Corradi Fiumara sides with pensiero debole ("weak thought") without acknowledging its weakness. She says that "the qualities of attention, tenacity, patience, respect, resilience, rigour and farsightedness that contribute to the development of 'weak' thinking constitute a way of relating that is based upon strength" (The Other Side of Language, p. 71). The real target of criticism, she contends, is not "strong" thinking but power, and she holds that the body of knowledge associated with power and violence is in fact quite fragile (pp. 68-69). So what would it mean to recover the "strength of the listening word" (p. 64)?
Logomachical culture chains us to dilemmas, enchantments and perversions that we can't cut loose from by means of alternative disourses. It would be utopian, Corradi Fiumara argues, to expect those who wield discursive power to disarm themselves and listen to those who yearn for a different kind of "noetic coexistence"; the best that can be hoped for in the culture of the deaf logos is a political turn-taking (p. 53). And yet she does hold out hope that proper hearing "might perhaps induce an evolutionary transformation in the coexistence of philosophical schools" (p. 54). On the one hand Corradi Fiumara says that the logos is speaking and hearing together, and on the other hand she is not proposing a discursive formation that would supplant other discursive formations. She says quite clearly, "No tradition of listening could be identified that draws upon or belongs within a specific institutionalized community" (p. 67). It's as if she were proposing an accomodation with discourses that didn't fall prey to their enchantements and their violence. She says that a force is released in listening that cannot be converted to a power without disappearing (p. 61).
"A listening atmosphere is not improvised," Corradi Fiumara says. "It is, on the contrary, the product of a strenuous process of conception, growth and devoted attention" (p. 60). When I say "improvisation" I mean a strenuous process of conception, development and devoted attention, but I take her point. She means that we need to cultivate a thinking that can sustain "the innovative concreteness of experience. Some of the myths that sustain culture can only be disenchanted by a way of thinking that may draw upon the source of its own strength, not so much in the form of an introspective isolation as in a solidarity of reciprocities that will allow for authentic listening" (ibidem, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis). She wants us to do away with the myth that the listener is stupid, unable to wield discourse and therefore unworthy of reciprocity. We have an ethical obligation not only to those who say something to us, but to those who listen (pp. 61-62). The figure of the unenchanted listener appears rather heroic in Corradi Fiumara's critique, and yet the unenchanted listener is not a solitary hero. The listener "is not isolated in the sense that he is connected once again to a network of vivid, moving and complex dynamics" (p. 61).
So I am back to the question of Corradi Fiumara's utopianism, such as it is. She doesn't offer an alternative discursive formation, or an ideal intellectual community. She does though hint at an alternative to Western culture, one that doesn't confuse strength and power, and recovers, in listening, "the primal vicissitudes of thinking" (p. 64). Since this is not a question of the introspective individual, how then do we cultivate a common attitude of listening outside of any cultural institution? Do we throw every new thinker back on the primal vicissitudes of thinking without calling therefore for an exclusion of the thinker or the vicissitudinous? Can we have a culture without institutions? I'm not sure that's what Corradi Fiumara is suggesting, but the question arises.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, listening, pensiero debole
Gemma Corradi Fiumara reminds us that the "auscultation" of written texts has been limited to inhabitants of the Gutenberg Galaxy (The Other Side of Listening, p. 30). Given the number of books published annually, does it make sense any longer to speak of inhabiting the galaxy of books? In my corner of the galaxy there are hundreds of books, and tens of thousands in the nearest institutional library. I'm hard pressed to make it through one book a week, though I may consult many more. Nowadays an avid reader with a high book life number could make a dent in Project Gutenberg, but just a dent.
Can we still then speak of communities of readers? That may be a dishonest way to characterize academic intellectual spheres. Professors, translators, editors (one can hope), publishers, reviewers, librarians, students, bursars, airline attendants, code monkeys, authors: all their specialized, unequally valued skills and more are required to make up a contemporary intellectual community, or a minor bookish form of life. Perhaps the practioners of a particular bookish form of life agree upon a language, as Wittgenstein might say (Philosophische Untersuchungen I, No. 241). Are there more and more reading lists that don't contain within their pages all the language one needs to thrive in a bookish form of life? Do contemporary bookish forms of life accept more and more slippage in their languages? Along with every "These are the books you should read!" comes a "Those are books you should not read!" If I sit down to read The Libidinal Economy it will not be because anybody has recommended it to me but because I intend to enjoy it, which is another point I mean to get at. Can "These are some books you might enjoy" institute an agreement on a form of life sufficiently sophisticated for academic culture?
If listening involves an openness more fundamental than the openness of the question, as Gadamer suggests, then Corradi Fiumara's question of why this has this not been a topic of philosophical discussion acquires a certain probity (pp.28-29, citing Truth and Method, pp. 324-325). (I'll note that the if might excuse her from engaging in a pensiero forte.) Corradi Fiumara's philosophy of listening celebrates anomalies (p. 49). The anomaly of the openness of listening appears as anomaly from within a paradigm of hermeneutics; I'm not sure if she means to abandon the hermeneutic paradigm altogether, or, if so, whether there is a name for the paradigm that thinks listening. It may be consistent with a kind of pensiero debole. Corradi Fiumara notably makes frequent references to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as well as the works of Gianni Vattimo, and Priogine and Stengers. I'm unsure of whether she has a deep commitment to postmodernism; I'll wait to read her more recent books before probing that question further.
Corradi Fiumara draws our attention to the pleasures of auscultation with an argument that reminds of Kuhn's idea that discoveries cannot unequivocably be attributed to particular individuals at particular moments (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 55). She says:
In an open organization of knowledge, even the experiences of pleasure and displeasure might become intsruments of philosophical research as they no longer function as ends in themselves but are amenable to be used as intermediate passages towards a more complex equilibrium. An experience of pleasure may not be confined to the status of an occasion of enjoyment but may be transformed into the announcement or uncovering of unapparent features in the complexity of interactions. Similarly the notion of pain may no longer be relegated to the noncognitive level of frustration but may enhance an awareness of features and factors which cause disturbance. The less pleasure and displeasure are regarded as mere fluctuations of one's inner life the more they can be introduced and used in the enrichment of our philosophical concerns.
(p. 46)
Kuhn and Corradi Fiumara, in their critique of the individual and of the occasion, are operating under a shared ethos of late Twentieth-Century thought. Beyond that, I think Corradi Fiumara has appropriated Kuhn's critique into a metaparadigmatic thinking of her problem (which also speaks to a kind of ethos). There are, nonetheless, elements of a paradigm in her thinking: "complex equilibrium," "complexity of interactions," and elsewhere, a deterritorialization of knowledge (p. 51 and passim). Are these in harmony? That is, if we begin to think a deterritorialized pleasure of auscultation, are we still interested in equilibria, or are we interested in disturbance? Do the pleasures of reading precisely disturb the complex bookish forms of life even as these forms of life celebrate more and more fluid bodies of texts? Is pleasure intrinsically a more unsettling basis of agreement than vocabulary or "the texts themselves"?
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, Kuhn, pensiero debole, pleasure, reading lists, Wittgenstein