Thursday, July 09, 2009
Montiglio concludes:
Silence is never neutral in the land of the logos. Many of its appearances seem to be variants of a similar sentiment, which could be called horror of the void. The Greek world is resonant, filled with circulating voices. On the battlefield, in the assembly, in the theater, in the city as a whole, the voice is an organizing principle. Silence threatens this fullness of sound. As a troublesome, paralyzing interruption of the verbal flow within the speech code of the Iliad; as an impenetrable and concentrated attitude in tragedy; as a sudden suspension of the normal course of nature, silence heralds disruption and provokes anxiety. Ominous silences most often break into cries: the horror of the void fills silence with its opposite, as if to re[e]stablish a lost equilibrium through an overcompensation of sound.
(p. 289)
I'd let this pass in silence but I want to note a possible difference between cultural representations of silence (the logos of silence, if you will) and silence as it actually experienced (the silence of the logos, perhaps). Does the consideration of silence as speech act obviate this difference? In any case can logoi encompass their own silences?
Labels: logos, Montiglio, pragmatics, silence, speech
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Montiglio turns briefly from the study of Greek tragedy to the study of medical texts:
[T]he Hippocratics insistently note the appearance of aphôniê as a most significant symptom. The meanings of this term range from speech difficulties, to a partial or total inhibition of the vocal organs, to aphasia, to the inability to speak on account of a physical lesion. Such an extended semantic field fits within the Greek pattern of calling "silence" not only a total absence of words or sounds, but also their partial presence. Just as the dative sigêi and the adverb siga (in silence) can apply to a bad speaker, that is, to someone who does use his language even though inadequately, the term aphôniê equates all kinds and degrees of speech disturbances with a "nonvoice." In the view of the Hippocratic doctor, patients who fail to communicate as he hopes are simply "voiceless."
The symptom of aphôniê is all the more disquieting for the doctor because he urgently needs his patients' words in order to understand the nature of their illnesses. Ancient Medicine stresses the importance of entertaining a dialogue with one's patient on a theoretical level. A concrete application of this principle, the Prognosis relies on the possibility of a regular communication with the sick, which alone enables the doctor to describe the symptoms of the disease in the most accurate way possible and to formulate a prognosis along with its evolution.
The troublesome character of aphôniê may explain why its emergence is repeatedly marked as "sudden" (exaiphnês). For it is unlikely that the onset of aphôniê was always so sudden in reality, considering the wide range of meanings of this term. As Danielle Gourevitch remarks, here "the observation is somehow replacing its object." To the doctor's eyes, a loss of speech and voice is apparently so fatal a symptom that it seems to manifest itself unexpectedly, abruptly, with no progression or warning: "When she was given a fragrant application of ground meal and myrrh, suddenly she lost her voice and died," writes the author of Epidemics 4 (30). Not surprisingly, this sudden loss of the voice is followed by an equally sudden death.
(Silence, pp. 228-229, my bold)
The disappearance of the voice more than the disappearance of language disquiets. Are all animal species endowed with a voice? To what extent might the voice be "given" through experience, developed rather than merely genetically endowed? Some species we know are able to learn vocalizations—but do they learn the voice itself? Biologist Stephanie Watwood, who studies how social interactions affect vocal development in animals, notes that the signature whistle of the male bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) assimilates to the signature whistles of other males whom they ally with as they fully mature. For females the signature whistle does not change over the lifespan. (See the video labeled "Whistles of Bottlenose Dolphins" here.) Does the juvenile male dolphin lose its voice as it enters adulthood? Is the autocognominal call an indication that dolphins are recognizable to each other by their voices, or does it signal some need for an additional unique identifier because the dolphin's voice alone isn't in fact unique? Does voicelessness represent the loss of the cognomen, the loss of any and all identity? Did the ancient Greeks conceive of disappearances of the voice that didn't symptomize dying, or is it perhaps the nature of conceptualization to remain loosely bound by a constellation of established usages and pregiven meanings, or to move within the ambit of affiliations, to assimilate? No, I rather imagine—assimilation means this much as much as it means an implicitly thoughtless con-formity— humans conceptualize more freely than that, at least as freely as dolphins and a few other types of animals create vocalizations in response to their acoustic milieu.
Labels: dolphins, environment, Montiglio, silence, voice, Watwood
Monday, June 22, 2009
"A philosophy of nothingness," Barbaras writes (Being, p. 121), "is still not realized as long as it defines nothingness as pure nothingness. Nothingness is genuinely nothingness only if it is not nothingness through and through." What is it about nothingness that's not like itself, adulterated through and through? Say that silence is a way of experiencing nothingness. Has there ever been in your experience a moment of unadulterated silence? What would you want to say about it?
