiably described as an event has taken place within this finite stretch of time since the event of the Universe's inception. Secondly, I am not sure about whether anything like eternity converges in the present moment. The notion of eternity that I must have to have in order to believe in the finality of death is not the kind of thing that can be experienced or that pertains to experience directly. There is no real merger of the present moment into the eternal, but rather a sharp division between two different kinds of temporality: one that is of experience, the other that is purely an abstraction.
Perhaps I jumped to quickly from finality to eternity. When I consider the ultimate fate of the Universe, and ponder that heat death is the most likely hypothesis (be sure to see Dylan Trigg's The Duration of Twilight), it occurs to me that the future too, time as we know it, is finite. What sense does it make then to say that time will cease to exist for all eternity? And yet isn't this exactly what the heat death of the Universe means? It seems as if I want to hold onto a notion of time that exceeds time itself. This can't be completely rational.
Surely there must be a way of thinking mortality that doesn't involve irrational thinking about time. Once I open the door to doubting the eternity of death, however, eternal recurrence, among others, is allowed to slip in. I simply don't know how long death lasts, if it lasts at all. Against these doubts, I could cling to the finitude of existence, relegating infinitude to nonexistence, but I wonder whether this wouldn't represent a failure to think about what I really believe about mortality.
Finally, given my belief in the finitude of all things, I wonder how repetition is possible. Here I am hoping that Deleuze is wrong in suggesting that the conclusions make reading the rest of his book unnecessary (p. xv). I am looking to this book to get some purchase on the possibility of repetition, and also the problem of how to think repetition as such.
Labels: Deleuze, finitude, heat death, mortality, Nietzsche, repetition, Trigg
Monday, January 15, 2007
Trigg's scathing critique of postmodernism (The Aesthetics of Decay, Chapter 7, "The Decline of Postmodernism?") led me to wonder about what kind of text The Aesthetics of Decay really is. It is partly a narrative of intellectual history. Amid the rapid transition from Maximilien Robespierre to the landscape gardener William Chambers (pp. 80-81), the thought occured to me that Trigg's opposition to postmodernism might not be without irony. Trigg says of this narrative:
The preceding account of concepts does not claim to be a genealogical analysis that situates intellectual history in causal terms. Instead, my intention has been to show, by way of historical examples, how rationality has informed modes of artistic and intellectual engagement. My account remains deliberately partial and incomplete: firstly, because intellectual concepts are viewed from a temporal perspective, and secondly, because I have sought to draw an idea rather than a system from these concepts. From the perspective of rationality alone, we see how the process to confront the failure of reason has been a struggle that has often reverted to claims of certainty and permanence.
(pp. 83-84).
This emphasis on the partial account appears to be at least consistent with postmodernism; however, Trigg claims for himself a temporal grounding which he finds unacknowledged in postmodernism.
By subverting the metanarrative and the Enlightenment conception of rationality, postmodernism involves a mode of nostalgia that depends on what was annihilated to affirm itself in the temporal present. Because of this negative identity, postmodernism remains locked in the past despite its attempt to evade temporal determinism. The incompletion of the present is reinforced as postmodernism withdraws from a committed stance into a conceptual impasse.
(p. 74).
Ultimately I am not reading The Aesthetics of Decay as a postmodern text, though it self-consciously does come after the decline of postmodernism. I am seeing in this exposition, the way Trigg sees in the ruin, the possibility of a "critical resistance against the enforcement of spatial rationality" (p. 150). Why does there need to be such a critical resistance if not for the sake of rationality? Is this not an essentially an argument about proportionality, about seeing decay as clearly as we see growth? I'm not really sure about that. (I haven't quite finished with the book though it is deeply engaging.)
Labels: narrative, postmodernism, Trigg
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
If we admit that memory is a structure of consciousness must we also admit that our lives are experienced in the past tense? To what extent? Dylan Trigg says, "Admitting that the real is absent, that our lives can only be experienced in the past tense, and that the foundation of home is disrupted by the opposing fluctuation between the desire of the present and the perishing of the past, exile emerges as the grounding mode of consciousness" (The Aesthetics of Decay, p. 40, emphasis mine). By way of clarification, he has earlier said that "[b]ecause concsciousness operates between opposing modes of memory and temporal divisions, it finds itself in an impasse whereby it is only able to fully experience itself through the act of recollection" (p. 36).
