Monday, March 02, 2009
Lefebvre writes:
One could reach, by a twisty road and paradoxically beginning with bodies, the (concrete) universal that the political and philosophical mainstream targeted but did not reach, let alone realise: if rhythm consolidates its theoretical status, if it reveals itself as a valid concept for thought and as a support in practice, is it not this concrete universal that philosophical systems have lacked, that political organisations have forgotten, but which is lived, tested, touched in the sensible and the corporeal?
(Rhythmanalyis, pp. 44-45)
We should be critical of our concrete universal, put it through its paces. In his discussion of dressage, which he says bases itself on repetition, Lefebvre notes that repetition, while apparently being simply mechanical in animals, is ritualized in humans (p. 39). Perhaps ritualization would explain why so many thinkers attribute transformative powers to repetition. Our transformations are, however, not beyond scrutiny. "Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world," yada yada yada. Undo repetition and the world comes undone. The person is lost, barely a person at all. Should we then be surprised to find that belief in repetition is strongest among the highly educated? Surprise. Lefebvre says, "Dressage fills the place of the unforeseen, of the initiative of living beings" (p. 40). Improbably one day surprise will not consort with spontaneity, nor spontaneity with initiative. Recognizing such an improbability is a first step in reclaiming initiative. There may be no end to surprise, foreseeable or otherwise. What is the transformative power of reclamation? What power do we have, really, to transform surprise or spontaneity? Yet initiations are surely within our power–unless we have given it over in advance somehow to repetition. A paradox: even our reclamations from repetition would base themselves upon a method, a dressage, certain ritual movements, numerated or numerative movements–yes, sooner or later we are going to have to get down and dirty with ordinality, and that may hold a surprise for us if we are holding fast to a certain figure of mind-body unity. Can initiation even be said to begin without ordinality? A cop out: initiation is undertaken in rhythm with ordinality–and why not? We don't know whether ordinality is a purely noetic function that could possibly exist at a remove from kinesis. Lefebrvre argues that each segment of the body and each organ has its own rhythm which is in accord or discord with the others (p. 38). Let's keep that in mind as we ponder whether ordinality yields rhythm, or whether rhythm yields ordinality–surely these are concepts of different orders, they could be explained if only properly ordered. But in fact I'm not so sure. In the same way repetition may be said to be an abstraction from concrete rhythm, rhythm may be an abstraction from a more concrete polyrhythm. By a twisty road we learn rhythm from polyrhythm. Or so we believe. My heart beats without my thinking about it, yet I put it through its paces, and can exercise some smidgeon of control over it, set one rhythm in accord with another. Is this smidgeon enough to sustain an illusion that I have mastered rhythm instead of merely succumbing to it? Is ordinality itself a succumbent gesture? (And so we begin to peel away initiative from spontaneity.)
Labels: body, learning, Lefebvre, numbers, rhythm, spontaneity
Friday, November 21, 2008
Who is Emmanuel Levinas, whose centennial seems to have been marked, posthumously, only yesterday? I'm reading texts by Levinas, complicit in a work of evocation, elicitations, replication in every sense. Should I–out of respect for the person, or a superseding fidelity to meaning– suspend the tradition of talking about the author in the present tense? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy restricts itself to speaking only of Levinas the philosopher. Is such a figure of the thinker required in order to read thoughts in the best sense, in order to read by the author? It must be said that, given an alternative configuration of textual life, thoughts could be published anonymously. I suspect that when we characterize we often wind up thinking we know far more than we can adequately be responsible for. (The more you know about me, the more you may be inclined to regard my suspicions with suspicion. I exhibit symptoms. My love of close reading is born of necessity.) "Words are disfigured or 'frozen', when language is transformed into documents and vestiges. The living word struggles against this transfer of thought into vestige, it struggles with the letter that appears when there is no-one there to hear" (Levinas, "The Transcendence of Words" (trans. Seán Hand, in The Levinas Reader, pp. 143-149), pp. 148-149).
Is the figure unambiguously good, an unequivocally positive valence? The word "figure" also has ghastly harmonics. A dissonance rages between the figure, not just the figure of the author, but also figures of readers, all manners of figuration on the one hand, and, on the other, living, the living word, and the discordance plays out not just between these polarities, but amid them, each within the other, the living word within the figure, the figure within the living word.