Labels: Barbaras, nothingness, philosophy, silence
Monday, June 15, 2009
Montiglio tells us, speaking of ancient Greek tragedy, "Silence often heralds a sudden, and sinister, transformation of one's being, such as the emergence of a pain that cannot be told but only cried out" (Silence, p. 224). Silence and cries represent an homology, rather than an opposition, because both signify the collapse of the logos (p. 225). (I can't help think that attention to the syntagmatics of silence and crying would tell us something more.) Silences, too, are heavy and physical, carried by the body that cries or that will cry. Greek audiences, Montiglio reasons, shared an interpretation of silences "as preludes to destructive outbreaks" (p. 220). Do these vocal outbursts genuinely fail to communicate anything whatsoever? How much space do we want to allow for the incommunicable? Is anything human lastingly unintelligible?
Two aspects of Cassandra's silence apply more generally to the tragic representation of silence. First, breaking silence does not mean making contact; on the contrary, the silent character moves from silence to an incomprehensible and solitary language. Second, silence gives way to a resonant and exuberant voice that overcompensates for its absence.
(p. 216)
Labels: Greece, humans, idiolectics, interpretation, monologue, Montiglio, silence
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
"From its very beginnings," Montiglio says, "a structural aspect of Greek drama has favored continuous sound over silent breaks: the nearly total absence of empty scenes. Permanently inhabited by the chorus, the stage is filled with its visible and audible presence at the end of each episode" (Silence, p. 160). The image of the drama parallels the image of speech even as one informs (interpolates) the other. Today instead of imagery I'll speak of cosmology, a cosmology of the continuous, the continuous drama, the continuous dialogue. Does a euphemistic cosmology by itself tell us anything about what it leaves unsaid? The unsaid must be interpreted. Too true. If we engage in cosmology–is that what we do? Do we do cosmology by engagement? If we involve ourselves, somehow, with cosmology, with the understanding that the said must leave room for response, that the unsaid must leave room for response, even quiet response, how do we account for our understanding? What kind of understanding is it? Cosmological? We have a cosmological understanding of cosmological understandings, we understand cosmology through cosmology. Ah, if that were true we'd be between cosmologies. Perpetually? Alternatively, one cosmology might dominate another cosmology. That's another cosmology. So is the question of the day "How are we instilled with cosmology" or "How do we move between cosmologies?" Are we able to routinely shake ourselves free of cosmology? Given certain cosmologies (the euphemistic cosmology, for example), would it always be sufficient for freedom from cosmology to merely stop talking about the world? This is dubious, but, if so, to free oneself would one have to specify which world of which one were no longer speaking? How?
Labels: cosmology, interpretation, Montiglio, silence, worldview
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Montiglio tells us that Athenian orators of the fourth century, in contrast to Homeric public speakers, "want their voices to be made of a pure disembodied logos, and not of a powerfully resonant substance. . . .From being ligeia, their voice has become lampra (luminous)" (Silence, p. 148). She recapitulates and expands on ligus:
[I]n epic poetry ligus modifies not only the voice of good speakers, but also the song of the Sirens and the dirge of the Muses, thus associating different forms of expression on account of their clear and powerful resonance. As regards speakers, there is no incompatibility between the audible physicality of their voices and the clarity of their words. By contrast, in the classical age ligus is applied to specifically to kinds of music and utterances in which sounds prevail over words: the lovely melody of the aulos, but also, and more insistently, the voices of mourning.
(ibid.)
Ligus, Montiglio says, speaking still of the classical age, "describes voices that are cast at the margins of the city: that of the nightingale, a plaintive song reminiscent of barbarian rhythms; that of mourning women, like the Thebans who pour out their ritual cries over the dead, or like the Suppliants, barbarian women similar to nightingales, who cry out their lament with a barbarian voice"(pp. 148-149). The marginalization of voices ripples–no, the disturbance is deeper. Sundered from sound, wrenched from its body, the voice loses its capacity to legitimately express suffering in public spaces, paradoxically just as further suffering is imposed by force; subaltern dissent is stifled at the cost of a muted logos for everyone, and, consequently, a muted democracy. Passions, any passions, including the passions of the Muses, have become a threat to the web of orders: the political, the epistemic, the linguistic, the expressive, the noetic, all sustained now by not just a denial of vocal power but by a violent reification of speech and concomitant suppression of the real, a devaluing of the real in the economies of the recognized. Recognition. The irony of course is that the voice is the epitome of recognizable of personal expressions, gestures that tell who we are. If hearing consigns us the world and its contingency, as Cavarero says in echo of Jonas (For More than One Voice, p.37), then the deafness codified by excision of voices from the shared logos makes problematic any discussion of a shared world, except in the most rarified, least inclusive settings. I have to stop myself here. I don't want to rely on pre-established habits of thinking in order to assimilate what Montiglio has to say. The dematerialization of language means something to me personally, and I suspect the dematerialization of silence does as well. Silence feels.
Let's pick up again on Montiglio's discussion. Her interpretation of the conceptualizations of the vocal quality of ritual mourning is, naturally, informed by Nicole Loraux's study of ritual lament. She ties work to a conceptual dematerialization of the voice, and also, coincidentally, a dematerialization of the logos.
