Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The synkairotic moment is not carved out of time by logos. If any carving is done it is with the synkairos, in the sense that one can accomplish something with an opportunity, a coming towards port. Said another way, it is synkairos which gives us the "not ever" in never allowing us to forget that the logos is an ongoing work. In one sense synkairos appears to be parachronic, which might, in a paroxysm of sloppiness, be taken as a substitute for achronia; however, this appearance can be explained as an artefact of mismeasurement, i.e., only by misapplying the methods we would use to measure chronos, were we to grant that such an entity exists that would adequately correspond to the concept, could we be led to the conclusion that synkairos is achronic.
So what is accomplished by saying synkairos? Well, the word springs from a dissatisfaction with synchrony, and it must in some sense be associated with all that the synchronic would stand for. That can't be denied. I'd like to make it mean something a little less, though, this little twist on the kairotic. The synkairotic captures the sense of the kairotic utterance being ensconced in response. The synkairotic utterance, by which I mean any utterance, is from and towards response, a discursion in the sense of being to and fro response. It is for response. Saying "synkairotic" makes its ensconcings explicit. (Perhaps you can see from another angle why I have such anxiety about thinking repetition?) In the language of opportunity the synchronic is the discourse of the passerelle, the concourse of embarkings and disembarkings that bracket a passage even if we cannot say what that passage means. Any fast distinction between the real and the symbolic may be jettisoned as need arises. The passerelle teaches us that opportunity.
Synkairos is not fictive, then, though it is fictile. The reason one cannot answer a question like "what is the duration of the synkairotic?" is not because the synkairotic is totally made up–again, it is with the synkairotic that made-up things are made up–but rather because if we mean for "duration" or its cousin "durée" to be of any use as a concept we should want to affix it to something permanently whereas properly synkairotic fixings are opportunistic, transiting towards port for reasons that are essentially transitory. They are neither fixatory nor nonfixatory, neither fixional nor nonfixional in any enduring sense. We might precisely say then that synkairos is not presumptively fictive, though fictions may surely be worked out synkairotically. This of course reiterates our initial proposition.
Perhaps I have missed the boat on duration. (I don't ask your forgiveness for showing my mistakes, but perhaps some forbearance.) It is important, if one seeks to understand the synkairotic, that duration be fixable, which also implies, perhaps, that it be unfixable. It seems that there is not a fixed or unfixed state that would be allowed to endure prior to duration. The same logic would apply to ephemerality, or the ephemerus, I think. That is, it may be assumed that duration and ephemerality are mutually exclusive or conceptual opposites while in fact here and now we can apply them to each other freely. This freedom of movement suggests to me that, as with something like affirmative negation, perhaps, the difference between duration and ephemerality, which seems to be carried on in the heart of duration, is not really a matter of dialectics or opposition, but rather it's a matter of two or more concepts inhabiting the same conceptual form, or making the same conceptual passage. Can you say "duration" of things that were thought to have no duration? We come to the concept of duration with other concepts in tow. Fixity, for instance. Yet we can reverse course. We can think duration otherwise than we have been given to think it. We can decouple it even from habit itself, which would keep duration forever in its hold.
If the synkairotic seems to decouple duration from fixity it is not on behalf of a prior (enduring) ephemerality, but only for the sake of allowing other couplings. The synkairotic then allows for the coupling of duration to fixity by allowing for the decoupling of duration from fixity.
I feel I'm in danger of disneyfying duration, but there are a few more words that need to be said about the question "what is the duration of the synkairotic?" The poetic function teaches us that the opposition between the axletree of the synchronic and the axletree of the diachronic cannot be permanently fixed, that the opposition admits of transposition. Well, we haven't even begun to think the diakairotic because we aren't prepared yet to think through passage. Perhaps thinking through the synkairotic will prepare us to think through passage, or perhaps we are avoiding a necessary step. In any case, evidently a doubt can be sustained. An aporia can be sustained. This is an important discovery which may help us address the question about the duration of the synkairotic. Unlike the synchronic, the synkairotic should not be expected to unfold all at once.
The synkairotic moment is multiple, complex. This is not so difficult to wrap our brains around, a complex moment, yet I would find it difficult to specify exactly how such a moment would relate to duration, or to temporality, ontologically conceived. (I won't say "synkairotic instant" because the instant is both overdetermined and etymologically all wrong–the moment does not stand still.) I suspect that there is some temporality at play in the synkairotic. I am playing with it. Yet if I were asked to define it with reference to what, I might rather think it were defined with reference to a complication of whats and whos. This is our synkairotic moment, and who we refers to, dear readers, is never definitively pinned down.
