Friday, September 11, 2009
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.
Labels: ambiguity, aporia, Corradi Fiumara, experience, metaphor, recursion
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
A memory of taking the blue bowl down from the kidaka. A secret object enclosed in a pouch will have been placed behind the bowl. Or in the bowl. It will come back to me, but it won't all come back to me. In the center of the room a bowl of oranges. Come sit. We may be on Lamu, or we may be on Unguja. We may be in Malindi. My thoughts return to the mountains, as always.
Sean M. Kelly (not to be confused with the Sean Kelly of Seeing Things), in an essay (pdf) for the latest Integral Review, quotes part of a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga concerning a capacity for having a memory of the future. Kelly's quotation leaves off just before Aurobindo says, "But this capacity works at first sporadically and uncertainly and not in an organised manner" (Part 4, Chapter 26). This sentence of Aurobindo's vitally qualifies the idea of a memory of the future. It invites us to examine experiences of imagination, or specifically imagined events (and thus also our understanding of time) in such a way as to not obliterate the vicissitude or otherwise completely level out experience–it should be clear that here I am not pursuing a perfection of consciousness but rather attempting to gain some insight on a phenomenon of experience. How would a memory of the future be experienced? Would we say that the future is remembered, or might it be memorized? What can't we commit to memory?
What is the relation between memory and thought? If it seems that the cogito remembers, that it exists temporally, is it also apparent that memory thinks?
What is the relation between memory and imagination? If we view a relation to the future through memory as paradoxical or nonsensical does it follow that we are viewing memory as something other than a mode of the imagination? Must there be in memory an unquestioned relation to the past? I ask again, what is passage? If we reject memories of the future on the grounds that memory must concern the past, are we in danger of being baffled by passage? Are transcendental consciousness and the passage of time ideas equally about passage? (It is not my place to deny extension to consciousness, and I have not yet assigned any such meanings to interiority.)
We may be lead to believe that the dream takes place in the loneliest of lonelinesses. If we stay true to the path of the dream, however, the loneliest of lonelinesses is shown to be a place reserved for the appearance of demons who offer demonic choices as to how we are to respond to their riddles–demons only ever offer demonic choices. They are after all not sphinges but demons. Let's ask whether the oneiric temporality properly takes place, or whether it represents a passage out of place. Have I just presented you with a demonic choice? To answer dreaming with dreaming. The residue of a contour.
What would oneiric translucency say to us about passage? I follow the aporetic ways of anamnesis; aporetically is how I begin to see through to the meaning of passage.
A trailing off into the dew. It's still like being inside the brool. The bedroom window. Waking up from a heart attack into a heart attack. Adrenaline. They dragged the lion off for questioning, the police. They broke his throat. Two or three blows and he went silent, limp. They dragged him away while we lay dreaming. For anamnesis.
When I hand you an orange the surprise of your laughter has been no less dreamy for having been remembered as a surprise. To live with our vicissitudes means to allow for surprise. Does memory concern those things which may be repressed, things which may be disallowed? What would make surprise irrepressible? That surprise would be irrepression itself?
Labels: aporia, dreaming, imagination, memory, Sean M. Kelly, Sri Aurobindo, surprise, temporality, transcendence
Saturday, June 28, 2008
What should we do if we suspect that our questions may be contributing to a culture of viciousness? Do we imagine that we could run parallel to viciousness while retaining an innocence? All around me I witness displays of psychic violence in the guise of seeking truth. What would an honest refusal to participate in brutal methods of interrogation require? Is there any limit to the refusal to participate in brutality? How would we recognize a commitment to nonbrutality in ourselves?