As Nicole Loraux has shown, the legal effort to reject the vocal expressions of mourning outside the public space is prompted by the political urgency to contain feminine lament, which supposedly upsets civic order by its unbridled affectivity. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the voice of the orator refuses to resemble these voices of lamentation: while the latter are all-sonorous, ligeiai, the former dematerializes by coinciding with the rational content that it conveys. In fact, lampros applies to the logos as well as to the speaker's voice; and persuasive speech, as Athena reminds us, is provided with eyes, with a gaze that emphasizes its rationality. This speech that wants to be manifest to the eye makes itself visible through an equally transparent medium: an immaterial voice, a pure "mirror of thought."
(pp. 149-150)
The nurturing of empathy leads to a realization that we not only acknowledge gaps in soulful encounters but that we feel our own impulse to respond to gaps. I speak now, to be critical of my own thoughts, from experience and from memory, which we may wish to regard in its physicality. Is luminosity an aspect of its physicality? Is it any less questionable for being embodied? Obviously I harbor doubts about the nature of my feelings, my impulses, my responses. Shall I cull the margins of the city for the secrets to my soul? How could that be empathy? Because it would represent a commitment to listening?
Labels: Cavarero, Greece, Jonas, Loraux, Montiglio, silence, voice
Friday, May 15, 2009
Montiglio interprets Pindar's poetics, supplying some broad thoughts about the materiality of sound according to the ancients. "Poetry is a sonorisation of the silent mind, and its coming to being depends on a restless movement of the vocal organ" (Silence, p. 95, her emphasis). And, worth noting in passing: "Reading out loud is a metaphor for both the execution and the composition of the poem. It is only through this reading that poetry comes to exist. Mental writing does not produce a nonrecited poem" (p. 94). Liquid sounds. Dramatic sounds. Sounds too powerful to be human. Did silence ever call to be animated? Somewhere a poem slips out of existence, into the silences that never give birth to conversation. Not even rereadings let us escape oblivion indefinitely. The poem knows that. Every poem secretly knows that. "The 'liquidity' of song, which takes us back to its oral origins, favors a thorough diffusion of the poet's voice"(p. 98). This would be a thespian voice, a persona attached to an arc ever near completion, the figure of sonorous presence, approximating total presence–cut down by skop as foretold. The voice of the ancient poet, though, is it not the voice of a rereading? "The voice of the Muses, which engages other voices in a contrapuntal response, seems to have the same capacity of spatial diffusion as the light; it is as tireless as the rays of the sun and spreads like dawn on the sea; it makes itself heard everywhere"(p. 97). Rereading is the silence of the said, or, better, it insists on the silence of the said, reads it aloud so as to put it to sleep, exactly a lullaby. The polyphonization of the unsaid, the said's remainder, rests on this sleep of the said within the rereading. What does the page symbolize amidst such tireless conversation? It too must be reread, polyphonized along with the rest of the unsaid. Symbolize?
Since the experience of poetry, in an aural culture, consists in the hic et nunc of its performance, the real or imaginary listener who wants to describe it follows the movements of its musical unfolding, just as we would describe a symphony following the succession of its resonances. Sappho seems indeed to be reproducing the many instrumental and vocal components of a true symphony, the subject matter of which is only mentioned at the end.
(p. 97)
Imagine a word too powerful to be human. Don't we do this all the time? Symphony, aural, resume, the silent mind. Imagine what it would take to voice such words, and only such words. To voice discretely, and only with the voice, the voice itself. Never happen. (Let "the vocal organ" be a metaphor for its never happening.) We call upon other voices–as if to converse? The experience of poetry has always been like hanging out with the daughters of Mnemosyne, the way we used to, when it rained. Would our aural materialism propose to explain away the touch of Terpsichore and her siblings, or her symbol? Unstring the Canon of the Nine? Step lightly, dear imaginary listener, in your interpretation of the boundlessness of musical voices, a boundlessness that coexists with the silent mind. The silent mind is a wild animal. The excursion of the poem means not to tame. Nor to bewilder. We are coming closer to saying what it means for the silent mind to stand for a material cause–the meontic efficiency of the symbol, incidentally, is nowhere near that of the ordinary sign. Do you suppose there is some balance to be struck between silence and restlessness?
Lagoon. Tortoise. Lagoon.
I threw myself at the shores of your tongue, restless you. What solace was there in sweet centuries we spoke them too. And we stole the silence of the said from the public library, its bright corners, musics, ours and Sappho's, who seemed never to have learned how to die, but fragment, fragment. . . taught us words like mythoplokos.