Labels: kairos, temporality
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Having finished Johnson's Listening in Paris I now feel that any apposite critique of Romanticism must come from a posture of having, if not embraced Romanticism, gone hand in hand with Romanticism for some way. Perhaps I wouldn't want to defend Romanticism except for the existence of anti-Romanticism, which leans towards pulling the shade down on what it's really like to have an experience. Our first anomaly evinces itself in recognizing an experience that one would rather not have taken for an experience in any Romantic sense. It points to a shortcoming in vision of *language as a giver of experience, for even though Johnson is a historian who specializes in musicology, the key to his thinking is the idea that "music is a language," and by "language" he means something that, unconsciously and from the outside, constructs experience. (We may wish to credit Johsnon with giving us something more subtle than a simple critique of Romanticism; he means to criticize the conditions of possibility of Romanticism. I would still turn the critique around to investigate the conditions of possibility of an "anti-Romantic" experience.) The specific problem Johnson's discourse raises is this: given an expectation of silent listening, how does one adequately and appropriately communicate one's boredom at the opera without being mistaken for either having a profound experience or for genuinely being polite? At this point I'd like to register my sympathies with elite audiences who feel that their responsivity, their very capacity for formulating and communicating responses to music, which must in only one respect happen both spontaneously and at once if they are to be responses, has been truncated, repressed, or otherwise mired in stupidities and awkward, if all too easy, niceties. Do such listeners suffer from too much Romanticism or, as may be evident were we to take our feelings into account, too little? Bear with me a second. I'm not going to argue that boredom represents a deep experience or an experience any less constructed or more interior than any other kind of experience. I will say that boredom is felt, and, most germaine to our critique, an urge to communicate this feeling arises even when approved codes of expressing such a feeling are not readily at hand. To think this through we must return to the question of response, which now must be thought with a new understanding of readiness, for it is only in one respect that responses are formulated and communicated spontaneously and at once, and that is in respect to the synkairotic and the spasmoreality that pertains to its breach. The synkairotic differs from synchronic in that its at onces are not in binary opposition to the diachronic, and may be stretched and bent in response to exigencies of moment. What we call one respect of response may be better conceptualized as one moment of response. The fact that response has other moments is not obscured or obliterated by the breach of the synkairotic. In actuality the inculcation of stillness (of which silence is but one mode) into the body of the elite listener reveals itself as an extreme kind of violence not because it denies an expression–this would the Romantic conceit of the anti-Romantic–but because it misplaces readiness. This may also stand as a metaphor for zombification, this stillness. We should not think of this zombification, however, in the sense of there being a Difference between Life and Death which may be suspended, but only in the sense of a readiness having been misplaced or even misappropriated. Readiness belongs with the response and with experience at once. Of course in embracing the momentary we must depart from the instant and the infinite experience it has been made to represent. So be it. We cannot listen well while allowing readiness to be restricted to the instantaneous.
Our second anomaly is a straightforward critique of the Boasian linguistic unconscious by Claude Hagège: On the Part Played by Human Conscious Choice in Language Structure and Language Evolution (pdf). (This may appear to be an ordered catalogue of anomalies; I take the existence of linguistic consciousness to be a single fact which any adequate thinking about language would have to account for, so I count it as one anomaly, without ruling out any finer analyses.)
Labels: boredom, Claude Hagège, James H. Johnson, kairos, language, listening, Romaticism, the unconscious
Monday, June 09, 2008
The first skoppic principle (relational architecture) is the breach. As we have seen, the skoppic function transposes a breach of skipping around from the axle tree of the synkairotic to the axle tree of the syntagmatic (syntactic yada yada syntactile yada yada syntacit yada yada }∅{). The }∅{ heralds the Fa Passage between atonicities, the pure diatessarial leap, delfYan sunflower in the myrrour of myrrours, the plagiodelphic breach again }∅{ again. "A monad is the semblance of a world," Massumi says, to which a proper reply might be "}∅{." }∅{ stands for a representation of the breach (transposed into the diatessarial, the mode of its standing for). It is of course the empty set that excludes no members; remember, this is all about shape.