Here are some words for Yusef, whom I surmise will be ambivalent about bifur/bifurre, but who nonetheless may appreciate Levinas' call to criticism: "The primordial status of the notion of erasure affirms the simultaneity of multiplicity, and the irreducibly ambiguous nature of consciousness" (p. 146). Who am I kidding? These words are alive for me. And hasn't Yusef in an important sense also already animated these words for me, illuminated them one might say, with his discussions of bifurcation? I don't go into reading alone, and I don't come out alone. Levinas won't dare and contradict me. (Go ahead ask me about living grammar. (I taunt taunting, fwiw.)) For Yusef, for real: "But in these bifurcations and erasures Leiris is less concerned to go down the new paths opened up or to latch onto the corrected meaning than he is to capture thought at that special moment when it turns into something other than itself. It is because of this inherent ambiguity in bifurcation that the very phenomenon of the association of ideas becomes possible" (ibid.).
For Michael–but not just for Michael, for all those who read along with Michael, including those (those figures, am I calling upon nameless figures too?) who also read along with me:
By creating beauty out of nature, art calms and quietens it. All the arts, even those based on sound, create silence.
This silence may be the result of bad conscience, or it may weigh heavy, or cause dread. This need to enter into a relation with someone, in spite of or over and above the peace and harmony derived from the successful creation of beauty is what we call the necessity of critique.
(p. 147)
I find it necessary to criticize the following quotation, and I call upon Levi, who will also be critical, to momentarily suspend his judgment, for our sake, in the event that there is in fact a sense in which this position means something more to us than a hegemony over the real, the material, or the natural: "The sounds and noises of nature are failed words. To really hear a sound, we need to hear a word. Pure sound is the word" (p. 148). We can appreciate Levinas' dialogism even as we maintain our critical distance: "because thought is symbolic, ideas can link up to form a network of associations. From then on. . . this network, further enriched by all that the signs of writing can then evoke, is important not for the way it displaces one idea onto another, but because it assures the presence of idea in another" (p. 146). How can we not hear in every dialogism the echo of other dialogisms? Or is it pure dissonance? Perhaps we need to hear what Levinas is saying more fully, what he is saying in these texts by Levinas, because he too has a sense of what "real" means.
As I review this last quotation, my thoughts are with Shahar, while at the same time they wander back over the territory of thoughts about the imagination that has become familiar to me–a certain quotation from Bachelard comes to mind:
The use of the word wrenches experience out of its aesthetic self-sufficiency, the here where it has quietly been lying. Invoking experience transforms it into a creature. It is in this sense that I have been able to say elsewhere that criticism, which is the word of a living being speaking to a living being, brings the image in which art revels back to the fully real being. The language of criticism takes us out of our dreams, in which artistic language plays an integral part. Certainly, in its written form, it in turn generates new criticism. Books call up books–but this proliferation of writings halts or culminates at the moment when the living word is installed and criticism blossoms into teaching.
(p. 148, my bold)
I butcher a chicken, I thank the chicken. Foul thanks. How can I thank Levinas? How can I? Levinas the creature? Never. Too creepy. Yet isn't there a sense in which I desire to be such a creature, a "man who speaks"? Chthonic replicant, reader of the autochthonic. Whichever way I turn it appears I am forced to abdicate learning, to subvert a loyalty, or turn my back on a critical engagement. Levinas? The inexpressible sadness of echoes? Are those my words now? Hardly. I don't keep them from you, fellow students of melancholy. Nor do I ask you to accept them uncritically. It is an irony that "the inexpressible sadness of echoes" says something about the sadness of echoes. I feel it.
Labels: chicken, dialogism, echo, language, learning, Levinas, reading, silence
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Hazrat Inayat Khan has inspired me to unlearn to repose. Proper repose is an unlearning of posture, habit, mood–and the art of repose must surely be an unlearning of repose as well. Anyway, here's a mysticism drop:
What is wonderful about music is that it helps man to concentrate or meditate independently of thought. Therefore music seems to be the bridge over the gulf between the form and the formless. If there is anything intelligent, effective, and at the same time formless, it is music. Poetry suggests form, line and colour suggest form, but music suggests no form.
(The Mysticism of Sound and Music, pp. 113-114)
Inayat Khan surely knew his talas and ragas, and he was well aware of a variety of musical practices, including those that might be called highly formal. So what does he mean by saying that music suggests no form? Maybe Inayat Khan is being inconsistent, because he also says that music is a bridge between form and formlessness. Perhaps he is expressing a truth of improvisation, a truth that is premised on unlearning. Or, perhaps he is expressing a truth of mysticism, also a truth of unlearning. No doubt his mysticism colors the way he thinks about music, about what it essentially is. If we say that music is formless, it seems we're talking about our experience of music rather than how it's put together or analyzed outside of performance. I wonder, if thought necessarily takes form, how can there be an intelligent encounter with the formless? I find this puzzling. Is philosophy up to the task of unlearning? Am I?
