Saturday, October 03, 2009
Taking a cue from Morris, who posits a deep connection between asymmetrical postures, openness and extroversion (Sense, pp. 164 ff.), let's provisionally categorize questions as either being symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical questions are exemplified by polar questions, though they include other types of presentation of either/or alternatives. Asymmetrical questions appear open-ended. They appear to transcend the horizon of the question considered as merely a more or less polite form of a request for information. They engage.
The asymmetrical question is grounded in an open posture. It arises as from a vulnerability, even as it negotiates a scaffolding that will support and inform noesis down the road ahead. Alternatively, the asymmetrical question leaps from the leap, comes to earth late in the process of questioning.
Does the asymmetrical question reflect the primitive condition of the question? Does the question initially spring from an asymmetrical posture or acture?
I'm assuming that a question arises from either a symmetrical or asymmetrical posture, and, secondarily, that it has either a symmetrical or asymmetrical form, which has its own shakiness as an assumption.
Regarding the secondary concern: How do we describe the commensurability of the question? Tacitly I have been assessing the symmetry of the question by balancing it against the answer. This is revealing. As argued previously, the question rather implies an answer or answerability, even in the form of refusals to answer. Answerability appears embedded in the horizon of the question, even as we acknowledge the delight people take in playing with unanswerable questions. Our assumptions then are all wrong?
So what is the question commensurate to? The request? Do we know the request well enough to measure the question against it? Is the question commensurate to the utterance in general? Dialogue? Are there, after all, dialogues without questions? (I've tried this, it's very off-putting.) So we face a conundrum of using questions without knowing what a question is, measuring the question ever provisionally, ever by a method open to questioning.
Does the aporetic arrive through an asymmetrical opening of the posture? Where does this lead? Do we ever, in questioning, pass beyond all measure?
Labels: dialogue, form, Morris, posture, questions
Friday, October 02, 2009
Barbaras quotes Merleau-Ponty taking off from Malraux' idea that we hear our own voices through our throats while we hear the voices of others through our ears: "I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else" (in Being, p. 281). For my part, while cognizant of the sense in which my voice is bound to my concrete existence and my uniqueness, I feel that, as previously noted,the ear comes late to hearing, late to hearing the other as well as (if differently than) the self.
Let's talk about listening to speech in particular, recognizing speech with its implicit dimension of listening as an example of coexistential ideation, an ideation characterized by quasi-interiority, an as if quality of its inner horizon. Here I'm thinking of ideation as allusive, as governed by methectic laterality rather than being directed "from above" or from the outside. Barbaras' thinking about this topic inspires. Under the heading "Sense as Articulation" Barbaras sketches out an ontology of the sign premised on the reversibility of the voice. He says:
Nowhere are we confronted with signs that are strictly vocal; they cannot be characterized as sensible, audible atoms, as individuals situated in exteriority. Most assuredly, I do not hear anything other than sounds, and yet it is not the sounds themselves that I hear. Their relationship escapes worldly exteriority; they are not situated side by side. Rather, they bear witness to a quasi-interiority corresponding to the quasi-reflectivity of the voice. Each sound already slips into the others, makes allusions there and, by this very relationship, sketches a meaningful unity. Nevertheless, this movement does not rest on the presence of a meaning possessed elsewhere; sense is nothing other than this lateral relation between the signs. It is implicated in words and phonemes, as a coherent deformation, rather than being possessed by them. Sense remains, at the heart of expression, "organic" rather than pure meaning, a "matrix of ideas" [Signs, p. 77] rather than an idea. Thus the incarnation of sense in the voice corresponds to the quasi-exteriority of signs.
(p. 288)
Just as it's obvious that there can't be deformation without form, there can't be as if without irrealization. However, irrealization in its usual forms emerges not from an isolated "interiority" (in an Idealist acceptation) but rather from matrices of delocutary vibrations, echoes which one echoes, gnoseologically, as it were. The aesthesiologicality of the vocal recovers a meaning of the as if as coexistential resonance and at the same time cadacualtic.
The vocal, it must be added, represents only one modality of embodied sign usage. Nonvocal coherent deformations are both imaginable and empirically evident. The vocal ought not be reified, as there are other routes to irrealizing coexistential vibration.
Labels: Barbaras, form, ideation, listening, Malraux, Merleau-Ponty, vibration, voice
Sunday, May 24, 2009
"Every work of art is painting and statuary, immobilized in the instant or in its periodic return" (Levinas, Totality, p. 263, my bold). We need to ask whether rhythm opens us up to the infinities of other people. For me, rhythm is a manumission from stupid moods, a dynamic movement out of a dismal immobility which is marked by the throb of a mere will to subsist, and an anemic throb at that. Rhythm overcomes the dolorous–or alternatively dwells in it, it amounts to the same–or rather it presents the means and the inspiration, the method of breathing and bodily vibration and most vitally the feeling that propels through the horizon of the given, the blue given, in a motion something like transmutation; rhythm is less of a form that one imposes on life than a music that emerges, develops and sends, a music that gives. Listening to rhythm, making rhythm with my knives and pans, musical instruments or my feet, makes me alive to my infinition. I enjoy it. Would this ecstatic journey of the self through rhythm be a condition for an openness to your infinition? Or do I risk deceiving myself about what is truly called for by your face? Levinas says "the whole body–a hand or a curve of the shoulder–can express as the face" (p. 262). So let's take off our shoes and socks and dance. Let's dance to some Zydeco Cha Cha.