Labels: causality, imagination, Montiglio, muses, myth, Pindar, poetry, Sappho, silence
Friday, May 08, 2009
The undertaking to thoroughly describe communicative, illocutionary silence necessarily requires working with an image of speech, if only to go around it. All images of speech are not reconcilable, though we may recognize any collection of them as all being ideas about speech, which if it doesn't approximate a reconciliation, at least suggests the possibility of one. In making such a recognition we may cede to an epistemic aporia about speech. We act as if we knew that certain ideas were ideas about speech, but we haven't yet been able to define speech, certainly not in a way that would make sense of contradictory propositions made about speech. Practically, as intellectuals, such as we are, we may well find ourselves in a defensive position regarding our grasp of speech. We put ourselves into question simply by noticing that two images of speech cannot be reconciled–but I am being hasty. Let's try to reconcile two views. First, there's my naive sense that conversation requires breaks in speaking, and that on that basis conversations can in fact be carried out episodically, over long hiatuses in some cases. Speech is rawly hiatal. This is an image of speech that conditions my thinking about verbal exchanges and interactions of all kinds. It is not the only image of speech one could imagine, live by. One could imagine a completely antithetical view. In the Homeric world, Montiglio tells us, "speech ideally circulates without ceasing" (Silence, p. 60). Montiglio uncovers a notion of something like a "speech economy," but one must wonder about the nature of speech as it would appear in such a system, and how its differences from speech according to the image of hiatal flows would illuminate the problem we have here with speech.
Homeric epic regards speech as the object of a continuous exchange. The verb for "to answer," ameibomei, literally "to exchange," inscribes speech within the ethic of reciprocity that should govern the behavior of heroes. But what is an exchanged word? First and foremost it is an entity that goes around incessantly, bandied back and forth without ever disappearing.
Outside the domain of speech, ameibomai signifies to alternate, to compensate. Emphasis is placed on the absence of any interruption during the movement. In Iliad 9, for instance, ameibomai means "to interchange watches": "They mounted guard in turn, and the fire would never go out" (471-472). Parallel to the constantly burning flame, the changing of the guard ensures continuity. No void is allowed: as soon as a soldier departs, another takes over.
(p. 61, my bold)
Montiglio has us draw a distinction between listening while waiting one's turn to speak, implicitly expected, and silence. To sit listening, for the ancient Greeks, belongs to speech whereas sitting in silence does not. Thus she leads us to the conclusion that "it is only to signify anomalies in an exchange that silence interrupts the verbal flow" (p. 62). It is the exchange which gives speech meaning and simultaneously calls for the entification of the utterance. Well, what exactly is our image of exchange? Do we have an image of exchange without a prior image of speech? Must we imagine the word that is a promise, sent forth on its journey, and yet, on the other side, interchangeable, a commerce? How does speech come to its other sides? In being imagined? If I said one needn't form an image of speech in order to speak I too would be asking you to imagine an essence of speech, "real speech," or "actual speech," unimagined speech. One doesn't evade speaking easily. Silence exists in relation to an imaginary speech, and this may be especially true if we are talking about something like a cultural construction of language instead of "The Idea of Speech"; imaginary speech, even praxiologically understood, tacitly informs even those operations that break from speech, provided, perhaps, that there exists something like a communicative intent, even one given through a purely rejective gesture, a blunt silence so blunt it's not even blunt. Imaginary speech is not metadiscourse, or, if you will, it is not merely to be explained as metadiscourse. Imaginary speech escapes itself. It delineates its silences. Yet silences persist, imaginary and inimaginary. Just as it practically remains possible to communicate between contradictory imaginary languages, notwithstanding the rise of minor misunderstandings or moments of miscommunication, that is, people who do not share the same image of speech may nevertheless communicate, so too does it remain possible to hold a communicative silence in reference to different images of speech. Well, this is a thesis. Possibly in such an instance one holds more than one silence simultaneously, for instance the silence that is continuous with the pause and therefore belongs to speech, and, on the other hand, the silence which speech defines as its disturbance. Of course we have already criticized this position. The silence that accomodates two images of silence is itself delineated by an image, a model, of communication.
Should we be guided by an image of speech that asks us to believe in questionable ideas like incessance and things that are only apparent, that never disappear? One imagines ghosts of words. Quite probably we would have to call upon an auxilliary image of silence just to make sense of the world of communication. And so we should ask about being guided by images that primarily serve other images, images that don't stand on their own, and won't therefore easily submit to scrutiny. Montiglio nonetheless scrutinizes. She does so without isolating, but rather by examining manifestations of phenomena across the spectrum of ancient Greek culture. Is her image of speech superior to the Homeric image her scholarship has uncovered? More interesting or more useful? Even the proposition that the contact between disparate images of speech engenders creativity in language, a tenet of dialogism, reflects an image of speech. It contests as well as illuminates. We must then put in question our communicative intentions. Are we now in dialogue with the ancient Greeks, who we say had an image of uninterrupted exchange at the heart of speech? What do we mean to say by our engagement in classicist discourse? Will we finally be able to reach the point beyond which there is no discourse, no understanding, because we have already understood, the point where silence intervenes? Was it never our intent to understand? If not then would it be fair to say that we are drawn to the image of the uninterrupted flow of speech, that it is so seductive in fact that we should question the position we've taken with regard to it, and thus put into question our own image of speech, the one we must explicitly hold in order to effect a criticism? Do we really yearn for a speech that isn't mythos? Do we ever really practice such a speech?