The sheer volume of what is excluded from the breach compels us to imagine a reality without any breaches, as we might imagine Reality without the Unicorn, or more multiversally as we might imagine a reality without a selected molecule of H2O. Well, the ways of irreality are limitless. I won't pretend otherwise. As I picture it, a world without breaches would be a quiet world, a world without spasms, without startles of any note. The reality that pertains to the breach, insofar the breach is pertained—actually it's eminently, if paradoxically, pertained by its own }{—is a spasmoreality. A spasmoreality contains an irreality in a special sense of holding with; it holds with irreality by holding an opening for irreality. Here we are talking about the myrrour of the spasmoreality; spasmorealities as they are lived hold a multitude of openings for irrealities. We should have a precise understanding of reality at this juncture. Reality is the sense of a world's duration (with this necessary proviso: we have no reason to believe that continuity covers all the possibilities of duration). The spasmomonde is the world whose sense of duration is characterized by the startle, or by startles. Picture a world without starts, a dead world. This is the kind of world bracketed out by the breach (and its representations); well this is a paradox (which won't be discussed away) not the least of which because the dead world also pertains to the breach by the same logic that anything pertains the breach, and hence as the spasmoreal and its worlds pertain to the breach. I won't say the spasmoreal and the thanatoreal pertain equally to the breach. How could I know such a thing? A thanatomonde may also describe a world without causality. Ideally, causality should be able to be startled. The reality pertaining to which causalities may be startled must by definition be a spasmoreality. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the spasmoreal opposes the thanatoreal or contains it in any sense other than the sense of holding an opening for it. If we could read backward from the diatessarial (and everything that relates to, everything it elapses) into the synkairotic we would see that the breach holds an opening for itself—its opportunism does not stop at itself, but only startles, which is how it carries half the synkairotic into the breach, as a startle. It's not as if the breach had a reality and its reality were spasmoreality; spasmoreality merely pertains. One might object that thanatoreality also pertains to the breach. What is special about spasmoreality's pertaining to the breach, or to a reality of startled causation? Thanataoreality pertains only through the breach. It has not other avenue of pertinence. Spasmoreality we can't be sure of. It pertains to the breach, and through the breach, but whether it follows other avenues of pertinence is not yet clear. It may be something of a flâneur. How does it pertain? If the reality of startled causation is also a spasmoreality, there is then a sense in which spasmoreality appears to pertain by doubling, which may be autoreplication, or some more familiar form of reproduction. Familiar words spring to mind, but we should be wary of thinking they describe the spasmoreal: viral, virtual, simulacra. Spasmoreality is not genuinely familiar. Probably it doubles itself by a process of meontic renewal, having one flipper periodically/at all times in irreality. However, we would never become aware of inhabiting a thanatomonde did it not pertain to the breach (as well as through the breach). An equality of pertinence can never be excluded from possibility, that is, from spasmoreal possibility most broadly conceived; more narrow ideas of possibility may bypass such an equality altogether. We must be able to imagine that a possibility may be seen merely in its thanatic aspect, or through its thanatognomic signs, even though they will appear to us as dead only by way of the breach, which, in a sense, holds thanatoreality up to its myrrour. The challenge, in the breach, is to discern living relation from revivifying dead relation, or, in an objective mode, the startle from the twitter of a dry nerve. Intuitively this is known by explorers of the spasmomonde and its doubles, which is why the rampike becomes a potent symbol, as delfYan zombies haunt the passageways.
"Kojima is on to something." The words recur. It would be eight kinds of wrong to believe that shape belongs exclusively to the sharing of opportune moment and all that signifies. Shape pertains to the passage between the synkairotic and the }∅{—and so we begin to imagine that the breach doesn't contain everything, that its reality isn't the spasmoreality of all spasmorealities, or any manner of real synthesis of all that lives and dies. There is this business of the from/to structure of experience, or movement of experience, that we can use to characterize the breach. Does it belong to the breach? Is from/to autospastic? Why study the gift? I reckon we shouldn't want to mystify, though there may be depths to plumb, nuances to unwrap, gestures to perfect. The gift requests a certain latitudinarianism. If the breach comes with a from/to, does it wipe the from/to away? Does it send it back?
Shape is given with the movement from the synkairotic to the }∅{; shape is given with the world. We remain totally within the realm of phenomenality, perhaps a lived phenomenality. (There are many sad clowns in the realm of phenomenality; oh well.) I've been saying "spasmomonde" as if its world could be defined by a certain sense of its duration, while it remains possible that a nonsense relation obtains between a world and its duration. If a spasmomonde were characterized by a nonsense of duration, its reality would have to be something other than spasmoreality properly conceived. I'm not persuaded that most spasmorealities aren't in fact improper, and in that sense the myrrour of spasmoreality may well be improper. As I see it a nonsense of duration is thanatognomic (which is why I would caution against allowing virtuality and its cousins to be thought yet). Spasmoreality holds an opening for irreality, and by the same gesture it holds an opening for thanatoreality, though it does not contain thanatoreality in any but this highly special sense, and if we find better ways of talking about continence and pertinence we should jump ship. This holding of openings is what allows shape to be presented, or to present itself, if that's what it does. In any case shape is never given by itself, but always with the world, and never in a vacuum, or what amounts to the same thing, in a dead living space, a space of dead things and furnitures, but always in the passage from the synkairotic to the }∅{, or, as may equally be the case according to the logos of the skop, the passage from }∅{ to the synkairotic, which may indeed be the originary passage, if the breach has an originary—of course we have our doubts.