The statues too would join us. The statuary and the plastic would join the performing arts if only we knew when to grasp the skoppic, the improvisation of the shape, and its many returns, the clay of everyday language. We could see them moving towards us, the statues, the sonorous masks, expressing, ecstatic, performative, the marble foot. This expression must not be confused with the infinition of the other person. Is such expressivity not a condition, though, of the openness to the infinitions of other people? What do you say of your mobilities, the ones you put out in the open? Do you ever find that you give yourself rhythmically?
Labels: form, Levinas, motility, rhythm, Terpsichore, the instant
Thursday, April 02, 2009
"The distinction between form and matter does not characterize all experience," Levinas assures us. "The face has no form added to it, but does not present itself as the formless, as matter that lacks and calls for form" (Totality, p. 140). Your body has neither a shape superimposed upon it nor does it appear as the absence of shape. Are we about to grasp an immateriality of the body? Your shapeliness intervenes, I insist, between imposition and absence of shape. It's your body that impresses, in the manner of an emanation. Flowing hand. Mutatis mutandis your bodiliness intervenes between stuff and emptiness. Thus your body is no more immaterial than it is unshapely. If we assign your shapeliness to singularity–to recognize your body is you, youtastically, that shapeliness is your gift to experience (experience thanks you)–then what of materiality, a singular materiality? Will materiality allow itself to be manifested uniquely-plurally? Levinas says that enjoyment is "an ultimate relation with the substantial plenitude of being, with its materiality" (p. 133). But hasn't your body, your body-with-a-face, compelled me to rethink materiality? Neither substance nor apeiron, but singularly you, your body. In pure expenditure, like dolphins, in pure loss, flowing hands.
Labels: body, form, formlessness, jouissance, Levinas, uniqueness, you
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
"In the physical act of writing, the medieval Englishman Orderic Vitalis says, 'the whole body labors' (Clanchy 1979, p. 90)," (Ong, Orality, p. 95). We should be able to speak meaningfully of technologies of speaking, to recognize that the spoken word is not natural, that it does not well up from the unconscious but comes through learning, and indeed conscious effort, and so the interesting question of how technologies become "interior transformations of consciousness" (p. 82)–Ong may be quite right, given certain understandings of "interior," "transformation" and "consciousness"–can be assayed on a level field, where we can finally appreciate Ong's argument that writing is not merely a copy of speech.
"Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal" (p. 101). Total situation? (We'll get back to that. Levinas may be instructive.) Aren't we really playing here with two concepts of verbality, one that contains itself, needed to begin making sense of phrases like "spoken words," and another that exceeds itself (and a third that contains its excess, and so on)? Verbality overflows. It's wordy. It's an easy enough concept. Is there then a totality in which the superfluence of verbality would be less than super? Why wouldn't verbality overflow its total situation, as, according to Levinas, language allows the other to do? Dribbling the basketball is always a modification of a total situation which is more than repeatedly bouncing the ball off the floor. Isn't it? So how do we know the situation is total? Does that simply mean it contains all the stuff we want might want to talk about in reference to dribbling (verbality, etc.)? Are we just being lazy? The whole body lazes in the physical act of blogging.
Quoting Ong again, because it's worth remembering: "Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expressions, and the entire human, existential settings in which the real, spoken word always occurs" (p. 47). Pragmatics, the subdiscipline of linguistics that studies how meaning is tied to situations of language use, examines aspects of language that appear to be far removed from the word yet by definition are understood to be linguistic. Such a course of study would enrich easy definitions of the verbal, but there is a danger of letting our own mental exercises interfere with a grasp of the phenomenon at hand: we start with an impoverished concept of the verbal, the lone word, in order to be able to arrive at our enriched concept, the word in its habitat, only to realize that we had already assumed the latter, which suggests to us that we not describing so much as constructing what resembles a reality–though it has a recursive dimension whose reality we are uncertain of–and perhaps our construction says more about us and our existential setting, which we can't really be sure is a total situation, than it does about the phenomenon it purports to address. What do we mean? How do we mean? Can we use science to help us live more meaningful lives? What is the role of criticism in our intellectual life? Is our intellectual life agonistic like a drama? Does it put reality on hold? Are all realities performative? If it seems that there are questions of the day, why does it also seem that some questions recur? How do questions, including forcefully answered questions, come to be asked anew? Arguably we suffer from a superabundance of ignorances, a postmodern condition; yet many thinkers surely have reasons for disregarding previous answers, established philosophical arguments and refutations. We may also suffer from a superabundance of anachronicity. My current reading of Orality and Literacy, in important respects an anachronistic text when it first appeared in 1982, is not altogether current. I admit to being uncertain about the times I live in. Does anybody care anymore about a critique of "total situations"? Is my simple critical attitude simply retrograde?
