Monday, December 08, 2008
I'm going to quote an extended passage from Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, and your first reaction is going to be like, Man, he doesn't get it. People are telling him as plain as day, but he just doesn't get it. Actually I think he refuses to get it. He has it in his mind that it's his calling not to get it. In this respect he is a dedicated professional and must therefore be taken seriously. He is in fact putting himself out there. He knows the music, in the sense that he has studied recordings, observed performances, talked with performers, and read various studies of the music. He is an interpreter of the music, yes, but above and beyond that he is a critic. He values the act of making judgments about music and about musicians. He is anything but stupid about what he does. Your response to what he does, a response I am sympathetic to, is something he has already thought about, albeit perhaps not in a way that you and I would agree with, but he has thought about it. Here's the passage, concerning John Coltrane's practice of inviting young musicians up on the stage:
But Coltrane seemed not to be able to help it. Rashied Ali tells a story on the subject. He remembers playing at the Village Vanguard with Coltrane in 1966 and being asked by Coltrane, in the club's back room before the gig, what he thought about Frank Wright, the young free-jazz tenor player. He knew that Ali and Wright were friends, and Wright, who had come to the club that night, had independently approached Coltrane about the possibility of sitting in with Coltrane's band at the club. Ali reacted skeptically.
I said, "Aw, man, he ain't playing shit."
He looked at me. I said, "Man, he ain't playing shit."
We go out on the bandstand and the first thing he does is say [to Wright], "Hey, man, come on up."
In the dressing room, after it was over, he said something I never forgot. He said, "I don't care what a cat plays. If you're into music, there'll be something you hear [in that musician] that you might like. One note, one sound, that you might like."
How does one react to such a deeply impractical statement, coming from an artist at the top of his game? Do you laugh? Do you tell him that he is wrong? (No, some musicians really aren't worth wasting time on.) Do you argue with him? How can you do anything other than try to take his advice, even if you fail? As an addendum to that story, Ali added, "From that day to this, I've never put a musician down for anything."
And what of Frank Wright? Until his death in 1990, he distinguished himself as almost the last of a breed by his devotion to the principles of power, loudness, maximum nonmelodic screaming-through-the-horn. He adapted a small part of Coltrane's sound himself, and that was enough for him. Later [presumably not later than his death], he said: "No motherfucker can tell me what I have to play, and I know I'm right because what I do is countersigned by master John Coltrane who accepted me at his side by calling me 'little brother.'"
(pp. 106-107)
The critic's inegalitarianism with respect to making sounds apparently underwrites an egalitarianism with respect to criticizing sounds, but this is not the whole story. Criticism itself must be enabled in a gesture that violently disfigures the object of criticism, a gesture that places music in the category of art rather than life. "If it's [art's] truly good and powerful, it deserves to engender a thousand misunderstandings" (p. 174). This is how the sophisticate says "let a thousand flowers bloom," but we mustn't let the modesty of saying "misunderstandings" obscure what is claimed by the conditional clause. What is being implicitly claimed is that no musician, not even John Coltrane, is, through the practice of making sounds alone, in a position to determine whether any assemblage of sounds truly rises to the level of being good and powerful. It's saying as much as that truth is decided upon, because there must be a decision behind any truth, on the model of an adjudication of verbal contradictions, through criticism, and though the critic might claim an allegiance to poetic truths, indeed a fondness for poetic truths, it is criticism that governs truth processes in his book.
Ratliff dismisses the view that "this music requires new inventions of selfhood" as Romantic in the most uncritical way one can hold Romantic views (p. 172). Calling an aesthetic viewpoint Romantic hardly suffices as a critique; the statement "this music requires new inventions of selfhood" is not invalidated so easily, yet I recognize that in making this point I risk misunderstanding or, what may be worse, misrepresenting Ratliff. He himself tells us that Coltrane is not on record as ever having used the word "art" to describe his life's work (p. 60), which again reinforces the point that Ratliff's criticism is anything but ignorant. Consider this maxim: "whenever Coltrane either started playing more notes or fewer, something was happening inside him" (p. 47). Ratliff sees such changes as "signs of growth," growth as an artist, naturally, but indeed growth, and, it must be pointed out, inner growth–whatever that could mean. Or consider this statement: "even some great artists must endure their own tedium"(p. 31). Isn't there some confusion here between artist and critic, I mean in saying that Coltrane had to endure his own tedium? And why shouldn't there be this confusion? Artist and critic are cut from the same cloth, verso and recto of the same process of decision. When Ratliff says that any musician's sound is a "full and sensible embodiment of his artistic personality," a definition he qualifies, in an elegant turn of phrase that decides for us what truly matters, as "a mystical term of art" (p. x), and then turns around and criticizes an philosophy–before saying "aesthetic" we should want to explore the feeling of music and let that guide us–which takes seriously Coltrane's ambition to be a force for good by requiring that listeners reinvent themselves, then we know that he is being anything but uncritical. Criticism is the soul of his enterprise. Does criticism then intrinsically do violence to egalitarianism, even as it says let 998 flowers of misunderstanding bloom (for the artist and the critic have been exempted from the tedium of a thousand flowers, the latter for having an understanding, the former for being subject to criticism)? Is criticism intrinsically uncharitable–on the one hand of course not, for there is some charity in Ratliff's criticism, arguably a modicum of charity towards Coltrane. Yet how do we do charity to panecastic methods of expression?