I don't agree with this, but it's not terribly easy to justify my disbelief. I don't want to adopt the position that the fullest experiences are those that take place without any intervention of memory, nor would I want to deny the fullness of the experience of an act of recollection. I might say that experience gets its fullness from its being enacted, but I'm not sure that experience that is passively undergone isn't also full, and besides, I don't really want to duck the issue of memory. Can there be a grounding mode of consciousness that doesn't involve memory? I wouldn't suspect that were likely. Can I take the view that there is no grounding mode of consciousness without defaulting to some preconcieved notion of what consciousness is actually like? This is a constant challenge for me. I don't really have any answers.
NB. Be sure to check out Dylan's blog. He's already responded to my previous posts about his book, and his posts are generally illuminating, elegant and lucid.
Labels: consciousness, experience, memory, Trigg
Monday, January 08, 2007
Here's a dilemma. Trigg says "the dynamic stasis that conceived silence presupposed the act of remembrance bewteen what is now and what was then" (The Aesthetics of Decay, p. 21). He later says, "the disruption of memory derives from the imprint of silence upon consciousness, already determined by violence" (p. 28). A bit of clarification will help to dissolve the apparent contradiction, but it will come with the danger of exposing a deeper dilemma.
By "disruption of memory" Trigg means the disruption of "historic consciousness" by what Proust calls the "involuntary memory." He also speaks, following Bergson, of the disruption of the equilibrium between "habit memory" and "spontanenous recollection," a disruption of "everyday consciousness" that the spontaneous recollection engenders (pp. 22-23). At this point we could say that the act of rememberance presupposed by the dynamic stasis that conceived silence is a matter of habit memory, but I'm not sure it's that easy.
Trigg says, "The experience of consciousness is founded in [the] act of selective rememberance. In experiencing my context, I do so with orientation to the memories that have preceded me" (p. 22). If experience is esemplastically "my experience," it is so because of memory. And yet, Trigg writes that in his analyis of "memory as haunted," the unity of historic consciousness is no longer certain. "In its place, an awareness of the fragmented, incomplete and ruined structure of consciousness materializes" (p. 29). Again, we could say that habit memory renders experience esemplastic while spontaneous recollection leads to fragmentation. However, Trigg does not explicitly make this equation, and even if he did, there is the question of why these two types of memory should represent gradients of a single faculty. So finally, how is it possible that my experience could be uncanny, and yet how could it be otherwise? How do we allow for silences?
Labels: Bergson, experience, habit, memory, Trigg, Unheimlichkeit
Sunday, January 07, 2007
How can nothingness be described phenomenologically? For Heidegger, nothingness is revealed by anxiety. For Marion, taking a cue from Heidegger, nothingness is revealed by profound boredom. We can inquire into these existential moods, but it is unclear (to me at least) whether we can see nothingness phenomenologically by way of such an existential detour. Dylan Trigg (The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason), on the other hand, proposes that nothingness is revealed in the phenomonon of silence which we can directly experience in a way that lends itself to phenomenological description. In his words, "The presensce of silence, when sufficiently forceful to recall its origin, is, I will seek to prove, the interceding agent between pure experience and pure nothingness" (p. 12).
How is Trigg imagining silence? "For silence to be rendered visible," he writes (p. 13), "it must rely upon a dynamic stasis between violence and the deserted space that violence leaves." Is this a more spectacular way of talking about attack and decay? I reckon Trigg is describing a second order of dynamics, but I point to attack and decay because I wonder if Trigg's description isn't consistent with the way we experience auditory phenomena–albeit silence is something we usually think of hearing rather than seeing.
Trigg's emphasis on "the ontological value of aesthetics" (p. 19) reminds me of Lyotard (I have in mind the essays collected in The Inhuman, and also the essay "Anima Minima" in Postmodern Fables). The turn towards aesthetics appeals to me because and insofar as it feels concrete, rooted in experience. If that's my yardstick, I should be able to see the value in existential approaches. In fact I do. However, on the question of nothingness, the existential approaches of Heidegger and his followers risk being lost in lifeless abstractions. It's far better I think to explore nothingness concretely as far as possible.