Another tack. Does one need to be able to transcend a condition in order to modify it? Technology modifies consciousness and, in the form of the word, it modifies a habitat. (This would be my difficulty, not Ong's, who doesn't theoretically regard the spoken word as a technology). So technology itself is transcendent? Perhaps we have merely found a lazy way to say that the human being modifies its consciousness as well as its relation to its wider milieu by the use of technologies which may have originally been intended to modify only one consciously thematized element or a selected few elements in the milieu. In addition to saying that technology has horizons, a lazy thought, we are also saying that transformations of consciousness take place on the horizons or at the margins of consciousness–but there is a problem of recursion here, as we are uncertain of whether horizons of consciousness precede thematizations without themselves being thematized beforehand. More, do forms have horizons, or do we posit forms in order to eliminate horizons? If the latter, do we posit horizons of form only after forgetting that we had meant to eliminate them in the first place? If consciousness is nothing like a form–something approaching pure plasticity, which would have to far more plastic than Ong allows human consciousness, though it would perhaps be "fit for molding," hugging the figure of the whole body that labors, working itself into the word–then we must not mistake moments in the plasticity of consciousness (rhythms, it might be said) for transformations. It is not merely the degree of human plasticity that's at issue here, or the degree of hardening imposed by the acceptance of cultural forms–we have some basis of agreement. Rather, the circumstances of the loss of plasticity are in question. For instance I have argued that Ong fails to appreciate the ramifications of the learning of language in early infancy; his sense of cultural horizons is limited to two principal types, which I reject. If "form" possibly eliminates horizons in order to be itself, "plasticity" requires horizons, requires that form exceeds itself–however, form already had in itself its own excess. It was already transformation, or rather, we needed to understand transformation in order to be able to talk about form. So what relation is there between transformation and the effort of the whole body–the total body?
Labels: body, form, language, Ong, plasticity, technology
Friday, January 30, 2009
Perhaps there is something like a schema of the face that we humans are born with. Perhaps such schemata are imprinted in early infancy. Why won't I admit that the face is both metaphysical and physical? Or simply metaphysical? What's the story with my attitude towards the metaphysical? Am I holding on to a face, a dear face? Am I afraid of other faces? Or have I really set my feelings aside in order to maintain a critical distance? Will I allow myself to be so naive? Does the face, by its nature, evoke naivety? Shouldn't I want to be free of the magistrature of criticism, once it's recognized as such? But such a freedom isn't quite the promise of the face.
Let's flesh out the sense in which Levinas means for us to understand language as metaphysical. First, though, a word on forms. Do we need forms to work through language? Levinas speaks of naked things, things which have no need for disclosure. He says they "disappear beneath their form. The perception of individual things is the fact that they are not entirely absorbed in their form; they then stand out in themselves, breaking through, rending their forms, are not resolved into the relations that link them up to the totality" (p. 74). He acknowledges a phenomenon of adumbration (and the als etwas, for this is how things are disclosed) as he prepares to offer an alternative. He calls this alternative "revelation," which, as we have remarked, is a difficult thing to ask an English speaker to regard as truly different from disclosure. Expounding, on the theme of language, Levinas says that the work of language "consists in entering into a relationship with a nudity disengaged from every form, but having meaning by itself, καθ αύτό, signifying before we have projected light upon it, appearing not a privation on the ground of an ambivalence of values (as good or evil, as beauty or ugliness), but as an always positive value. Such a nudity is the face" (ibid., Levinas' emphasis). He goes on to add, making his critical stance abundantly clear, that the face "is by itself and not by reference to a system" (p. 75, Levinas' emphasis). (There may be an irony in positing the revelation of the face as a step in the critique of the system, but I don't mean to be sarcastic by any stretch.) Why language? Why is this the theatre of revelations? Is it simply because language was the talk of his century? To be sure, Levinas touches on a truth about language that we should pay heed to whether we are talking about language in a metaphysical sense or what the linguists call natural language. He says "language institutes a relation irreducible to the subject-object relation: the revelation of the other. In this revelation only can language as a system of signs be constituted." (p. 73). He says that "in its expressive function language precisely maintains the other–to whom it is addressed, whom it calls upon or invokes" (ibid., my emphasis). What then is the relationship between expression and form? Perhaps we should imagine the press of air in the throat, the touch of air, its sculpting. Who will then take from the skop the final word?
Labels: face, form, language, Levinas
Friday, December 19, 2008
Recalling my statement that "[i]mprobably the plus one, as in 'infinity plus one,' will be revealed as something other than thought," I now read that Levinas defines infinity as the desirable, which he explains as "that which is approachable by a thought that at each instant thinks more than it thinks" (Totality and Infinity, p. 62). In pointing to the improbable I expressed symptomatically a desire to escape a noetic enclosure I will now call metaphysical, knowing too well that our understanding of that term could quickly come undone. If I wanted to steer a philosophical discussion away from metaphysics would I not be aided by the desirable? Escape is not so easy, I know–or so experience has taught me so far.
Is language easy? Language is so plainly multifarious we might well point to its improbabilities. Hmm. Here Levinas reveals (which according to my grasp of English is synonymous with saying "Levinas discloses," a grasp which doesn't fail to realize that Levinas draws a meaningful distinction between his idea of aperspectival revelation and Heidegger's thinking about "disclosure") a key to his dialogism:
One can, to be sure, conceive of language as an act, as a gesture of behavior. But then one omits the essential of language: the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face, which is accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us–in teaching. And, conversely, gestures and acts produced can become, like words, a revelation, that is, as we will see, a teaching. But the reconstitution of the personage on the basis of his behavior is the work of our already acquired science.