Labels: dialogism, Greece, ideation, Montiglio, silence, speech
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Montiglio writes of the Eumenides:
In keeping with their nature that entails verbal negation and dissonance, the Erinyes prove to be the enemies of exchange. First, these forces of destructive speech oppose clear and articulate language. Their strident voice imitates animal sounds, bellows and barks. Their song, insofar as it is incompatible with the lyre, denies all harmony between music and human locution, because the lyre is the instrument that meets the clarity of speech. This "lyreless" song raises its voice against Apollo's soothing muthoi: "Here is the song, a frenzy that ruins the mind, the hymn of the Erinyes, mind-binding, without lyre."
(Silence, pp. 42-43)
Do we hear the vulnerability of the listener in this passage? Will the enemies of exchange had laid waste to silence, or does silence endure like it always does, like the empathy one feels for the person who hears the alyric of the Eumenides? Silence is not the splintered lyre but the lyre on the cusp of speech? The broken lyre? Are we not on the verge of weeping for the man who cradles the broken lyre in his arms, always there, on the verge?
Are the Eumenides, however, really the enemies of reciprocity? We are all tragic figures insofar as our ignorance cries out to be interpreted. It's such a small thing to be ignorant of, our involvement in listening, the gives and takes. Furious whispers escape the lyricist's fingers, as they are eternally on the verge of doing. A string that buzzes, a frenzied hymn. This what has become of music, is it completely alien to the lyrical, the lyricist's hands? They hold things of the lyre, memorize them, and forget. By whose hand were the lyre have been broken? If it's not possible to act then none of us is a tragic figure. This is obvious. And if we never know what it means to know by listening?
Labels: eumenidies, listening, lyre, Montiglio, silence
Friday, April 10, 2009
The very existence in Greece of a "code of silence" that involves the body and pervades cultural manifestations as diverse as religious rituals, Homeric epic, drama, and medical texts, points to a shared tendency to associate an absence of words with specific gestures and postures; an association, in turn, which suggests that for the Greeks silence was a highly formalized behavior, much more so than it is for us.
(Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos, p. 8)
Labels: body, culture, Greece, language, Montiglio, silence
Friday, March 13, 2009
Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book promises to be a good read. She has done her research. She writes well. She thinks formidably. I'll surely enjoy critically engaging with this text.
Does poetry speak to us of a tacit dimension of language? If there is a special case of language called poetry, a genre distinct from others that we can isolate and consider separately from our investigations of language, does it yet tell us of a reality, a vivid reality, of all speech and its house, language? My prejudice is clear. I am surrounded by poetry–but perhaps I delude myself. By no stretch am I an expert on what constitutes poetry.
While Scarry holds that "imaginary vivacity comes about by reproducing the deep structure of perception" (p. 9), I suggest that poetic juice flows from the chthonic prosody of all tongues, iteratively one imagines. Assonance and consonance are the stuff of Scarry's prose. Perhaps also her thoughts. However, she claims that "verbal art. . . .has no acoustical features" (p. 5, her emphasis). Can it be said without controversy that verbal art (in the limited sense in which Scarry defines it) has no acoustical features but it echos the spoken word? The idea may be backwards and upsidedown too. Scarry defines poetry (apparently deciding for us that the model for all poetry must be written) as a "sequence of printed signs [which] contains a set of instructions for the production of actual sound; the page itself does not sing but exists forever on the verge of song" (p. 7). Poetic language does not echo the spoken word but formulates it. It presages. Obviously text is a possibility of language, as a way of irrealizing speech. Are any traces of this possibility already inscribed in the spoken word? What about possibilities for following instructions?
Dreams. What happens to the spoken word in dreams? Is the word in dreams interpreted through hearing? Does the prosody of a sequence of dream words have no acoustical features? Are these words merely submerged?
Labels: imagination, language, poetry, prosody, Scarry, silence
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
Monday, October 20, 2008
The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights.
(Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, p. 30)
It can't be denied that these very words have a ceremonial quality to them. They ceremonialize the break with ceremony they attempt–or perhaps it's not so much that they themselves ceremonialize as they are embedded in a history of ceremonial deceremonializations. Ceremoniality already imbues them before they are said. We can see Levinas' unsaying of that idea, and even perhaps the whole thrust of these words which attempt to unsay more than was said in the passage above, or to say the left unsaid that imbued the saying–by virtue of leaving, perhaps, a withdrawal from saying.
He inspires, Levinas. I aspire to do ceremony unceremoniously, to express an unceremonious style while carrying out life's daily rituals. Why elevate the routine to the ceremonial? Why risk being pompous at all? Why risk being ill understood? It occurred to me to say nothing today, to let silence further unsay Levinas' unsaying, as if that were still vital to me (which it still is today though it's intrigued me on many previous occasions). But the quotation would have been a ceremony even without explicit comment. The reading of Levinas has commenced! Sound your funky horn! The reading of Levinas has commenced! I protest against the solemnity of a silence. I attempt to unsay its pregnancy of unsayings with an abundance of arrival, and so to reiterate the unsaid profusely. I leave these words.
