Thursday, November 20, 2008
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about" (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, No. 203).
"The way up and the way down is one and the same" (Heraclitus, DK 60).
When we follow a path do we follow an image of the path or do we feel the path directly without any mediation of the imagination? I mean our everyday experience of following a path. Although we are able to immediately feel something that could be called a path, provisionally, awareness of such immediate feelings tends to be extraordinary. We can cultivate divergence from the image of the path, just as we, in most cases without clear awareness, cultivate a convergence upon the image of the path. In either case perhaps we walk a path our imagination has laid out for us. (Yes, we can speak of not walking a path as irrealization of a(nother) path, as well as as an irrealization of walking a path, i.e. the path allows itself to be not-walked, or irreally walked, in multiple ways. Walking is a labyrinth of paths....) In a real and vibrant sense we walk in our imagination. Is this walking in our imagination a parallel walking, a walking that walks alongside actual walking? (Does such a parallelism–representation as such–only appear as an artefact of philosophical reflection, whereas in the raw walking and walking in our imagination are one?) Is this walking in our imagination what should be meant by saying "walking"? Or is it something else entirely? You tell me.
I'm of the opinion that mostly our abilities, the bulk of our abilities, are dormant. We don't feel the need to break paths, so we don't. Is sleep an ability? Should we be able to sleep our way into the breaking of a path? How else? What would lack of preparation have to do with breaking paths? Quick. Extemporize extemporization.
When we're following a path are we making good use of our imagination? Do we imagine in accordance with an image of the imagination? We should feel exhilarated by our imagination. Could it really be imagination itself that would keep us from feeling exhilarated by our imaginative exercises? Sometimes I realize that all my images are dull. That sucks.
"The way up and the way down is one and the same."
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."
Labels: habit, Heraclitus, imagination, improvisation, labyrinths, spontaneity, wandering, Wittgenstein
Friday, June 27, 2008
Nancy talks about the ostranenie of the photograph, how it captures the familiar and strays into strangeness ("Nous Autres," in The Ground of the Image, pp. 100-107). At length:
Such is the straying and secret I am of the photo. Thus it does not say, "I is an other"; rather, it proffers the wholly other "I am" whose text consists in "we others." It remains to be asked whether there is ever any I am that is not laden in the depths of it-self with innumerable we-others: but that is perhaps exactly what the photograph charges itself with uncovering, with suggesting. Each "subject" in the photo refers tacitly, obstinately, to all the others, to this prodigious universe of photos in(to) which we all take ourselves and one another, at some time or another, this colossal and labyrinthine phototeque in whose depths there stalks–like a Minotaur–the monster, the monstration, and the prodigious image of our strangeness. The encounter is always monstrous, or monstrating, ostensive and threatening, invasive and evasive in the same moment, straying in its capture, released in being grasped. This is not a dialectic, or else it is the point–the seed or grain–of madness that vibrates at the heart of every dialectic, the labyrinth that disturbs its progress and throws it off course.
This grain, or this labyrinth, is called a body. A photograph is a rubbing or rubbing away of a body. We others, as others, are bodies. When we meet one another, we are bodies. We are in each case the brother or the sister of the Minotaur's human body, and it is this body's blood that flows through the beast's head. The bodiless, for its part, is the same, the self-same, hidden behind its body, the dimensionless point of spirit, the empty reference of a formal "I think." But what makes the photograph possible (and what once made people believe that it could capture spirits in its gelatin) is that in the photo it is a question of the body: it is the body that grasps, and it is the body that is grasped and released. It is the body, its thin surface, that is detached and removed by the film. This is the physics and the chemistry of the instant, the force of gravity of the click, this curvature of space and this impalpable lightness of a vision that precipitates and coagulates into a thickness of skin, a density of touch. The contact and the tact of the photographic click detaches a new body each time, an instantaneous body, unstable and fixed in its instability, as a loving or a suffering body, desiring or fearing, which is surprised and overtaken by pleasure or pain. We others, we difficult bodies, delicate bodies and exposed skins obscured by their own clarity, bodies gently pressed and released by another body, by its eye, its finger, its uncertain thought of being and appearing, which suddenly comes to take its place in us (others), as in the cavernous recesses in which it will carry on its rumination.
(pp. 106-107)
In the following paragraph why does Deleuze put "passage" in quotation marks?