Absolute experience is not a disclosure; to disclose, on the basis of a subjective horizon, is already to miss the noumenon. The interlocutor alone is the term of pure experience, where the Other enters into relation while remaining καθ αύτό, where he expresses himself without our having to disclose him from a "point of view," in a borrowed light. The "objectivity" sought by the knowledge that is fully knowledge is realized beyond the objectivity of the object. What presents itself as independent of every subjective movement is the interlocutor, whose way consists in starting from himself, foreign and yet presenting himself to me.
(p. 67)
My views on teaching are way more relaxed than Levinas'. Apparently my views on the difference between writing and speech also differ from Levinas', not merely because I favor the trismegistic over the magisterial, I reckon, but because I don't regard writing as an act of simply representing spoken language, and this permits me to be cautious about the kind of qualities or deprivations of qualities I attribute to writing. Notwithstanding our differences, Levinas may have something to teach me about language. The following passage (it's long, but worth studying) occurs as an elaboration of a response to Buber's philosophy, which Levinas reads as a corrective to a kind of "neutral intersubjectivity" (p. 68) he finds in Heidegger. Again the field is language:
The claim to know and to reach the other is realized in the relationship with the Other that is cast in the relation of language, where the essential is the interpellation, the vocative. The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him, to classify him as sick, to announce to him his death sentence; at the same time as grasped, wounded, outraged, he is "respected." The invoked is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category. He is the one to whom I speak–he has only a reference to himself; he has no quiddity. But the formal structure of interpellation has to be worked out.
(p. 69, Levinas' emphasis)
Hi. It's me again. Sorry to interrupt. I wonder if the best antidote to the notion that one understands before one listens is the notion that, in conversation, one simply does not understand the person to whom one listens. I have a few books on the topic of listening on my wish list, including Nancy's. We'll see where that leads in the coming year. To continue with Levinas, then:
The object of knowledge is always a fact, already happened and passed through. The interpellated one is called upon to speak; his speech consists in "coming to the assistance" of his word–in being present. This present is not made of instants mysteriously immobilized in duration, but of an incessant recapture of instants that flow by by a presence that comes to their assistance, that answers for them. This incessance produces the present, is the presentation, the life, of the present. It is as though the presence of him who speaks inverted the inevitable movement that bears the spoken word to the past state of the written word. Expression is the actualization of the actual. The present is produced in this struggle against the past (if one may so speak), in this actualization. The unique actuality of speech tears it from the situation in which it appears and which it seems to prolong. It brings what the written word is already deprived of: mastery. Speech, better than a simple sign, is essentially magisterial. It first of all teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which alone it can teach (and not, like maieutics, awaken in me) things and ideas. Ideas instruct me coming from the master who presents them to me: who puts them in question; the objectification and theme upon which objective knowledge opens already rest on teaching. The calling into question of things in a dialectic is not a modifying of the perception of them; it coincides with their objectification. The object is presented when we have welcomed an interlocutor. The master, the coinciding of the teaching and the teacher, is not in turn a fact among others. The present of the manifestation of the master who teaches overcomes the anarchy of facts.
We must not say that language conditions consciousness, under the pretext that it provides self-consciousness with an incarnation in the objective work language would be (as the Hegelians would say). The exteriority that language, the relation with the Other, delineates is unlike the exteriority of a work, for the objective exteriority of works is already situated in the world established by language–by transcendence.
(pp. 69-70, Levinas' emphasis)
By transcendence. Is it so unrespectable that I should want to emerge from metaphysics, or that I should want to emerge from metaphysics and still have something to say about the journey, something honest, if that's not being too assertive? Let's back up, take a look at this world established by language, and see what, if anything, distinguishes it from other worlds. Speaking of temporality, Levinas says, "This world that has lost its principle, an-archical, a world of phenomena, does not answer to the quest for the true; it suffices for enjoyment, which is self-sufficiency itself, nowise disturbed by the evasion that exteriority opposes to the quest for the true" (p. 65). It's my opinion that one should not put antipluralism ahead of the quest for the true. }∅{ presents an opportunity to listen to questions that come from other worlds (as many as it takes); so, following my own advice, the world of dialogue that exclusively identifies the quest for the thing itself with the quest for the true, indeed creates an opposition between "evasion" and this quest, as if there could only be one true path, this world of dialogue commands respect as a place where ideas are put into question. Surely one emerges from this world with the power to improvise. What of this power? Has one called upon this very power in order to come to the assistance of instants of dialogue, utterances really? Did it never cease? Was it never held in abeyance? Should we not apologize for the incessance of our improvisations? If we do have to reason to apologize, however, if we must put our powers of improvisation on hold for the sake of the quest for the true in this special world of dialogue, don't we then at the same time call upon those powers in order to put thought into question? Or could it be that our entrance into this world of dialogue entails–a cutting to shape–a transmutation of the power to improvise into a power to question. Two points then: such a transmutation would provide a reason for understanding the work of this world as maieutic in a meaningful sense, though the malleability of this power would teach us to be careful of conflating the transmutational with the permutational; such a transmutation would be accomplished by virtue of an abiding power of improvisation which belongs to a world ordered not in line with the arch but in departure (starting) from the breach (}∅{), as far as departure (starting) goes. That is to say, this special world of dialogue is not one but many. Hasn't Levinas already said as much, already spoken of plurality, and in particular the plurality "required for conversation"(p. 59). But he also said, "The inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as plurality" (p. 58, Levinas' emphasis). Shall we put into question then the idea that plurality pertains to worlds? And why not? Is there a question of plurality not enjoying itself with our conversation? Does our respect for plurality obey a principle or are we free to put our respect into practice, free to extent that it's meaningful to speak of freedom, to the extent that we can depart from plurality, that we can go so far as to disrespect it. Is it plurality that's an entailment of freedom, or freedom that's an entailment of plurality? How do we question these sometimes premises apart from each other? Transmutation? And aren't we free to distrust transmutation?
