Fido the Yak

Jankélévitch makes, while essaying music's ambiguous "depth," in a section that could be placed under the heading of enchanted chronology, the seemingly prosaic statement that musical works exist exclusively in the time of their playing (p. 70). Before critiquing let's read the full paragraph for context:

Music is an essentially temporal art, not a secondarily temporal one like poetry or dramatic literature or the novel. Of course, time is necessary to perform a play: but theatrical works can be read one right after the other, or in fragments, and in any order you please. A musical work does not exist except in the time of its playing. Now, this playing occupies a certain durational interval interval (by virtue of tempo), and one can work out its timing; the elapsed time is measurable but not compressible and would not submit either to being abridged or extended. Thus the sonata is properly speaking a succession of expressive contents that unfolds itself in time: it is an enchanted chronology, a melodious form of becoming, time itself. Sonata is sonorous time: the temporal realization of the virtualities contained in two musical themes. And it takes time for the listener to discover these virtualities and for the spirit to delve into the core of this immanence: there is a time for sinking in, and this time, perpendicular to the time of the performance (if one dares to use such language), is the time that the listener spends in delving into the thickness of this meaning devoid of meaning.

(Op. cit.)

Now let's take the position that a musical work exists only in the moment of its performance, knowing that we might afford some depth to such a moment, knowing that there is a time of listening. What does one then rehearse? Of course a musical rehearsal may be thought of as a kind of performance. However in a crucial sense the rehearsal, insofar as it a performance, has an as if quality. Its being as performance, if we may permit ourselves such a phrasing, is conditional. Is it conditional on there being some—some other—awaited performance, a performance that must have the quality of not being realized, not yet, or in the case of the perpetual student of music, not ever, but in any case not realized? Is the performance pseudoreal? Eoreal? Rehearsal reveals the eoreal aspect of the performative—an aspect beyond the telic and the atelic— which minimally teaches that the temporality of the musical is indeed well characterized as having depth, if not depth of being, which may perhaps not pertain to things eoreal, then appreciably depth of phenomenality.

What does rehearsal mean for enchantment? Again, one comes up against a problem of repetition. "In music," Jankélévitch asks (p. 71), "is repetition not often innovation?" I ask, is repetition in general an essay of the work of temporality itself, an essay which potentially reveals the eoreal aspect of time?

Labels: depth, eoreality, Jankélévitch, music, repetition, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:32 PM. 0 comments

Kangas writes, "The ordeal expresses an event that is neither temporal nor eternal. It is not the direct presence of the eternal within time, which would annihilate temporality, but rather an interruption of it" (p. 116). He also says, "Receiving time is the most basic work of the of the living subject" (p. 105, his emphasis).

Does the living subject interrupt temporality in order to receive it? What relation might there be between the event, which could be cosmic, or material in the extreme, and exchange, a social relation? The gap of reciprocation, which is not exactly the gap of return, that is, the lag between the reception and the sending of gifts, stands out as a practical, coexistential temporality. The art of interruption—is it itself an interruption

What role is there for patience to play in the constitution of the event of the ordeal? Must it always remain yet to be determined—or is that already too much of a determination? Is it really so hard to wait and see?

Labels: event, Kangas, Kierkegaard, temporality, waiting, work

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:25 AM. 0 comments

What do we make the positing of the instant that cannot be posited? Does one always come late to the instant, the instant that refuses to be even partially anticipated because it emerges as a surprise? What are we to make of this metaphysics of birth? In Kierkegaard's Instant: On Beginnings David Kangas rereads Kierkegaard's philosophy in light of such an instant, a coming into existence, he says:

that falls essentially prior to any beginning that could be represented, posited, or recollected by a subject: a beginning prior to all beginning, prior to the total horizon of presence—hence, an "anarchic" beginning that will always already have begun. This is what is meant by "Kierkegaard's Instant." The problem is one of thinking a beginning that cannot be translated as a first principle or ground, a beginning that neither serves as foundation nor can be posited. Self-consciousness, we learn from these texts [of Kierkegaard's], arrives always too soon or too late to the instant in which existence is given; it cannot be made to coincide with itself. Vis-à-vis this infinite beginning, existence shows itself as absolute departure, without foundation or goal.

(p. x)

If we take Kangas' reading as impetus to institute a logic of letting go of first principles, might we then also desire to let go of the coupling of the instant with a givenness of existence? Another passage may edify:

What transcends self-consciousness is not what stands over against it, but falls prior to it. Through paradox after paradox Kierkegaard's early texts exhibit a movement toward the radically anterior, the irrecuperable, the unrecollectable. They return thinking to an "infinite beginning," which he names "the instant" (Øieblikket), in which temporality itself begins. The instant is the name for a beginning that cannot be interiorized, appropriated, recollected, represented, or possessed. It is not a work of self-consciousness, not mediation, but rather the event through which self-consciousness is first enabled. The instant is the gift or birth of presence. An instant cannot claim to be. Of itself it is nothing, it is nowhere; it neither is nor is not. And yet everything changes in the instant. An instant enters into experience, or becomes present, either essentially too soon or too late. Anytime one says "and before I knew it," or "and then suddenly," one will have felt the residual effects ("traces") of the instant.