The extreme mobility of the phantasm and its capacity for "passage" have often been stressed. It is a little like the Epicurean envelopes and emanations which travel in the atmosphere with agility. Two fundamental traits are tied to this capacity. First, the phantasm covers the distance between psychic systems with ease, going from consciousness to the unconscious and vice versa, from the nocturnal to the diurnal dream, from the inner to the outer and conversely, as if it itself belonged to a surface dominating and articulating both the unconscious and the conscious, or to a line connecting and arranging the inner and the outer over two sides. Second, the phantasm returns easily to its own origin and, as an "originary phantasm," it integrates effortlessly the origin of the phantasm (that is, a question, the origin of birth, of sexuality, of the difference of the sexes, or of death. . .). This is because it is inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin. Our early problem, "where does the phantasm begin, properly speaking?" already implies another problem: "where does the phantasm go, in what direction does it carry its beginning?" Nothing is finalized like the phantasm; nothing finalizes itself to such an extent.
(Logic of Sense, p. 217, my bold)
The instant labyrinth passes in the direction of adventure, in the direction of agility. To be a witness to its passage would I have to be haunted? Growing comfortable with transcendence would be an indulgence were it not for this sense of haunted/haunting, this sense of whispers.
Perhaps for the Epicurean the simulacrum represents the ultimate adventure, a greater challenge than suffering itself. However it should be doubted, by which I mean it should not be doubted perforce but with the sense of responsibility or commitment we should bring to our shoulds, to the extent we can do so prior to the constitution of any should. To live amid superstitions is to force the mind to suffer. Is force real? Possibly what compels us to dwell amid simulacra is the force of our own doubt. On the other hand "dwell" may be a poor choice of words. Do we exactly pass among simulacra? Such a passage would not be an Epicurean notion but an adventure. I'd like to believe that talking about how such a doubt exists would be an adventure, but I rather sense that you may feel as if you've talked doubt to death. Maybe instead of adventure we should speak of sidestepping, as if nobody had already made an adventure out of the detour. All of our conversations may be haunted that way too.
Agility is more real to me than Unconscious Thought or its Conscious Thought, more real than either the body rubbed away or the body I am left to inhabit, and impressively more real than any zone of difference between the two. Am I left then with a fantastic that can't "pass"? Why should I feel dismay that the instant labyrinth would be a passing thing, or a kaleideation of passing? What's its passing to me? What's its haunt?
Allow me a doubt about the instant. Perhaps the instant means no more than a copula, a bringing together of two affairs, two detours. I feel it necessary to decouple the instant labyrinth from the labyrinth of the straight line. Perhaps any affair is a celebration of the aleatory, but as I've noted before, celebrants of the aleatory are often uncomfortable with the aleatory encounter. It's as if we needed the copula to enable the affair as affair, and perhaps we only recognize the aleatory as it is carried on alongside; its birth would then be in the copula–the beginnings of a paradox I reckon, but perhaps one that we can happily set aside for just a moment, content to simply take note of a discomfort. Do we meet the instant Minotaur in profile? Is the instant labyrinth properly traversed?
Labels: Deleuze, imagination, labyrinths, Nancy, transcendence
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Simha Arom agrees with Jean Molino's definition of the musical: "Whenever sound is shaped and recognised by a culture, it is musical" (quoted in African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, p. 147). By this definition we could, though it would run counter to the task Arom has appointed to himself, hear language as musical. We would stumble into trouble on a few points, for instance on the question of differentiating language from culture, which might also call into question the differentiation of language from music and with that the whole project of differentiation, perhaps especially as it is conducted in tandem with a project of thinking by analogy, or amidst analogy.
Sometimes every word is troubling. I probe into words and wonder about the transmiguration of forms and also their persistence (and also the and also), and I do so, in part, because words are tools I think with, and perhaps that gives me trouble. I am troubled by thinking with. What does it mean to think with, or to think by? Thinking about thinking with, in a wee hour, a bout of psychasthenia welcomes another inhabitant of the horizon of thinking. Is this the figure of a muse? Trouble itself? A list of troubles: music, culture, recognoscence, shape, sound.
The musical. You could hardly be blamed for objecting to the personification of thought's other, or, whether or not it means the same thing, its with. (Before we cast ourselves as the feminine of thought, a distinct alternative, we should settle the matter of personification.) We don't yet know what a sonus is, so perhaps it's premature to think of carrying it through, though we may yet find ourselves doing something like that, carrying a sound through to music, or possibly by music. (The interchangeability of by and with?)