Labels: language, Levinas, reading, silence
Friday, October 10, 2008
Edward Casey imagines a distinct variety of silence, a soundlessness that is not a strict silence but "an amorphous auditory state in which no specific sound is heard" (Imagining, p. 27, his emphasis). Let's flesh out this image and study it. Imagine an amorphous auditory envelope in which one can sense the presence of voices, one feels enveloped in voices, yet no specific voice can be heard. An intimate bustle, intimate and slow. Something like breathing, irregular, vague, on the cusp of being respiratory. Murmurs. Subvocal vibrations. An infrasonic, glacial ebullience. Swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. (Our images not nearly our own, we borrow freely from cultural memory.) Splashes of voices, mere splashes without any clear sense of being animated, or of having sense at all. What can we learn from such an image of a voicelessness, or such images, such a flow of imagining, if we can talk about flow while suspending a question of continuity?
Casey cites Bachelard on "the need to animalize which lies at the origin of imagination" (I might say the need to animate, or even the desire to animate.) Bachelard continues, "The primary function of imagination is to make animal forms" (Lautréamont, p. 51, IN Imagining, p. 30). The connection between the animate and the form brings to mind a passage from an interview of Michel Henry that Michael Tweed translated and Shahar blogged about. Henry says (my bold):
A form is not actually a kind of exterior entity, but the expression of a force. The point, straight line, broken line, etc., are the expression of specific forces that occur in different ways, continuous or intermittent, in the same direction or changing direction. And the theory of forms, which refers to forces, refers at the same time to subjectivity, because the forces inhabit our body, our lived body, our subjective body that is our actual body. Consequently the world of forms is, in some way, a coded universe the true meaning of which amounts to the play of forces within us, hence to life, for the living body is a body that is made of forces: such is the origin of painting. Further, it is an invisible element, the invisible force with which the living body is identified, that is the principle of the composition of a painting.
So, incidentally, we might think that forms are already animated, animalized, animal, or on the verge of becoming animal, i.e. dynamic. Perhaps we are speaking of an animot voicelessness–yet we have before us precisely an amorphous voicelessness. Is there a dynamism without forms? Would such amorphousness perhaps be chimeral, a blending of for(ce)(m)s rather than a negation of for(ce)(m)s? Does our voicelessness under study here reveal in any discussable way a desire to animate? What would wildness mean if it weren't animated? A journey behind the back of forms–but how does it feel, this voicelessness?
Casey says that for humans "the voice seems to be intrinsic to the human body and not just an accompaniment of it" (pp. 32-33). It's hard to imagine a disembodied voice, he argues. Is it hard to imagine a disembodied voicelessness? Imagine a body without gestures, the body as womb perhaps. Now imagine an amorphous collaqueation of bodies without gestures, bodies without voices. This image of bodies without gestures accords with my image of amorphous voicelessness, but before agreeing that it is indeed easier to imagine an embodied voicelessness than a disembodied voicelessness I'd want to make sure that being without gestures doesn't represent a kind of disembodiment. Perhaps it even represents a kind of de-animation, an inversion of the basic function of imagination. Wouldn't that also be a power of the imagination? Can't we imagine with our whole bodies being outside of our bodies? There are limits? Silence, perhaps, is such a limit. Our dubious silence of the indistinct voices takes place at a border between the felt body and silence. Perhaps it is a shadow place, or even a shadow silence. And whose silence would that be? Now that the thought is out there, can you imagine it as either belonging or not belonging to anybody?
Thus a paradox of unwilled spontaneity, an imagination that imagines itself as other, may be at play in the image of voicelessness. In speaking about the relative spontaneity of an image, Casey has three things in mind: (1)its unsolicited arising, its feeling as if it effortlessly appeared, (2) its instantaneous, and (3) its capacity to surprise (p. 34). He regards the first as most crucial. Possibly we merely forget that we have called upon the imagination, that we have in fact solicited an image, and this forgetting allows for the illusion of spontaneity. However, what if the "illusion" of spontaneity is a necessary precursor to our imaginings? Or simply another way of saying how we imagine? We let our imaginations run wild. We let them function. We let spontaneity be, and this letting be of spontaneity takes the form of images. To let be is decidedly not to will. To will a spontaneity would be to will it out of existence, out of all irreality. The image is an unclaimed spontaneity. If it is called for, it is called for by a surprise that it creates the conditions for. Spontaneous voicelessness vanishes in the instant it reveals itself as surprise, at the border between the emergence of a human voice and an amorphousness. Voicelessness is a image from an unclaimed life, from the wild.
Labels: Bachelard, Casey, imagination, silence, spontaneity, surprise
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
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Irigaray says that "Brahma exists only through the capacity to pose a question beyond what already exists" (Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček, New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, p. 41). Should we think of questioning as a transcendental gesture? Does transcendence even begin to do justice to the question. Imagine then a yonder side of already being. Does the question bring to light a yonder that otherwise wouldn't have been anticipated? What is a yonder that is not? A mediated yonder?
Is surprise a yonder of already?
Think of an idea like "the being of the question" or "?-being." In succumbing to a desire to bestow being upon the question, if only, perhaps, for the sake of fixing a topic of conversation, do we not risk asking less of ourselves than the question invites? What is there of ourselves beyond what is? The question is prejudicial. Who is there of ourselves beyond who we are? A transcendence both of and beyond–don't think there isn't any risk involved in asking too little, or in allowing too little to be asked. Too little risk is also a risk to be weighed, to be questioned.