Labels: aesthetics, experience, Heidegger, Lyotard, Marion, phenomenology, silence, Trigg
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Some while ago Dylan Trigg asked whether it is possible to think of musical intervals independently of spatial extensions. The short answer is yes. The long answer is very long indeed, but perhaps not much of an answer. I've been giving a lot of thought to harmonic thinking, how not to do a phenomenology of listening (*cough* Don Ihde *cough*), but I simply cannot fathom what an originary way of listening would be. Morning. An ornithologist hears a robin doing something robins do while a musician hears a bb, or the 13th harmonic of a D, which is not quite equivalent, and cognitively quite a different sort of operation. A bad example perhaps because in my experience robins don't dig anything past the 12th harmonic, whereas many musicians, Giya Kancheli, for instance, evidently do. Digging beyond the 12th harmonic is going outside the received harmonic world of the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system--Okay, so is the 11th, but we can always fudge it and, a la George Russell perhaps, play as if our tonal system were consistent with natural harmonics. Fudging it: that's the name of the game in harmonic systems. The blue sixth (13th harmonic) is well established in several musical traditions, but I don't know of any working musical system that fully comports with the harmonic series. You always have to bend a little somewhere. The fundamental question here for me is whether the kind of musical training that enables one to identify the 13th harmonic brings one closer to the original sonic phenomenon or whether the cultural mediation involved in producing trained musicians shapes the perception of sound to such a degree that the way musicians hear things ought not be understood as primary by any stretch. This is partially moot because I believe most musicians would recognize the ratio represented by the thirteenth harmonic as a blue sixth or blue thirteenth (i.e., thirteenth tone from the tonic) before they would recognize it as a harmonic. And yet....
Enough for now. In addition to robins, I've been listening to a lot of music, going through a new batch of cd's. In the Heart of the Moon by Touré and Diabaté is as good as it gets. I have listened to a bit of kora music, live and recorded. This recording is the best I've ever heard that instrument sound, as if your head were right there in the calabash. Both musicians use harmonics to great effect, and the recording seemingly captures it all. Wow.
The first time I really listened to pianist Hank Jones was on the album Sarala which featured a kora player by the name of Djely-Moussa Condé. There's some really fine music on that album, and the whole session is exemplary of what afrojazz fusion ought to be about. A couple of years of ago I bought a Hank Jones cd and was disappointed by the shabbiness of the recording and, frankly, the listlessness of Jones' playing. It was definitely not a date worth putting on record. But one bad session was not enough to sour me on Jones. I recently picked up Joyous Encounter from Joe Lovano featuring Hank Jones on the piano. I've long been a fan of Lovano's beefy tenor sound, so the only risk I saw here was that they would be playing standards and maybe not giving it their all. As it turns out, it's solid. There's plenty of energy on these cuts, and loveliness too.
I've been in awe of Gonzalo Rubalcaba since hearing him live, oh, about ten years ago. Now this is a cat that dwells in the upper harmonic realms. I've bought quite a few of his recordings, but I haven't appreciated them all equally. The ones I like most are like Diz, because Rubalcaba can be very moody, but he also really does have exquisite time, so I prefer to hear him being moody at a furious pace. Paseo finds him with Ignacio Berroa on drums. Man, this is good stuff.
Unless you're a hardcore monkophile or jazz historian you may not have heard of Elmo Hope. A long time ago I picked up Harold Land's The Fox because it featured Hope on piano, and they played several of his compositions. It was a little disappointing. (I've never quite dug that whole Westcoast scene.) However, recently I snagged a Bluenote reissue (limited edition connoisseur cd series) called Elmo Hope: Trio and Quintet. Oh, this is it. If you dig Herbie Nichols, Bud Powell and Monk, you have to listen to this.
Labels: Dizzy Gillespie, Djely-Moussa Condé, Elmo Hope, George Russel, Hank Jones, Idhe, Ignacio Berroa, Joe Lovano, Kancheli, kora, piano, Rubalcaba, solitude, tenor saxophone, Toumani Diabaté, Trigg