Does music call forth sound? Sound may have its own raisons d'être, but what are its reasons for being musical, for being shaped and recognized by a culture as such? Does music dramatize? Does it have its theatre of the labyrinthine and its masks, for perhaps resonance is the destination of sonance and also its journey and its origination, a calling forth. Music's calling forth of sound would be less spectacular than Dionysian, we can imagine, but nevertheless it plays in the same amphitheatre as spectacle and also chorus, the double theatre, the labyrinth of threads and dancers. Its purpose obscure, its dramaturgy amounts to this: a calling forth to airs. The singer's mask, the resonance with listeners and listening, what Nancy refers to as the whole articulatory cinema of the voice (which we insist on calling its theatre, sung and staged before it is cut up and framed, but, here Nancy is most insightful, drawing the face), which is not around the face like an atmosphere, but labyrinthine, that is to say connected to the hip bone, to the knee bone, to the ankle bone to the ball of the big toe, grounded in poises: airs. A ball of airs: entrée, adagio, variations, coda. The disco of words (poussette of the breath) never ceases to astonish, to vary forms that defy pronunciation and at the same time rasp true: larynx (λάρυγξ), diaphragm (δια- + φράγμα), a form which invites us to anatomize the ancient, phrenes (φρένες), and hence phrenasthenia, a weakness of frenzy, of the Dionysian, or of Mynde, a coming unpoised, disequipoise—how quickly the figures recompose themselves.
Culture (adagio). The truth of culture is that it is not a person. To even call it an it is deceptive. Were we to conceive of culture as an it, as a neutral person, we would recognize a defining characteristic: it takes its time. What we affectionately think of as ancient Greek civilization is still becoming civilization, still becoming Greek, still becoming ancient. It takes its time. It veritably drawls. We speak of cult-ure (Kult-ur, though we might have to reclaim a meaning) to call attention to, rather than an instance of caring, an activity of care, an activity that extends even beyond the seasonal, though we can use the seasonal to remind us of the time it takes, to get a foothold on what it means to take time, what it means to till. To think by culture is to become a witness to the intermarriage of the fast and the slow, and to let things into and out of our hands. Culture is not nurturing. It has no womb, no matrix, no biomechanical integuments of its own. It is precisely nurtural. It is in our hands, and, alternatively, out of our hands, or so to speak. It can't be dissociated from passage. That is, it takes its time.
Recognoscence. You know the dilemma. You recognize it. To know is already to know with, already and also again. Turn it on itself again: to recognize is already and also again to recognize by culture. How will you recognize the muse?
Shape. Would a departure here be on a theme of variations? Depart we must. The thought must occur that plasticity itself is a metaphor—feel free to worry about which way the action flows, about what it means to shape by culture. Let's leave form aside for a moment and pla-y with shape. To shape is to skop, and it is skopping (the activity of skops, commonly misspelt as scops) that nurtures its meaning. (Is skopping an end in itself? Wait, please.) Perhaps to nurture is to blur a line between helping along and allowing to be; perhaps it strikes a balance. The skop steps out of the synkairotic, skip skop, and so gives passage to it. The skop becomes, through donation, all about passage, passage through and through. The skop is all over that thing, a virtuoso of passages.
Sound is how we know the world has depths—or, rather, before we can know what a world might be, sound is how we know depths. It would be stupid to consign sound to surfaces, though it would be equally stupid to deny the surfaces their due. Sound unravels the how of depths. The howl is the sound of sounds on the slow, the slow tongue. The slow tongue calls forth the drawl, the ripple of the howl. Does the howl have a bottom? What is the nurture of our inquiry? To hear the howl of existence in a ripple, to know disturbance at its reaches: to sound sound as a double resonance, without priors, a true rap. It was already and also again called forth by passage, the door held open by the figure of the skop, and maybe in that double theatre the figure was doubled too, and you could feel the vibration of trouble itself. Sound.
Labels: Arom, labyrinths, Molino, music, Nancy, shape, sound, Terpsichore, vibration
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Jacques Attali's The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom (trans. Joseph Rowe, North Atlantic Books, 1999) has something to say about the nomadism of the global elite and those who emulate their lifestyle. (I will likely have more to say about the nomadisms of the imminent future in the more imminent future.) I get the sense that Attali is looking to the labyrinth to make sense of his own not quite sedentary life. One of the things he feels uprooted from is the Enlightenment, which he, unobjectionably it seems to me, associates with an aggrandizement of the straight line. Attali feels that life, the world, time and perhaps being do not move in straight lines. In the first place then his study of the labyrinth is a celebration of the meander, and the philosophy of the meander must be understood as a critical alternative to an inherited metaphysics of straight lines. Attali tells us that "time itself does not flow but is spread out in space with comings and goings, with spirals and blind alleys, and distant proximities as well as illusory distances," and he goes on to say that "nothing is more urgent than the learning of patience and the pleasure of losing oneself, of ruses and detours, dances and games, so as to discover oneself as capable of fashioning one's life as an ironic work of art–before one is able, if ever, to pass on its secret" (p. xxviii).