Levinas says, "The distinctive characteristic of forms is precisely their epiphany at a distance." Does the transmutation of this δυναμις–perhaps we could say faculty if we knew what to make of the question–this power of improvisation into this power of questioning, a transmutation that itself is not beyond question, but only appears in this world of dialogue, does this transmutation occur at a distance? Well, it appears at a distance in our case. We observe our experience of dialogue.
The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and beyond form. Form–incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into a plastic form, for it is adequate to the same–alienates the exteriority of the other. The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato's expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents.
(pp. 65-66, Levinas' emphasis)
How will I come to the assistance of my persona when he comes asking about the unformulated question, brings it into conversation, opens it to incessant deformulation? Is this not a true inquiry, this deformulation of the question? It too may have as its horizon the }∅{.
Labels: anarchy, dialogue, form, improvisation, maieutics, plurality, questions
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Shahar draws our attention to the works of Itamar Even-Zohar, who has worked out a semiotics he calls polysystemic theory. The other day I sort of casually let it slip that I would be reclaiming synchrony from the structuralists on behalf of language and good sense. Well, now I have a project on my hands because Even-Zohar has given the matter a lot of thought and he intends to do some reclaiming of his own. He says that once we recognize that semiotic systems do not exist outside of history we are led to certain conclusions:
First, it must be admitted that both synchrony and diachrony are historical, but the exclusive identification of the latter with history is untenable. As a result, synchrony cannot and should not be equated with statics, since at any given moment, more than one diachronic set is operating on the synchronic axis. Therefore, on the one hand a system consists of both synchrony and diachrony; on the other, each of these separately is obviously also a system. Secondly, if the idea of structuredness and systemicity need no longer be identified with homogeneity, a semiotic system can be conceived of as a heterogeneous, open structure. It is, therefore, very rarely a uni-system but is, necessarily, a polysystem--a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent.
("Polysystem Theory," p. 11).
Of all the things there are, which of them should not be called a system? I'll turn the question on myself: of all the things there are, which of them should not be described by metaphor? Well, what is preliminary to a study of synchrony? I intend to approach synchrony as such (a metaphor, no doubt), schools and poetry in abeyance. (There's only so much a single person can do, I know, and for that matter collectives too have their limitations.) If synchrony means to abolish history, though I may disagree, I will not hesitate to report it. And if it were to emancipate itself from anti-systematicity I won't keep that under my hat either.
I take to heart Evan-Zohar's point that structuralism has been misinterpreted, even by some of its champions, as a statics. I am cognizant of his position that the polysystem is an open system. However, I must reiterate an objection to a structuralist view of culture, and I believe my criticism applies as much to Evan-Zohar's polysystem theory as to structuralist thinking, whatever degree to which the latter has been misconstrued. Evan-Zohar subscribes to cultural holism and he maintains that the literary (poly)system, his primary interest, is isomorphic with the cultural (poly)system. This peculiar idea of isomorphism should be referred to thought rather than to the field of cultural anthropology in order to sort out what exactly we should want it to mean. The doctrinary ideas of cultural holism, functionalism, structural-functionalism, on the other hand, should definitely be referred to cultural anthropology, as that discipline has put these ideas to the test (and, I reckon, has ultimately found them wanting in various ways). For my part, I am uncomfortable with an appeal to a phenomenon that is purported to stand above and beyond one's immediate field of inquiry. Whether that phenomenon would be Mind or Culture, as the case may be, one should be able to interrogate it directly as well as in its relations, or set it aside altogether.