I won't say, not even in so many words, that it is egalitarianism that would lead me to be charitable in my reading of Ratliff, nor will I claim that a desire to be charitable has broken through my own tedium as a reader. How should I name my studies in such a way as to show they are not irrevocably estranged from Ratliff's criticism? There's a wildness to Ratliff's criticism. I acknowledge it knowing only too well that I cannot possibly properly acknowledge it. At the same time there is an assiduousness that I recognize as belonging to my world, one might even say a sedulousness in the sense of being devoted to expression if not in the name of logomachic truth then expression in the absence of deception, plain expression, plain poetry. Some of Ratliff's judgments lead me to ask whether Ratliff must free himself from this assiduousness in order to practice his criticism, but I don't mean by that question to grossly imply that his judgments are unstudied, instudious if you will. I resist making that judgment myself for my own good, for my own practice of assiduousness, our shared assiduousness. What is this distance between my intellect and the antagonistic impulse that might be called critical? Is this distance also critical? Studious? Is study in the end only so much rigamarole, or does studiousness demand that we, that somebody, break through the rigamarole of study? It must be thought that we could be seduced by our own devotions, beflummoxed by our own plain truths. Must it be studied?
Labels: Coltrane, criticism, music, panecastics, Ratliff, reading
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Irigary, in a criticism of Hegelian dialectic, recommends a turning away from "an absolute saturated with language. . .in order to return to the absolute silence that the respect for other as irreducible to oneself calls for" (Between East and West, p. 100). She continues, "Negativity is then applied to the absolute itself as the accomplishment of the subject, an absolute reduced not to nothing but to a silence attentive to the other" (ibid.).
I'd like to give a moment's thought to the possibility of a meontic mode of silence, a mode of silence that invites us to hear what isn't voiced in order to better hear the voice. (It is appropriate to speak of voices, to hear voices in these words. We are indeed speaking in interpersonal terms. At issue is something like an egalitarian imperative, what Irigaray refers to as "horizontal transcendence," and the whisper of a radical panecastics that would resituate negativity, thought and the question without the violence of a depersonalization.
Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that the duration of silence is dialectical in every direction. Naturally. The attentionality of a silence is dialectical in every direction, open to interlocutors from all corners, speakers of the between, so it is might be expected that its duration should be multidirectional or polyvalent. Is this true of even the most intimate silences? The nature of the most intimate of silences is to not be widely known. That limitation too represents a kind of meontics. Maybe to be intimate is to be incompletely answered in a special way, to not know all of the valences of a silence's duration, to not let them be known.
Where would our interiors be without silence? Could we then build an interior without attention to others? This is an anxiety I think many people have, that one can indeed build build an interior away from all attention. People fear being trapped, and at the same time they fear a threat to betweenness. Perhaps though it is a question of durations. One attention span does not perfectly synchronize with another. Silences overlap, perhaps even lay askew. They seem not to attend to each other, and for a moment at least, the each other is thrown into doubt. Where would each other be in the absence of attention? Well, let's not rush to fill every silence with a lack of attention.
Will silence tell us whether it masks attentiveness or inattentiveness? Will words?
Labels: dialectics, Irigaray, listening, panecastics, silence
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Verbal sequencing may be broken by an impulse–perhaps an impulse belonging to somebody–to think otherwise. Would such an impulse then be pathological?
Panecastic translation, to be communicative, would have to consist of something other than brute transpositions.
An idea of distributive meanings might be helpful, a distributive idea of distributive meanings. Disambiguate.
If one does not feel the impulse of a meaning, one is without that very meaning. That's a transposition. Does it leave room for questioning? Can we question that which has not been lost? In what sense is something lost when only its verity appears to be lost? Is there ever anything we can find by losing its verity? Does our transposition leave room for true ambiguity? Can we be true to ambiguity on anything like an equal footing?
The breach, when it's at home, means the impromptu thought. It means, among other things, thinking on the spot rather than on the basis of first principles. It is not a call for the destruction or negation of principles. It does call upon a capacity to step away from first principles, and an ability to think otherwise which may lead to a practical negation of first principles, were practice dialectical, a fact which would have to be posed and decided in practice, or, perhaps it might be said, in the breach. Just as the breach brings us to think urgency or exigency–and also a certain kind of indigence that would pull us back from the boundaries of thought–so it brings us to think the impulse. Do we give in to the impulse? A distributive idea of pulsation.
How do we let the impromptu be?
I say in a thousand ways that the aleatory encounter is a high ideal that few reach in practice, but when will I learn?