Was the question already beyond what already exists, or was it posed there? To compose a beyond that questions what already exists: who are they that exist through such a capacity? Those who surprise? Who isn't ("(non)-being") most authentically surprising?
I wouldn't say that I know Luce Irigaray, if only through her writings, because that might imply that the capacity to surprise had somehow vanished from her works. We go back. We read anew. I'm not sure how we could say that the text is what already exists while it yet affords possibilities of posing questions beyond itself. Do we want things to be depleted? Is that a meaning of the bestowal of onticity? What is the silence that comes with the relinquishment of words? It may constitute a kind of violence to hear such a silence as impersonal. It may constitute an imponderable stupidity not to hear the implicit question in the silence that comes with the withdrawal from words.
Labels: Brahma, Irigaray, ontology, questions, silence, surprise, text, transcendence
Friday, February 08, 2008
Forgive the paralipomenal quality of this post–if a story that's always never quite being told can be said to have paralipomena then welcome to my blog, dear reader. I'm reading Merleau-Ponty's "The Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (in Signs) at the same time I'm reading Nancy on the image and Agamben on infancy and while I wish to dwell on the topic of silence (and entwinement, the as such, nothingness and that whole business) here I'd like to briefly touch on a reverberant passage:
Language does not presuppose its table of correspondence; it unveils its secrets itself. It teaches them to every child who comes into the world. It is entirely a "monstration." Its opaqueness, its obstinate reference to itself, and its turning and folding back upon itself are precisely what make it a mental power; for it in turn becomes something like a universe, and it is capable of lodging things themselves in this universe–after it has transformed them into their meaning.
(p.43, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis)
Kaleideation unfolds under the sign of the peacock. It may as well be the sign of the anole lizard, and that "may as well be" may as well be the unraveling of its meaning, the deciphering of its labyrinth. But I will tarry and loaf a while in the garden with the peacocks. (As it happens not everybody is enraptured by peacocks but lizards poop too so what are you going to do?) Although many appreciate a flamboyant display, few appreciate the faculty of display. It is like looking into the mirror and not seeing the mirror, or it's like knowing how to tie one's shoelaces. Display may as well be the cosmos–I'm now prepared to let Arendt have this point–for display is certainly a cosmos and one cosmos is as good as another in the garden with the peacocks. In this cosmos kaleideation transforms things as they are into their beauty. Wasn't their beauty intrinsic? This is touchy. If beauty touches on forms–a florid if, albeit oft taken for granted–what needs to be said about how forms touch on beauty? And what of the lure of the something else promised by the transformative, the something else that may simply be the as such of thing as it is or silence. Is silence presupposed or might it rather be a kaleideation?
Do you present yourself to me as kaleideation, dear you? Through kaleideation? Does the aleatory encounter take the (trans)form of a kaleideation? Oh how I have distorted you, my beautiful you! It's not so much that I balked at the formless encounter; I have allowed myself a crumb of nostalgia and it has been my unraveling, or an unraveling, as be as that may well. My mood is subtrist as I sit in the garden with the peacocks, adding to a story that's never quite being told.
Labels: display, formlessness, kaleidoscopes, language, Merleau-Ponty, peacocks, presupposition, silence, you
Monday, October 15, 2007
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
As I've been reading The Other Side of Language I've been thinking that I should cultivate a habit of silence. I admire bloggers who maintain silences. Not the long silence of the abandoned blog, but the regular thoughtful silence between posts. I could alter my reading habits, read whole books before commenting instead of doling out commentaries chapter by chapter on several books at once. I could simply say less.
Corradi Fiumara says a number of things that cut close to the bone. She says, "When 'exploration' of inner life is undertaken without silence it is deformed into an involuntary parody of the 'life of the mind'" (p. 105). She says that the "continuous involvement with language might be considered an automatic, repetitive defense against the separation anxiety that silence can represent" (pp. 102-103). She talks about ways of avoiding genuine reciprocity, and says that among these are a saturation of the space of reciprocity with messages and "as a subsidiary avoidance measure, one can fling oneself into extremely rapid passages and ephemeral connections between the various thoughts as they emerge" (p. 103). That sounds like a description of mania, which is undesirable. And yet I must confess to a certain abiding love of the rapid passage and the ephemeral connection. It's a dilemma.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, silence
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Like Hung Wai-Shen, László Tengelyi argues that the tacit cogito of the Phenomenology of Perception was superseded by Merleau-Ponty's later phenomenology (The Wild Region in Life-History, p. 33; I will unpack Tengelyi's discussion more fully in a later post). Tengelyi alerts us to the following passage in The Prose of the World:
In the "I speak" psychology rediscovers for us an operation, a dimension, and relations which do not belong to thought in the ordinary sense. "I think" means there is a certain locus called "I" where action and awareness of action are not different, where being confounds itself with its own awareness of itself, and thus where no intrusion from outside is even conceivable. Such an "I" could not speak. He who speaks enters into a system of relations which presuppose his presence and at the same time make him open and vulnerable.