So what kind of a relation is isomorphism, and what can we learn by interrogating it? Even-Zohar, in addition to avowedly presenting a jargon, also presents, in outline at least, a functionalist theory of "literature" (which is also a bit of jargon, as I'm sure you will recognize). Well, we must make allowances for those who would think productively, or, rather, technically. So when I question the use of the word "isomorphic" it must be clear that I am questioning all at once a particular item of language, a more or less systematic method of describing a parcel of reality, and a way of thinking. I make allowances because I know that in key respects I am a rude thinker and I wish to mitigate against my rudeness. I value comity. So it is with all due respect that I ask whether our understandings of phenomena have been tainted by a discourse on forms. (Such a discourse may also be thought of as technical, if that bakes your noodle.) You see, a heteromorphy or an anisomporhy would raise the same issues for me—though by no means do I wish to sweep aside the problem of equation. To use such language means being faced with a dilemma about what to do with forms: are forms anterior or posterior to the activity of thinking? And getting jiggy with that question surely means being able to say something about thinking, whether it is an activity at all, and, if it is, what can reasonably be said about what it does. Is there an isomorphism between the thought and the question? What would it mean to posit an isomorphism between the interrogated and the uninterrogated? In talking about isomorphism in any fashion aren't we left then with precisely a discourse on forms, shakily perhaps, but on forms?
What should isochrony mean to us? I'm going to express an opinion in the hopes that it will not be recieved as a substitute for supple thinking, which we should all aspire to in some measure: isochrony is wrong. It is wrong because it destroys anything approaching eudemonia. Perhaps I'm saying as much as isochrony is irrational. Perhaps. Culture is often irrational. I believe the noblest purpose of studying culture is to emancipate oneself from it, and I believe the same emancipatory impulse should motivate the study of forms, though of course I imagine I could be persuaded otherwise. So we have the question of forms, and here in the problem of isochrony we have a question of times and measures, and all of these questions fall under the shadow of a technocratic culture that, were we so bold as to attempt to master its secrets, would take the life from us in exchange. But my view here is, after all, just an opinion, a starting point, perhaps, for a longer discussion of what time means in our lives, and what it should mean, if time should mean anything.
In what sense can two anisochronic moments be synchronous? How do we measure history? Oh, is that History, "history" in a technical sense, or history in a real sense? Because history in an etymological sense could travel under the name of historiography, and that might be an everyday sense as well. Is it just any kind of thing that can (or cannot) be separated from an inquiry into that thing? I ask about kinds of things in order to ask about the essence of things. Does essence point to inquiry? (Do I have it all backwards?) Does the thing? Does the historicization of the synchronic, in analysis if not in practice, say something about the essence of the synchronic? I think perhaps, and yet we still do not know whether the synchronic has anything like an essence or even an existence and as a concept we have yet to clearly define its scope and its import.
Even-Zohar and I agree that the synchronic is not static, which is to say, achronic or ahistorical. I don't think we will be able to finish taking it apart until we explore togetherness, temporality, and the proper measure of temporality. (We might also ask whether togetherness has its proper measure, naturally). A passage of questions becomes apparent at this juncture, and it may occur to some that this is indeed our main passage forward: do we simply mean to say that the phenomena synchrony is purported to conceptualize are historical? Sure, but there's nothing simple about it. There's nothing simple about a science of historical phenomena, or a discursive history of an historical discourse, or, to borrow a turn of phrase from anthropologist Stephen Tyler, a reality fantasy of a fantasy reality. (I am profoundly indebted to Tyler for saying that "the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation," "Post-Modern Ethnography," in Clifford and Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture, University of California Press, 1986, p. 128). In all this talk of synchrony should we want to concern ourselves with reality in any sense? Should we take the claim that synchrony does not escape the historical as a wake-up call to reality? Very tricky. What is the purpose of studying the historical?
As I was saying, I don't intend to definitively take apart synchrony at this time. I'll leave it on hold until I've thought more about temporality, togetherness and, perhaps, the imagination of meaning.
Labels: culture, discourse, Even-Zohar, form, historicity, Steven Tyler, structuralism, synchrony
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Merleau-Ponty discusses the painter as one who carries on a conversation with himself, with the things of his world, and with pre-existing works. Perhaps this conversation is the triple resumption he is referring to when he says:
This triple resumption which makes a sort of provisory eternity of the operation of expression is not simply a metamorphosis in the fairytale sense of miracle, magic, and absolute creation in an aggressive solitude. It is also a response to what the world, the past and the completed work demanded. It is accomplishment and brotherhood. Husserl has used the fine word Stiftung—foundation or establishment—to designate first of all the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus being universally; but above all to designate that fecundity of the products of a culture which continue to have value after their appearance and which open a field of investigations in which they perpetually come to life again. It is thus that the world as soon as he has seen it, his first attempts at painting, and the whole past of painting all deliver up a tradition to the painter—that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory.
("Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," in Signs, p. 59)
It might be useful to think of Stiftung as also endowment or donation.
Metamorphosis must be a kind of response, either a response to forms or a response to some meaning or expression carried by or through forms. Well, this isn't altogether clear. We can ask whether metamorphosis responds directly, or indirectly, to forms; alternatively we can ask whether it is actually forms that are given to responsive metamorphosis. Or form itself. (I like for my questioning to recognize a variety of mental bents.) Metamorphosis may be, always or in certain instances, a response by way of forms to expressions that weren't previously given in the form of forms. Why forms? Here we need to ask about what it means to be given. Would it be possible to give and take form in a single gesture?
The last time I talked about the prefix μετα- I was drawn to its sense of signifying a quest. Now if I ask whether form and change relate sibsomely or unsibsomely—or both together in some manner, which would have the status of a possibility (kaliedeation/monstruation)—am I giving new life to questioning itself? Surely questioning doesn't need to be given anything, and not by me. Does the question take the form of an endowment? Do you see where this leads? Towards the provisory, perhaps.