Sensualto has not previously existed as a word except as a typo. Henceforth it describes a style of movement that meanders or gently wavers, and also a style of warm melismatic singing. It also describes anything suggestive of sensualto forms or gestures, for example, "A sensualto minotaur was engraved on the ewer." As a direction in music it means exactly "softly, with gusto." It connotes sinuosity and masonry. The philosophy of sensualto reveals that it has no end; it's history is labyrinthine and has nothing to do with its origin. For all that, sensualto is frequently unicursal.
Labels: Attali, labyrinths, peregrinations, typos
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Using the example of the caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland, Deleuze lays out the principles of the ideal game (The Logic of Sense, "Tenth Series of the Ideal Game"):
- There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule.
- Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw.
- The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a single cast which is ontologically one.
He offers some further description:
The unique cast is a chaos, each throw of which is a fragment. Each throw operates a distribution of singularities, a constellation. But instead of dividing a closed space between fixed results which correspond to hypotheses, the mobile results are distributed in the open space of the unique and undivided cast. This is a nomadic and non-sedentary distribution, wherein each system of singularities communicates and resonates with the others, being at once implicated by the others and implicating them in the most important cast. It is the game of problems and the question, no longer the game of the categorical and the hypothetical.
(pp. 59-60, Deleuze's emphasis)
The ideal game can only be thought as nonsense, and for that reason "it is the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure reason" (p. 60). Is freedom then nonsense? Is freedom the affirmation and ramification of chance, the reality of thought and the unconscious of reason? We'll see if that isn't beside the point.
Deleuze revisits the eternal return, noting two types; one which is cyclical, the other which occurs on a straight line. "Do we then sense the approach of an eternal return no longer having anything to do with the cycle, or indeed of the entrance to a labyrinth, all the more terrible since it is the labyrinth of the unique line, straight and without thickness" (p. 64). I'm a bit confused about the relation between the line of Aion and the living present:
The present does not contradict the Aion; on the contrary, it is the present as being of reason which is subdivided ad infinitum into something that has just happened and something that is going to happen, always flying in both directions at once. The other present, the living present, happens and brings about the event. But the event nonetheless retains an eternal truth upon the line of the Aion, which divides it eternally into a proximate past and an immanent future.
(p. 63)
I'm lost. I'm looking to the living because Deleuze asks whether the terrible labyrinth of the straight line commands an ethics of Effects (p. 62), and I can imagine at least an ethical relation to living beings. On what model, though, do I think an ethics of Effects? Not morality, for that is the model for games with other principles, and I have the impression that Deleuze has laid out the principles of the ideal game in order to get at a new model for thought and conduct. The ideal game is "without responsibility" (p. 60). The thought implies that the ideal game has no relation to ethics. We could look to an ethics inscribed in its principles (which must not be confused with rules in this case), but if there is an ethics in its playing it does not involve responsibility. Do voices carry in the labyrinth of the straight line, calls and responses, any voice whatsoever? It has no thinkness. It is not a tube, but precisely a line. Would Deleuze's ethics of Effects then be an ethics without communication, or would it be totally enveloped in communications and resonances? Does it matter to whom something communicates? Does the labyrinth of the straight line communicate with the living present?
How is that we have personal relations with ideational configurations? The question's been passing through my mind and that may explain some of the questions I am posing about the ethics of Effects. Deleuze's philosophy, it may be said, is not personalistic. However, the effect of calling for an ethical relation to Effects–and in addition Deleuze's idea of the eternal return asks to be thought of as ethical–is to call forth a person for whom projects and relations can be ethical. This may be a profoundly self-centered ethics, about the proper care of the Thinker; yet on the other hand it may be extremely broad, commanding us to accept responsibility for farflung Effects. I can only speculate. The labyrinth of the straight line has me tied in knots.
For those who might say my concern for the personal in an ethics of Effects is out of place, I am genuinely curious to learn how an ethics without persons is being thought. We might begin with the question, What is an ethical relation to nonsense?
Labels: Carroll, Deleuze, ethics, labyrinths