Monday, September 07, 2009
Consuetudinal tool use, evidenced in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), and humans, is probably a synapomorphy of the family Hominidae (see van Sheik et al. (1999), "The Conditions for Tool Use in Primates: Implications for the Evolution of Material Culture," Journal of Human Evolution, 36: 719–741; the article's hypothesis is that social tolerance is a condition for the development of material culture (i.e., consuetudinal tool use)). How strong is the evidence, then, that "an unprecedented level of behavioral developmental plasticity" is a hominini (Pan/Homo) synapomorphy (van Sheik (2004), "Book Review of Behavioural Diversity in Chimpanzees and Bonobos, Journal of Human Evolution, 46: 517–518)?
The possibility that consuetude represents a phyletic elaboration of plasticity doesn't preclude the tracing of our understanding of plasticity back to a primitive consuetutindal tribalism ("phylism"). We face a dilemma. The natural history of plasticity, like the natural history of reflexive consciousness, appears to leap out from the physis that precedes it. We can no more reasonably deny that an understanding of plasticity arises from human experience than we can deny phyletic origins of plasticity. A revolution has occurred at some point, to choose a metaphor, or, to choose another, the birth ("nature") of something new on earth, something rather paradoxical. However, vestiges of a parthenogenic fantasy may constrict our thinking here. Reciprocally, fantasial thoughts about plasticity appear to be constrained by the tribe, operating through a sphere of shared affects which steer the thinker back from frontiers of knowledge. We need to know how flexible plasticity is—and generally how plasticity works, what it does—before we can profitably determine that x or y degree of plasticity (supposing developmental plasticity admits of degrees, which there is some basis for if one looks at, for example, weaning times, or the period it takes to learn rudimentary locomotive skills, not to mention consuetudinal tool use) represents an unprecedented level of plasticity among Hominidae, Primates or, indeed, Animalia.
Labels: apes, chimpanzees, culture, development, evolution, humans, orangutans, plasticity, tools
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Lived depth is both meaningful and labile, David Morris tells us (The Sense of Space, hereafter Sense). Morris distinguishes lability from malleability and metamorphosis, and explains that by saying lived depth is labile he means that "it is open to alterations that propagate from within our experience of it, where the kinds of alterations are themselves open to alteration" (p. 19). Among the rudiments of lived depth we can further note plasticity, the unfixity of thresholds, bodily movement, or, better perhaps, dynamic, chiasmic movement. Morris helpfully defines "dynamics": "Dynamics are simply shifts in self-organization; the intrinsic ordering of perception always reflects the interaction of body and environment, and changes to either will, as a matter of course, produce changes in self-organization" (pp. 15-16). As an aside, does sense in movement rehabilitate Sinngebung?
When we make the leap from the givenness of the chiasm to the givenness of the }∅{, now understood as a modality of our acceptance of the chiasmatic and coexistential extraordinaries, our way of accepting wild meanings, even those that may be our own—the flavor of the spasmoreal is everywhere now—then we come to question the givenness of the autopoietic. In what depth does it unfold? Naturally we are imagining a physis that has yet to be studied except in fragmentary, inchoate crossings. Can there be a betweenness that doesn't be tween with(in) an encapsulating space. Possibly a (between)space (s p a c e) of multiplicities: an autopoietic space, let's imagine (}∅{, too, for kicks—of course we ask about its givenness—does the attribute ever give rise to the eidos?).
Intersubjective spatiality: "One's sense of depth and space is not simply rooted in the crossing of one's body and the world, but in the crossing of one's existence and an other's existence" (p. 25). I note a radical difference between our perspectives, Morris' and mine, far more radical than the substitution of the * and its spasmoreal multiplicity of relatioms for the pattern of the X. Morris wants to attend to the grounds of the encounter with the other (p. 28). I'd rather see }∅{ as a condition of the encounter, at least provisionally. I don't know whether the encounter can be grounded without being ground to a halt.
Labels: chiasmus, epoché, flux, Morris, motility, physis, plasticity, spasmoreality, spatiality
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Scarry asks us to imagine a face. "It may seem than in shifting from the motion of skating to the motion of smiling, we have veered away from the subject of circles, but we have not, for when the face breaks into a smile, the mouth moves into a small upward opening arc" (Dreaming, p. 208). Levinas asks us to imagine a face that would break through the image of the face, a face that would appear above and beyond phenomenality. This metaphysical face that transcends appearances is a face that speaks.
To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form, to present oneself in a mode irreducible to manifestation, the very straightforwardness of the face to face, without the intermediary of the image, in one's nudity, that is, in one's destitution and hunger.