Labels: form, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, metamorphosis, questions
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Miguel Leal writes, "For [Catherine] Malabou, the essence of plasticity resides in its dual substantive condition that designates that which is capable of giving but also of receiving form, or, to be more precise, in the 'double movement, contradictory and thus indissociable, of the emerging of and of the annihilation of the form,' thus taking its place in a between-two in which the very idea of creation is at play" (On Plasticity: Sound Cartographies). As I peek into various senses of the plastic I feel I should say again that I don't look to etymologies for originary meanings but rather for alternative meanings or perhaps varieties of a meaning in the anticipation that, if I am fortunate, a conflux of meanings or thoughts will emerge to stimulate further thought and discussion, even if it is only discussion amongst myselves. Today I seek to momentarily develop, to borrow a term from Dominique Païni (whom I just today learned about from Leal's essay) a plastic awareness of the plastic awareness, the latter of which I will identify with the imagination. The idea of the oscillation of the emergence and the annihilation of forms calls back to Nancy's thinking about the metamorphic force of the image and the rapport with the image. There is some cause for linking the idea of the plastic with the idea of the image. The word plastic comes from the Greek πλαστῐκός which means "fit for molding" and also, when said of persons, "gifted in sculpture." (I'm relying upon the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott for the meaning of Greek words.) It is related to πλάσσω, which means "to form, to mold" and, in one of its senses, "to form an image of a thing in the mind, to imagine." (Mold, btw, comes to us by way of the French mouler which means "to hug the figure.") Another meaning of πλάσσω is "to mold or form by training or education." A πλάσμα is, among other things, an image or figure. The Greeks thus help us think of the image as something shaped and also, perhaps, shaping. What qualities must the sculpted possess in order to sculpt the sculptor? Leal touches on the idea of a thickness necessary for any plasticity. He says that "in order for matter to show its plasticity it is above all necessary to grant it thickness." The double movement of imagination hugs the figure and draws out the form, unfolding in a milieu the emotional thickness of Play-Doh or the temporal thickness of the plasmatic stream. It is perhaps utlimately the thickness of metaphor, which, in kindness to Leal, I will regard as a πλαστῐκή τεχνῶν.
What do we want matter to say to us? Does the giving and taking of shape happen outside of shape? Is a plastic awareness of plastic awareness necessary for plastic awareness in the first place? Would the plasticitiy of the plastic awareness of plastic awareness be metaplastic or hyperplastic? How far can we stretch plasticity? Is there a point to deformation, or is it all just a stretch? Is the give and take of shape essential to shape? Is formlessness capable of receiving form or might it be only give-and-take that formlessness gives-and-takes, never merely taking nor merely giving. Is the imaginatively gifted also the imaginatively taken? The imagination is necessarily always formless in one aspect, a form having been taken, even if we are unsure of the exact point in the exchange of forms at which imagination begins. To be imaginatively taken is to be absorbed in the exchange of forms, which for practical purposes means cultivating a plasticity with respect to the question of origins. One thing I think we want matter to say to us is that it isn't exhausted, that it's ready to play some more.
Labels: form, formlessness, imagination, Leal, Malabou, Païni, plasticity
Monday, January 28, 2008
James H. Johnson argues that the revolutionary politics of the Terror fostered a musical style that was conservative and reactionary. Here he talks about polyphony:
[T]he cultural climate of Jacobinism worked against polyphony, for polyphony implied a divided social body. Dramatically, it signified protagonists at cross purposes; experientially, it made transparency between stage and spectator difficult; and musically, it promoted dangerously personal experience. In short, polyphony was the musical equivalent of dissent.
(Listening in Paris, pp. 152-154)
Perhaps the relation between personal experience and music seems obvious, but I will probe it just a bit. How would polyphony in particular promote a personal experience of music? Is it actually animus towards the personal that drives the suppression of polyphony? The political forces that would stomp out plurality would also stomp out personal liberty and in extreme though not genuinely rare cases they would stomp out music as well. Should we let the people who would stomp out music tell us what music means, or even provide the vaguest outline of what constitutes a musical experience?
The suppression of music ranks among the most vicious forms of the challenge to pluralism for which there is no easy rejoinder, no unambiguous defense. The champion of liberty must concede that one is free to hate music, to express one's hatred of music and to persuade others to hate music even while denying that one is a person, or, more commonly, that a human being must be thought of as an entity endowed with personal liberty. I sense there is more at stake in the suppression of music than any particular variety of political liberty, though I am not quite imagining a musical experience absent a political liberty.
Do I have to be precisely at liberty to even think that there must be something more than liberty? That is, is it liberty that affords me something more than itself?
Liberty without music is worthless to me. I can even say that music is liberating. Music gives liberty as much as it is born in liberty and for this reason liberty appears to me to be polymorphous. There are as many forms of liberty as there are forms. (I might be sliding away from a view that liberties exist as such.) In addition there are transformative liberties, metamorphoses, monstruations and kaleidiations of liberty.
Is personal experience the domain of the transformative par excellence? (I don't know that this is true, but I will not fear to think it.)