It should bother us that Deuce Martinez is an educated man. It should also bother us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an educated man, but we, those of us who enjoy asking questions, can allow ourselves to concentrate on inquiring after our culture of questioning. In all probability the gentleman from Virginia participated in peculiar methods of interrogation–I think it's reasonable to conclude that he was in fact a participant in the peculiar interrogations of Mr. Mohammed–not because he was born to do so, but rather because he was educated to do so. Here it would be naive to think that education and brutality are diametrically opposed, or that brutality must be innate. We should want to put questioning on trial without employing falsehoods or stupidities. The questioning of questioning represents a necessary intermediary step–a step made necessary by the coming to light of certain brutalities–on the path to a questioning of brutality, a questioning which I am presuming must take place if we are to live without becoming brutality's other victims. To undertake this questioning prompted by a brutality that must be questioned means stepping into an aporia with real felt consequences. Must we definitively remove all doubts by this process in order to avoid being brutalized? If there are right ways and wrong ways of asking questions, are we learning to question brutality in the right way? What should we be asking of our educators?
Should our education prepare us for trauma? How?
Let's ask whether questioning and ethics are truly compatible. Do they suffer together? So far a culture of questioning is just a hypothesis. Does committing to a nonbrutal way of questioning in any way lead to a verification of the hypothesis? How would we assess the reliability of our verifications while refusing to participate in brutal methods of interrogation? I would like to be able to articulate a decent philosophical response to the situation of people having poisoned the well of questioning.
Labels: aporia, brutality, Deuce Martinez, Gitmo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, questions
Monday, February 11, 2008
Agamben writes:
While scientific experiment is indeed the construction of a sure road (of a methodos, a path) to knowledge, the quest, instead, is the recognition that the absence of a road (the aporia) is the only experience possible for man. But by the same token, the quest is also the opposite of the adventure, which in the modern age emerges as the final refuge of experience. For the adventure presupposes that there is a road to experience, and that this road goes by way of the extraordinary and the exotic (in opposition to the familiar and the commonplace). Instead, in the universe of the quest the exotic and the extraordinary are only the sum of the essential aporia of every experience. Thus Don Quixote, who lives the everyday and the familiar (the landscape of La Mancha and its inhabitants) as extraordinary, is the subject of a quest that is a perfect counterpart of the medieval ones.
(Infancy and History, p. 29)
Is there no method, elenctic or otherwise, for reaching aporia? Is there no unsure path? The question before us seems to be whether experience, if it has about it an essential aporia, must also therefore be unmethodical or completely disconnected from any method whatsoever. I'm unsure of how to answer the question directly. Before attempting to answer the question I would like to investigate the etymology of method. There is a Latin methodus (mode of proceeding, rational procedure) which is not too distant from the English method. There is also an ancient Greek word μἐθοδος which we should analyze. Its two parts are μετα- and ὁδὀσ. It is ὁδὀσ of course which means way, path or travel. The curious bit is μετα-. The OED says of this prefix, "Cf. Mycenean Greek me-ta ‘together with’, which is perh. the original sense in Greek. In ancient and Hellenistic Greek μετα- is combined chiefly with verbs and verbal derivatives principally to express notions of sharing, action in common, pursuit, quest, and, above all, change (of place, order, condition, or nature), in the last sense freq. corresponding to classical Latin words in trans- prefix." So we are brought around to the idea that the μἐθοδος might be thought of as a quest for a path (or, golly, even a path about a path). I would prefer to think of it a little differently for the sake of investigating the question at hand. Μἐθοδος is in a vital sense the quest about a path. Its relation to the path may be touch and go, and the path, for its part, may reciprocate. The touch and go is the mode of being together of the path and the quest (which may possibly be the path as such). Μἐθοδος puts the question on the path at the same time it puts the path into question. The transmigural quality of the discursive does not leave method to go on its way unscathed, but rather transmiguration infuses the method and gives it an essential meaning. To answer the question, then, experience is indeed methodical, or it presents an aspect that is identifiably methodical, though its relation to pathways is always touch and go. It remains to be decided whether aporias must be absolutely cut off from all pathways, or whether they might represent the go phases of the touch and go of experience in its methodical aspect.
Labels: Agamben, aporia, experience, peregrinations, questions