(Totality, p. 200, Levinas' emphasis)
If we could ever turn off the imagination, everpresent as life, we might be able to discern whether faces ever appeared without touching on images. The imageless appearance perplexes. Perhaps, however, it is intermediacy rather than the image per se that has vexed us so. What appears to be a phenomenon of the persistence of images may be an aspect of intermediacies, in which case we might prefer to approach an understanding of living with images, their betweens and their middles, before thinking we know what an image does to the point where we could identify appearances that weren't images.
I imagine the face of the beloved. Images appear. That much makes sense. Are appearances irreal? Is the face of the beloved any less a real face for appearing as an image to me? Well, it is not the face of the beloved until it speaks to me and breaks through its image? How long does that last? Are there pauses in conversation? Perhaps a mistake has been made by Levinas in isolating a purely phenomenal form. How many images in life are purely phenomenal forms? My ruminations on the imagination have led me towards the idea that the imagination, rather than being an activity I can easily start and stop at will, by a process that might generate purely phenomenal forms, is instead integral to my life at every moment. Its rhythm doesn't belong to the will in any unscrutinized sense of that idea. My imagination surrounds the spoken, interweaves, intermediates. Has enough been said about the betweens of the said, or the betweens of the said and the unsaid?
Labels: face, imagination, Levinas, plasticity, Scarry, speech, transcendence
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
"In the physical act of writing, the medieval Englishman Orderic Vitalis says, 'the whole body labors' (Clanchy 1979, p. 90)," (Ong, Orality, p. 95). We should be able to speak meaningfully of technologies of speaking, to recognize that the spoken word is not natural, that it does not well up from the unconscious but comes through learning, and indeed conscious effort, and so the interesting question of how technologies become "interior transformations of consciousness" (p. 82)–Ong may be quite right, given certain understandings of "interior," "transformation" and "consciousness"–can be assayed on a level field, where we can finally appreciate Ong's argument that writing is not merely a copy of speech.
"Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal" (p. 101). Total situation? (We'll get back to that. Levinas may be instructive.) Aren't we really playing here with two concepts of verbality, one that contains itself, needed to begin making sense of phrases like "spoken words," and another that exceeds itself (and a third that contains its excess, and so on)? Verbality overflows. It's wordy. It's an easy enough concept. Is there then a totality in which the superfluence of verbality would be less than super? Why wouldn't verbality overflow its total situation, as, according to Levinas, language allows the other to do? Dribbling the basketball is always a modification of a total situation which is more than repeatedly bouncing the ball off the floor. Isn't it? So how do we know the situation is total? Does that simply mean it contains all the stuff we want might want to talk about in reference to dribbling (verbality, etc.)? Are we just being lazy? The whole body lazes in the physical act of blogging.
Quoting Ong again, because it's worth remembering: "Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expressions, and the entire human, existential settings in which the real, spoken word always occurs" (p. 47). Pragmatics, the subdiscipline of linguistics that studies how meaning is tied to situations of language use, examines aspects of language that appear to be far removed from the word yet by definition are understood to be linguistic. Such a course of study would enrich easy definitions of the verbal, but there is a danger of letting our own mental exercises interfere with a grasp of the phenomenon at hand: we start with an impoverished concept of the verbal, the lone word, in order to be able to arrive at our enriched concept, the word in its habitat, only to realize that we had already assumed the latter, which suggests to us that we not describing so much as constructing what resembles a reality–though it has a recursive dimension whose reality we are uncertain of–and perhaps our construction says more about us and our existential setting, which we can't really be sure is a total situation, than it does about the phenomenon it purports to address. What do we mean? How do we mean? Can we use science to help us live more meaningful lives? What is the role of criticism in our intellectual life? Is our intellectual life agonistic like a drama? Does it put reality on hold? Are all realities performative? If it seems that there are questions of the day, why does it also seem that some questions recur? How do questions, including forcefully answered questions, come to be asked anew? Arguably we suffer from a superabundance of ignorances, a postmodern condition; yet many thinkers surely have reasons for disregarding previous answers, established philosophical arguments and refutations. We may also suffer from a superabundance of anachronicity. My current reading of Orality and Literacy, in important respects an anachronistic text when it first appeared in 1982, is not altogether current. I admit to being uncertain about the times I live in. Does anybody care anymore about a critique of "total situations"? Is my simple critical attitude simply retrograde?