Labels: formlessness, Inayat Khan, learning, music
Monday, August 20, 2007
"An event cannot be neatly isolated from previous and later events without losing its essential character as an event, a character of 'emerging from' and 'leading into' which accounts for the continuity of the process. An event is thus not the result of an abstraction out of the flow of time, but a constitutive dynamic element of the flow itself" (André De Tienne, Learning qua semiosis, SEED Journal 3(3), 2003). When I suggested that we could look at something like spacetime as a cosmic event, I basically meant that it has a beginning and an end. Whence it emerged and whither it leads to are a mystery to me. I'm baffled by the thought that there could be a course of events of which timespace is merely one event. Allow me to be baffled for now.
The events of our lives take place amidst a multitude of processes. An event can be seen to emerge from any number of prior events and lead to any number of subsequent events. What holds it together, what makes an event an event, is a narrative. Narratives are eminently contestable, a fact which may be obscured if we take a process for granted, just as it would be if we took events to exist in isolation. On what philosophical grounds can we decide that one process is material while others are immaterial? How do we evaluate narrative choices? By what criteria? For example, is a sophisticated narrative better than a simple narrative? I think what matters is what one can learn by it. One could retell a sophisticated narrative and learn nothing by it because it only touches on what one already knows. This is a question of the practice of narrative, and of the attitude one takes towards narratives, rather than a question of the intrinsic value of narratives. Yet if narratives have no intrinsic value, I'm hard pressed to say how exactly we can learn from them. Do we learn by placing values on processes and events, or by drawing values out? How can we say that we draw values out of our own narrations? There is a possibility that in narrating a course of events we might surprise ourselves. Learning from narration might then be about sustaining the ability to be surprised. Does evaulation have a beginning, a middle and an end?
Labels: De Tienne, event, learning, narrative
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Deleuze says that differences in the system of language should not be thought of essential oppositions, which introduces the point of view of a representational consciousness, but should rather be seen as the entry points to a "transcendent exploration of the Idea of the linguistic unconscious" (Difference and Repetition, p. 204). He cites approvingly the work of linguist Gustave Guillaume, whose Foundations for a Science of Language I've just requested from the library. A somewhat different take on Guillaume comes from Marc André Bélanger's Chaos, Complexity and Gustave Guillaume. I'll withhold judgement on what Guillaume is really all about, but since the paper has come to my attention, I want to look at what Bélanger has to say about the infant's exposure to language, which stands in contrast to the way Cavarero has portrayed vocalizations between mother and child in early infancy.
When a child learns his mother tongue, he does so by trying to reconstruct the system behind the utterance he hears...[T]he order of the system comes not only from the "aggregated behaviour" of humans as speakers but also from the mind of the infant (Latin: "unable to speak") learning his tongue. The child will make all the intuitive generalizations he can based on the evidence, and will form, reconstruct, the best system he can. As he grows up, he figures out through a process which entails both induction and deduction (and, as Pierce would say, abduction) the different categories of words and what each can and cannot do.
("Chaos," p. 7, emphasis Bélanger's)
In many respects Cavarero presents the more realistic account of infant vocalizations. The first facts of language that are learned by the infant are its rhythms, its musicality, its embodiment and its relationality (For More than One Voice, p. 180 and passim). However, I wonder whether she doesn't go too far in her banishment of the subject (see this passage for example). If Bélanger's infant subject seems a little too advanced to be credible, the alternative of no conscious subject of language learning also appears to be, well, a little too larval. Most infants eventually do learn to speak, and it's difficult to imagine this happening without any glimmers of consciousnesss whatsoever.
Deleuze has much to say about learning, but I wonder about the strategy of placing everything and the kitchen sink in the realm of the unconscious. When all is said and done, what does consciousness mean to Deleuze?
Labels: Cavarero, Deleuze, Guillaume, infant, language, learning, strange attractor, the unconscious
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Does the Biranian body ever learn to do anything, or does it immediately know everything it knows about movement, everything it needs to know? Henry's Biranian children are like this, already knowing how to run and play. We say an ungulate hits the ground running, but in reality it takes a few minutes for the young ungulate to learn how to walk. What's going on in these first few moments? Does the ungulate learn to use its body, or does it learn its body in some non-instrumental way? If we accept the immediacy of the felt movement, how do we then account for the body's learning? So much of the human's ontogeny is given over to learning, I'd say the human body is the learned body par excellence, the body as it is learned. Can immediacy do justice to the body as it is learned?
Labels: body, Henry, learning, Maine de Biran