(p. 17)
Having begun to reread The Prose of the World, I now feel that my previous objections to Hung were not well thought through, and my understanding of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language was inadequate. However, I still feel that the obliteration of the tacit cogito is not complete. I will explore Merleau-Ponty's thinking about the speaking subject, language and expression with an eye to how his thinking might overcome the limitations of the Cartesianism of the tacit cogito, such as it is.
"We now regard language as the reverberation of my relations with myself and with others" Merleau-Ponty announces (p. 20, my emphasis). Tengelyi argues that Merleau-Ponty approaches language as a diacritical system, a system in which the "I speak" is included. This is true as far is it goes; however, Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of this system frequently make use of musical metaphors, metaphors of gesture suggestive of dance, and of course the analogy with painting. Modern structural linguistics is only one model he uses to investigate the phenomenon of language. Language is embodied. Language is expressive. The expressive "system of harmony," operating through the locution that touches on sedimented significations to make them yield strange sounds (p. 13) belongs to another interior system of the relation between self and other:
[S]peech and understanding are moments in the unified system of self-other. The substratum of this system is not a pure "I". . . but rather an "I" endowed with a body which reveals its thoughts sometimes to attribute them to itself and at other times to impute them to someone else. I accommodate the other person through my language and my body. Even the distance which the normal subject puts between himself and others, as well as the clear distinction between speaking and listening, are modalities of the system of embodied subjects. . . . As an embodied subject, I am exposed to the other person, just as he is to me, and I identify myself with the person speaking before me.
(p. 18, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis)
Although Merleau-Ponty here talks of the other "before" me, he is in fact inclined to regard the essential relation between speaking subjects as lateral. He claims that "the other is never present face-to-face" (p. 133). The other is, instead, "always on the margin of what I see and hear, he is this side of me, he is beside or behind me, but he is not in that place which my look flattens and empties of any 'interior'" (p. 134). The other is decentered because the self is decentered; the embodiment of the speaking subject means that it is open and vulnerable, and that, counterintuitively perhaps, it can be generalized. "From the first time I relied on my body to explore the world, I knew that this corporeal relation to the world could be generalized" (p. 136). For Merleau-Ponty, the world has a bite, and we empathize with everybody exposed to its bite as we are. "As long as it adheres to my body like the tunic of Nessus, the world exists not only for me but for everyone in it who makes gestures toward it" (p. 137). In a footnote, Merleau-Ponty discusses style in terms of a "nonconstituted rationality of the thing-axis" and he says that "a nonconstituted rationality is possible only if the thing is nonfrontal, ob-ject, but what bites into me, and what I bite into through my body; if the thing is, itself too, given through an indirect grasp, lateral like the other person–such a rationality has decentering as the ground of meaning" (p. 45, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis). When Merleau-Ponty says that "[t]he signification of signs derives initially from their configuration in current usage, from the style of human relations that emanate from them" (p. 36), I take this to mean that its meaning is grounded in a decentering. "There can speech (and in the end personality) only for an "I" which contains the germ of a depersonalization" (p. 19). In a footnote he explains that this depersonalization is founded on an originary fusion of the embodied subject and her world, and he notes that "[t]his foundation does not prevent language from coming back dialectically over what preceded it and transforming the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies inot a coexistence of language" (p. 20).
In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty defines the tacit cogito as "the presence of oneself to oneself, being no less than existence" (p. 404). In The Prose of the World he is concerned with this same relation of self to self. He asks, "How can the cogito emigrate beyond me, since it is me" (p. 134)? His answer is that "there is a myself which is other, which dwells elsewhere and deprives me of my central location" (p. 135, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis). Thus the tacit cogito is in one sense superseded by a decentered self, by a bodily coexistence. Yet nobody who has read Phenomenology of Perception would be utterly surprised to find bodily coexistence inhabiting the decentered self.
"The tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself," Merleau-Ponty says (Phenomenology, ibidem). By arguing, in The Prose of the World, that the cogito does not speak (and I find its lack of personality most interesting), it appears that Merleau-Ponty has left behind the tacit cogito as well. On the other hand, there is a tacit dimension to the speaking subject, the "strange expressive organism" (p. 14) for whom speaking and listening are but two modalities of the same expressive life. And, Merleau-Ponty says that speech "never quite pierces the 'eternal silence' of private subjectivity" (p. 43). "[W]e should consider speech before it has been pronounced, against the ground of the silence which precedes it, which never ceases to accompany it, and without which it would say nothing. Moreover, we should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven" (pp. 45-46). Thus it seems that the only thing Merleau-Ponty has left by the wayside is the cogito itself. The relation of oneself to oneself, and the silence of the speaking subject are intact. Does Merleau-Ponty thereby free himself from a problem of Cartesian subjectivity? I'm not sure. It would be fair to say, I think, that the problem has been decentered.
Labels: Hung, language, Merleau-Ponty, silence, Tengelyi