It arrives on time without being punctual. The beat is not a point, but it is like a source, an arrival that was always already home. There is the beat, and there are reverberations, sourced vibrations. Is there an "ultimate matrix"? A raw material of phenomenology? Is it rhythmical? Is it rhythm? Will we allow rhythm to be collapsed into absolute subjectivity?
Says Caputo, "everything in Husserlian constitution turns on a certain anticipatory movement, a gesture of regularizing the flow by means of anticipating its regularities, of sketching out beforehand the patterns to which it conforms, of trying in effect to keep one step ahead of it. The flux is not raw and random but organizes itself into patterns which build up expectations in us about its next move, and this 'building up' of expectations is the key to the 'constitution' of the world. Experience is the momentum of such expectations, their progressive confirmation or disconfirmation, refinement or replacement" (Radical Hermeneutics, p. 37).
The disruption of syncopations (lost beats, a confusion of horizons) teaches us to think on our feet. We don't renew the foot but the step, and intentionality becomes diaphanous in the nonpunctual moment, the moment of rhythm. Something we find at the source of phenomenality, between presence and absence, amidst the hustle of the imagination. We do the hustle. We do intentions. What now is the amplitude of presence, or of absence. An intuition that amplitudes fall in some measure under the sway of rhythm.
Let's press ahead. Is consciousness lost in a "spacing out process" or is it merely altered? Does consciousness reduce to rhythm? We are a step away from dancing to the rhythm of apeiron. "What is irreducible for Husserl," Caputo says, "is the flow of internal time. That is rewritten by Derrida as the irreducible spacing out of nonderived re-presentation, that is, the sheer open-ended power of repetition, the plurivocity of combinatorial possibilities, the impossibility of containing and dominating this drift, the inescapability of indefinite alteration"(p. 145, my bold).
How do we conceptualize a relation between rhythm and infinity? Do we need to think of infinition? Is it enough to think of movement? "Derrida," Caputo claims, "wants to refute them [the Eleatics] with a kind of Dionysian dance, with the rhythm of dithyrambic song" (p. 145). Does the reduction to rhythm show us a refutation of a thought infinity or its transmutation? I think this can be played with. Let's imagine, with Caputo's assistance, a hermeneutics of rhythm that has no standing, a hermeneutics of the breach of rhythm at the source of phenomenality. Such a hermeneutics "has no standing and no position, and it makes no attempt to get beyond physis, beyond the flow. Such a hermeneutic comes to pass only in the element of movement and kinesis" (p. 147).
Labels: Anaximander, Caputo, Derrida, epoché, Husserl, rhythm, Terpsichore, Zeno
I've been reading David Foster Williams Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ which contains some discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. Here I'd like to say a word about the Dichotomy, and hopefully explain how a pluralist can believe in motion, that is, move and be immersed in world of motion without being paralyzed by doubt. I'd also like to say why I feel that Diogenes the Cynic, whose answer to the paradox was to silently walk, has been given short shrift.
The Dichotomy states that "that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at its goal." That's incorrect. Motion, or any abstract continuum expressly meant to represent something like motion, does not have an intrinsic halfway stage or halfway point. Only a second step of abstraction can add a halfway point to a motion. Taking that second step creates two problems, the first being that one is likely to forget one is dealing with two distinct levels of abstraction, the second being that the abstractions involved may be incommensurable. Motions and divisions are separate realities. Lines and points are separate realities, though both may be brought together under the umbrella of geometry. A certain kind of infinity, Zeno's infinitiy but not all infinite sets, may be considered an artefact of incommensurability. A pluralist is not somebody who believes in the infinite divisibility of the world, but rather in there being multiple incommensurable worlds. There's no hidden monism behind pluralism, as Zeno wrongly suggests with his infinite divisibility. There's just more than one reality.
By remaining silent while he walked, Diogenes gave a brilliant answer to the Dichotomy. He demonstrated the existence of at least two realities: the logos and locomotion. The logos isn't the only reality that philosophy might be concerned with, though it might be said that the logos is the way philosophy concerns itself with various realties. Diogenes faults the way Zeno has deployed the logos. As easily as the logos can contain, it can be contained. Diogenes contained the reality of the logos with his silence. With his feet he not so much refuted or disproved the Dichotomy according to its own implicit terms (logic) as he demonstrated an alternative mode of being that one could, if one were so inclined, believe in. The existence of an alternative to the logos having been demonstrated, the Dichotomy is shown to be inadequate to the critical task it was meant to accomplish, viz., a critique of pluralism. This is not a case of common sense versus philosophy, but of philosophical error and correction. Diogenes was undoubtedly correct.
(There might be a paradox or inconsistency in the way I've argued this. Is Diogenes' walking merely an alternative to the logos, or, as a response to a riddle, is it therefore part of the of the logos? We could see the logos as expansive, perhaps bending its own rules as it encompasses more and more activity. That might suggest a kind of monism, a crumpled monism, if one were inclined to go looking for monisms (and if one weren't so inclined one might also speak of logoi). If the logos isn't so expansive, however, Diogenes' walking takes the measure of the logos in the sense that it marks a limit. That might suggest that different realities aren't so incommensurable. I don't think that's quite right, though, because marking a limit doesn't measure a reality so much as it signifies the existence of another reality. Can one criticize monism from outside the logos? Etymologically, "critical" (κρῐτῐκός) means able to discern, able to separate. (In fact the meaning of the logos may be a mirror of criticism, of sifting and separating.) It would be imperious to say that criticism can only happen within the logos. If I say, then, that Diogenes criticized Zeno at the limit of the logos, as I'm tempted to think, am I therefore accepting of Zeno's infinity?)
Labels: criticism, Diogenes the Cynic, infinity, paradox, Wallace, Zeno