Could there be a given world given with no shapes, not one measly shape? This is like asking whether there can be a world of no duration. The difference between not having any duration and not being able to make sense of a duration is inconceivably close to pure difference. Is from/to a shape? Is the breach? Always we are able to look at things sideways. Shape however is not what it appears to be seen only from a profile or an aspect; shape always has in its appearance a from-the-inside which makes it shape. We want to know shape in, or better, through the breach. Shape startles. Only a spasmoreality could hold an opening for that which is mondial by neither excluding nor containing worlds, that is, by the breach. Such is shape.
Labels: dolphins, kairos, Kojima, Massumi, monadology, nonsense, shape, spasmoreality, Thales
Friday, May 23, 2008
Does the synkairotic have an inception?
Agamben helps us to say about time what has been on the tip of the tongue. He begins:
Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also—and above all—to 'change time'.
("Time and History," Infancy and History, p. 91)
Agamben finds in pleasure an experience to accompany a revolutionary conception of history. What is the time of accompaniment? Should we also look for it in καιρός, or the kairotic grasp of time. Agamben says, "within itself the cairós distils different times ('omnium temporum in unum collatio') and within it the sage is master of himself and at his ease, like a god in eternity" (p. 101-102). If the kairotic (rather than the thinker—as usual the sages have all the fun) actually does bring together all times, or all conceptions of time, then it would not only be useless to speak of the synkairotic, it would be absurd. Surely there was a paradox in this conception of the kairotic to begin with: how can kairos bring together all times and be a time itself? And further, oughtn't we historicize kairos? Oughtn't we question whether kairos/καιρός belongs equally to the Ancient Greeks, the Stoics and the Post-Industrial Europhones? At this moment, when it is uncertain whether the kairotic can carry all that has been put upon it, dare we anticipate that the synkairotic will fare any better, that it will after be able to carry what we need the moment to carry? Oh, but according to one reading of Seneca to totally inhabit the kairos would mean to anticipate its future, and to dwell in that anticipation; yet perhaps it is in the nature of the moment to allow the future to be. Should we worry about a revolution of the moment sliding into a revolution for the moment? Any time now the whole affair might be dismissed as vicissitudinal, and we ourselves might collapse into vicissitudinarianism. Indeed. Well, the synkairotic is necessitated not merely by the wobbliness of the kairotic but also at the same time by the wobbliness of the synchronic. Amidst all this wobbling superfluity may be the least of our worries.
If the kairotic is a bouquet of times, the synkairotic is the economy of cut flowers. From gardens to homes and every boutique (apothec/ἀποθήκη) along the way: snip, snip, snip. The synkairotic brings together, but it also cuts, and it lays away. The synkairotic neither merely anticipates nor allows the future to be, but it also lays it away.
"The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." (We'll see where Arom takes Jakobson's (and Bachelard's) ideas soon enough.) There is yet another need for the emergence of the synkairotic. Pleasure and enjoyment must be joined, as must jouissance and orgasm. At the same time, any genuine revolution must be synorgasmic. The syncherotic function projects the enjoyment of polyvalence from the axis or selection into the axis of combination. Or something like that. Times change as fast as play. Ultimately I may come to embrace the vicissitudinal, without resentment if not without a tinge of sadness. How will I begin to describe the embrace of the synkairotic?
Labels: Agamben, Arom, Jakobson, jouissance, kairos, Seneca, synchrony, time
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Daniel Stern holds that the present moment in everyday experience has a duration of between two and ten seconds, and is typically around three to five seconds. This is the length of a phrase (of language or music), and about how long it takes to breathe in and out (The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, esp. pp. 44-52). Stern dismisses the idea that in meditation one can expand the present moment beyond the ten second barrier because, he says, "In the meditative or flow states, the idea is to lose the sense of self and for consciousness to maintain a concentrated focus, relatively impervious to other stimulation" (p. 43). This doesn't ring true. The obliteration of self isn't necessarily a goal of meditation, and even when it is, there seems to be something to the accomplishment of expanding a moment of awareness beyond the normal range. A horn player, for example, may practice pranayama solely for the purpose of honing his or her breathing skills. He or she might also experience improved phraseology, rhythm, or the ability to concentrate. All of these skills can be put to use in crafting moments of musical experience that are longer in duration than the normal duration of the present moment. It's fascinating, I think, that there would be a normal range of duration of the present moment, but there will always be people who challenge and exceed conventional limits, even those limits apparently set by their psychological nature. This too is a reality of everyday life.
Labels: kairos, temporality
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
"Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality -- in real or absolute reality, that is" (William James, Pluralism, Pragmatism, and Instrumental Truth). Is the kairotic a special problem for philosophical monisms, or is it only a problem against them?
What's to be gained by comparing the kairotic now to the chronic now? Assuming that James isn't totally out to lunch, the comparison shows that the chronic now glosses over the eachness of nows, that it doesn't allow other nows to be originally nows. What does the kairotic now gloss over?
I can easily say "I can do without transcendence" but can I put it into practice?
Labels: chronos, immanence, James, kairos