In all likelihood personal experience doesn't need to be promoted. Johsnon has shown that the dominant aesthetic during the reign of the Jacobins heard music as something that promoted feelings, or, perhaps, elicited feelings. I imagine a danger arising from a diffuse feeling that the feeling touches the personal, but maybe that would have been beside the point. The transition from the elicited to the illicit may have to do with an atmospheric hostility towards feelings; on the other hand the stomping out of feelings may be an unintended casualty of an aggression against free representations of liberty–I'd even say relatively free representations of liberty, because unlike Nancy I don't know what absolute freedom would mean in this context. I don't know that feelings elicited by music, created or sounded by music, are themselves absolute feelings or have any contact with an absolute freedom or a domain of the absolutely personal. At the same time, I don't deny the existence of the feeling or the personal or the free. Perhaps the Jacobins correctly surmised the polymorphousness of liberty, and, given a certain dogma about representation, the injuction (the enjoinment, which would be at the same time a disjunction) against polyphony took shape as if by necessity. And the most dangerous liberty of all would be the transformative.
Questions for a later date: is the formless transformative? Is the transformative necessarily formless or of the formless?
Labels: Blue Meanies, form, James H. Johnson, listening, music, Paris, Terror
Monday, January 07, 2008
Nancy speaks of the force of the image, a force that is "a unity woven from a sensory diversity" ("Image and Violence," in The Ground of the Image, p. 22). I don't believe this jibes with the immobility of the image Nancy posits in "The Image–the Distinct." It seems closer to my initial feeling about the dynamism of the imagination. Anyway, here Nancy speaks of the force of the image and its relation to forms:
Under this force, forms too deform or transform themselves. The image is always under a dynamic or energetic metamorphosis. It begins before forms, and goes beyond them. All painting, even the most naturalistic, is this kind of metamorphic force. Force deforms (and so, therefore, does passion); it carries away forms, in a spurt that tends to dissolve or exceed them. The monstrous showing or monstration spurts out in monstruation.*
*The word monstruation comes from Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: "Communication is the attempt to restore, through the repetition of some sign, the intensity of an affect to which this sign is connected, but phenomenally this repetition must fail: there would be no affect without this perpetual failure, without the incessant monstruation of signs in the Heraclitian flux that is perceptuality." See his Esthétique du chaos (Auch: Tristam, 2000)
(ibidem, and page 142, note 10, emphases in original, my bold)
To see the violence Nancy sees in the image requires acknowledging a kind of violence without violation. I'm not sure that I can ultimately accept such a broad definition of violence, though I won't close the book on it. (It's curious that intellectuals would feel that their truths are violent. I'm keeping my eye on those intellectuals.) That leaves us with a discussion of the force of the image and the question of forms or, especially, deformation. Is it right to call this force of the image deforming? If the force of the image is truly metamorphic it might seem that it must do violence to forms. Does the image's being the other of forms ("The Image–the Distinct," p. 3) mean that it does violence to forms? I'm not sure of this. I doubt that the imagination makes a study of the forms left in its wake. The consciousness that would see the imagination as destructive of forms must be retrospective or reflective, and I would be cautious about the assimilation of such a consciousness to the imagination. Do forms and imagination share the same consciousness at all? This is a difficult question.
Can there be a metamorphosis prior to forms? I'm wondering if Nancy hasn't misidentified the force of the image. Perhaps form itself introduces violence into the imagination, or the expectation that form creates and which cannot be fulfilled manifests itself as a kind of violence. The force of imagination itself however, were we to allow it to flow without imposing forms upon it, may not be violent. It may not violate forms because forms and the force of imagination don't really touch on each other, and it's really only a belief in forms that misleads us into thinking that they should be in contact. Monstruation then would represent a distorted view of what happens in the imagination, a view from inside the form, from the inside of a repetition destined to failure, a view from outside the image. But I am not sure of this line of thinking. I have to seriously consider Nancy's suggestion that the image has no inside (ibidem p. 11). Wouldn't it follow that the image has no outside?
Let's take up the idea that the imagination touches upon forms. To reiterate, if the force of the image is prior to forms what is the sense in calling it metamorphic? What would be the problem with regarding the imaginataion as morphogenetic? (Is the force of the image not being violent a problem?) If the force of the imagination is indeed prior to the emergence of form would it be prior to the existence of a morphogenetic field? (Could the imagination be just such a field?) By the time a mnemic entity can survey it the morphogenetic field is littered with broken and ruined forms. Who destroyed them? Who created them? Who can remember whence the forms came? How could the imagination be capable of anamnesis?
If monstruation has an other it is kaleideation. Kaleideation also speaks to the failure of repetition, yet it keeps going. The kaleidoscope is its symbol, its instrument and its perspective–how odd. Can we avoid being spectators of our imaginations? The deformations of kaleideation are invisible to us, if they ever in fact take place. Nonetheless, the kaleidoscope gives us a sense of being able to witness the imagination's metamorphic force. Collisions without horrific consequences? It seems that now I'm only looking at the metamorphic force of the imagination with one eye. Where did I put that other eye?
Labels: form, imagination, Kacem, kaleidoscopes, Nancy