For what reason do we say that misunderstandings are pathological, abnormal, accidental, or, in the jargon of the sociologist, dysfunctional? When I call academic disciplines "curiosities" I am playing with the professor's mYrror. However, if things like discursive formations exist, we might rather wish to not represent a professorial self at all. On the other hand, perhaps we have evidentiary reasons to inquire after connections between distributive misunderstandings and professorial selves.
Who is the self we know through misunderstandings? How does meeting this person impact our habits of feeling?
My interest in the misunderstanding is not merely descriptive but rather therapeutic. I would like to alleviate the suffering that comes–perhaps indirectly, belatedly for sure–from having understood too much, even while knowing that I feel compelled to reach for further understanding. I should be careful of taking that feeling with me into any effort to understand. A compulsion to disappear.
Why wouldn't a distributive misunderstanding be therapeutic? Under what circumstances should we want to make an effort towards misunderstanding?
My problem with placing the iter-able before the iteration, which is generally a problem with intellectualism, amounts to this: I won't assume that the things I have made essential to my life are also essential to your life, because if I were wrong it would feel as if something essential between us had died. My world has more than enough grief as it is.
Labels: dialectics, improvisation, Kristeva, meaning, misunderstanding, panecastics, paths, pulsative function, repetition
Monday, June 23, 2008
Someday repetition will be thought as a panecastics.
Someday it won't be possible to think that the meaning of the word panecastics changes by being repeated without realizing that repetition has changed by becoming panecastic.
Labels: panecastics, repetition
Jacques Rancière says, "Understanding must be understood in its true sense: not the derisive power to unveil things, but the power of translation that makes one speaker confront another" (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. pp. 63-64). If I ask for an end to confrontation–I may not ask alone; to name one name I may have Corradi Fiumara to hold my hand–will you accept that as my translation of Ranciere's idea? Is there a nonconfrontational way of facing one another, or a completely nonconfrontational addressivity? A lapidary addressivity? A simple bringing into contact? (In any event, Rancière himself thinks somewhat along these lines, proposing an alternative to the metaphorical equation of reason with combat.)
And what of my translation of translation? Is there at work in translation a power that asks? A power that asks one speaker to listen to another? Give up power, I hear?
I have a will to translate salto mortale. What would it say to delay leaping into it?
Have I ever denied your acrobatic powers?
Let me catch you with my arms of nonaggregation:
One can say, if one likes, that truth brings together. But what brings people together, what unites them, is nonaggregation. Let's rid ourselves of the representation of the social cement that hardened the thinking minds of the postrevolutionary age. People are united because they are people, that is to say, distant beings. Language doesn't unite them. On the contrary, it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate—but also puts them in a community of intelligence. Man is a being that knows very well when someone speaking doesn't know what he is talking about.
(p. 58)
Do I understand irony correctly?
What a happy troupe we are, we who are distant.
It is because we are distant that we identify with the funambulist. But we empathize as well as identify. We hold our breath. We gasp. Would we empathize if we were up there on the same rope trying to hold our balance? That is, must we find a moment for empathy, or are empathies immediate? Are empathies immediately distant?
Don't credit me with too much irony, by the way. Please.
Words are doors to the soul. Have I ever been through those doors? Imagine a door marked Gregarious.
Words about the poetic virtue:
The impossibility of our saying the truth, even when we feel it, makes us speak as poets, makes us tell the story of our mind's adventures and verify that they are understood by other adventurers, makes us communicate our feelings and see them shared by other feeling beings. Improvisation is the exercize by which the human being knows himself and is confirmed in his nature as a a reasonable man, that is to say, as an animal "who makes words, figures, and comparisons, to the story of what he thinks to those like him." The virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing. "Knowing is nothing, doing is everything." But this doing is fundamentally an act of communication. And, for that, "speaking is the best proof of the capacity to do whatever it is." In the act of speaking, man doesn't transmit his knowledge, he makes poetry; he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates ans an artisan: as a person who handles words like tools. Man communicates with man through the works of his hands just as through the words of his speech: "When man acts on matter, the body's adventures become the story of the mind's adventures." And the artisan's emancipation is first the regaining of that story, the consciousness that one's material activity is of the nature of discourse. He communicates as a poet: as a being who believes his thought communicable, his emotions sharable. That is why speech and the conception of all works as discourse are, according to universal teaching's logic, a prerequisite to any learning. The artisan must speak about his works in order to be emancipated; the student must speak about the art he wants to learn. "Speaking about human works is the way to know human art."
(pp. 64-65)
I hold open a door to your adventures. Can I hope for more than vicariousness? I wouldn't risk standing in your way, or tripping us both up, for the sake of a merely vicarious adventure. What are the true poetries of shared feelings? Rancière points down the "long path of the dissimilar" (p. 67)? The poetry is not the dissimilar but the path.
What do we know through the poet? Whom do we know? A person not content to feel, but who must impart feelings.
Instead of translation and counter-translation I will speak of panecastic translation, a translation in which each party brings something to the work of translation. Panecastic translation is a dialogic breach, a working of the gap between feelings and expressions. Panecastic translation assumes that each and every utterance is translatable. It may then resemble a form of piracy.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, dialogism, equality, Jacotot, panecastics, Rancière