Another tack. Does one need to be able to transcend a condition in order to modify it? Technology modifies consciousness and, in the form of the word, it modifies a habitat. (This would be my difficulty, not Ong's, who doesn't theoretically regard the spoken word as a technology). So technology itself is transcendent? Perhaps we have merely found a lazy way to say that the human being modifies its consciousness as well as its relation to its wider milieu by the use of technologies which may have originally been intended to modify only one consciously thematized element or a selected few elements in the milieu. In addition to saying that technology has horizons, a lazy thought, we are also saying that transformations of consciousness take place on the horizons or at the margins of consciousness–but there is a problem of recursion here, as we are uncertain of whether horizons of consciousness precede thematizations without themselves being thematized beforehand. More, do forms have horizons, or do we posit forms in order to eliminate horizons? If the latter, do we posit horizons of form only after forgetting that we had meant to eliminate them in the first place? If consciousness is nothing like a form–something approaching pure plasticity, which would have to far more plastic than Ong allows human consciousness, though it would perhaps be "fit for molding," hugging the figure of the whole body that labors, working itself into the word–then we must not mistake moments in the plasticity of consciousness (rhythms, it might be said) for transformations. It is not merely the degree of human plasticity that's at issue here, or the degree of hardening imposed by the acceptance of cultural forms–we have some basis of agreement. Rather, the circumstances of the loss of plasticity are in question. For instance I have argued that Ong fails to appreciate the ramifications of the learning of language in early infancy; his sense of cultural horizons is limited to two principal types, which I reject. If "form" possibly eliminates horizons in order to be itself, "plasticity" requires horizons, requires that form exceeds itself–however, form already had in itself its own excess. It was already transformation, or rather, we needed to understand transformation in order to be able to talk about form. So what relation is there between transformation and the effort of the whole body–the total body?
Labels: body, form, language, Ong, plasticity, technology
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Miguel Leal writes, "For [Catherine] Malabou, the essence of plasticity resides in its dual substantive condition that designates that which is capable of giving but also of receiving form, or, to be more precise, in the 'double movement, contradictory and thus indissociable, of the emerging of and of the annihilation of the form,' thus taking its place in a between-two in which the very idea of creation is at play" (On Plasticity: Sound Cartographies). As I peek into various senses of the plastic I feel I should say again that I don't look to etymologies for originary meanings but rather for alternative meanings or perhaps varieties of a meaning in the anticipation that, if I am fortunate, a conflux of meanings or thoughts will emerge to stimulate further thought and discussion, even if it is only discussion amongst myselves. Today I seek to momentarily develop, to borrow a term from Dominique Païni (whom I just today learned about from Leal's essay) a plastic awareness of the plastic awareness, the latter of which I will identify with the imagination. The idea of the oscillation of the emergence and the annihilation of forms calls back to Nancy's thinking about the metamorphic force of the image and the rapport with the image. There is some cause for linking the idea of the plastic with the idea of the image. The word plastic comes from the Greek πλαστῐκός which means "fit for molding" and also, when said of persons, "gifted in sculpture." (I'm relying upon the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott for the meaning of Greek words.) It is related to πλάσσω, which means "to form, to mold" and, in one of its senses, "to form an image of a thing in the mind, to imagine." (Mold, btw, comes to us by way of the French mouler which means "to hug the figure.") Another meaning of πλάσσω is "to mold or form by training or education." A πλάσμα is, among other things, an image or figure. The Greeks thus help us think of the image as something shaped and also, perhaps, shaping. What qualities must the sculpted possess in order to sculpt the sculptor? Leal touches on the idea of a thickness necessary for any plasticity. He says that "in order for matter to show its plasticity it is above all necessary to grant it thickness." The double movement of imagination hugs the figure and draws out the form, unfolding in a milieu the emotional thickness of Play-Doh or the temporal thickness of the plasmatic stream. It is perhaps utlimately the thickness of metaphor, which, in kindness to Leal, I will regard as a πλαστῐκή τεχνῶν.
What do we want matter to say to us? Does the giving and taking of shape happen outside of shape? Is a plastic awareness of plastic awareness necessary for plastic awareness in the first place? Would the plasticitiy of the plastic awareness of plastic awareness be metaplastic or hyperplastic? How far can we stretch plasticity? Is there a point to deformation, or is it all just a stretch? Is the give and take of shape essential to shape? Is formlessness capable of receiving form or might it be only give-and-take that formlessness gives-and-takes, never merely taking nor merely giving. Is the imaginatively gifted also the imaginatively taken? The imagination is necessarily always formless in one aspect, a form having been taken, even if we are unsure of the exact point in the exchange of forms at which imagination begins. To be imaginatively taken is to be absorbed in the exchange of forms, which for practical purposes means cultivating a plasticity with respect to the question of origins. One thing I think we want matter to say to us is that it isn't exhausted, that it's ready to play some more.
Labels: form, formlessness, imagination, Leal, Malabou, Païni, plasticity