(p. 4, Kangas' emphases, my bold)

Labels: anarchy, delay, infinity, instant, Kangas, Kierkegaard, surprise, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:49 AM. 2 comments

How do we share a here? Nowly? Momentaneously?

Barbaras distinguishes depth, the embeddedness of my body it the world, from the distance between things in a homogenous metrical space.

Depth, the remoteness that cannot be carried forward in the form of an outline within things, is the first dimension. Whereas height and width seem to belong to the things themselves and to owe nothing to the subject, depth corresponds to the originary unfolding of spatiality. The priority of depth does not therefore mean a privilege would be granted to it, within objective space, vis-à-vis height and width; in this space, all of the dimensions are equivalent. Depth is of another order than actual distance; it is situated just short of metrical space and reveals thereby a new sense of dimension.

(Being, pp. 209-210)

Does the space between things exist as space? If so, what kind of space? How is it presented? "The enigma of depth, Merleau-Ponty notes, is that there is a between of things" (p. 213). Is the between of between us of the same order? I feel a depth to our relationship. Do I compare this depth to the depths of my relations to other people? Do I instead operate out of a uniformal between, or, alternatively again, out of a depth belonging to a region or a modality of interrelations between people? Does the between exist polymorphously? Is it made polymorphic? Does the between have its unifocality, in its unfolding if not in its etiology? Does it at any time belong here?

Does the idea of bewteenness drive us to envisage the coexistence of things and the coexistence of people as belonging to a shared dimension? Indeed Barbaras asks us to rethink coexistence. To begin with, a question of phenomenality, he notes that "the phenomenon ascends to itself only by making itself co-present to the world and consequently to all the others" (p. 215). Does this formulation grant too much agency and ultimately too much personhood to the phenomenon in general? Again, from a different angle, do the co-presence of phenomena and the coexistence of people equally arise from depth? (Is there an implication here that depth is worldless, that things hover in a betweenness, a polymorphic being around in which if a horizon could only be discernible in an embryo?

Coexistence, Barbaras instructs, should not be bemuddled with strict contemporaneity, "which supposes precisely a space entirely unfolded. As soon as the being-together of phenomena is determined as depth, their articulation cannot go up as far as the order of the contemporaneous; their articulation cannot coincide with the axis of the "now" (p. 216). What would a loose contemporaneity resemble? Would one want not want to characterize it as coexistential? What if we initially divide the contemporaneous from the now?

Here's a thought: "The relation of the present to the past must be characterized as chiasm" (p. 224). If nothing in reality exists momentaneously in that the past is always chiasmically implicit and the "presence of depth opens the dimension of a future" (p. 216), then strict contemporaneity almost appears to be a strawman. Well, perhaps our interrelations are haunted by a ghost of contemporaneity. Perhaps we live with a spectral contemporaneity. Or else, if we are to interrogate strict contemporaneity, we could posit an irreducible plurality in the depths of coexistence. I don't know about this. We speak of having a shared history, or sharing a life together. What do these phrases mean? Is what we share enigmatically never quite here, or never quite in a here implicit in there being an us? How do we interpret our irreversibility?

Labels: Barbaras, chiasmus, coexistence, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:10 AM. 0 comments

Barbaras continues a critique of Sartre:

Phenomenality is just as much negation of determination as it is negation of the in-itself. One has to say instead that phenomenality stops short of both affirmation and negation. It is a negation that not only does not dissolve into the positivity of essence but still negates every form of positivity, so that it also cannot affirm itself as pure, univocal negation nor abolish itself in favor of fully positive being.

(Being, p. 123, Barbaras' emphasis)

Instead of "phenomenality" I would say epoché. The question I'll ask relates to whether one makes a commitment to the study of, or even the worthy living of, phenomenality. Could an encounter with the phenomenal be compromised by a prior commitment to understanding the phenomenal? This goes towards a critique of the instant. How does one declare an allegiance to the instantaneous without doing violence to the instant? Conversely, how does one maintain absolutely no affinity for the instantaneous and yet be able, at the drop of a hat, to live in the instant? Must the instant be unbearable? Well, this perhaps suggests a reason why the instant is thought of as precisely not experienced in any temporal, mundane or ordinary sense. On the other hand the difficulty of sustaining an enthusiasm for the mundane suggests that duration too may be as unbearable as the instant. We live in the to-and-fro between these unbearable states, between duration and instantaneousness. If this movement is bearable, does that mean that the instantaneous as well as the mundanely temporal therefore become bearable?

Labels: Barbaras, encounters, epoché, rhythm, Sartre, temporality, the instant

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:05 AM. 0 comments

"Infinite being, that is, ever recommencing being—which could not bypass subjectivity, for it could not recommence without it—is produced in the guise of fecundity" (Totality, p. 268). Levinas explains that his concept of fecundity denotes a future which is both mine and not mine, not a future of the same, but an adventure for me (ibid.). It is both a possibility of myself and of the Beloved, and as such it "does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity" (p. 267, my emphasis). Is there a significant dialogic essence of the possible, or a polylogical dimension of the "can" (the originary importance of which I Levinas would reject in the form of the "I can," the living body)? Is there, alternatively, a meaningful polylogic ethos of possibilities? My departure from Levinas may be radical. I'll get back to it.

Have we found, in infinite being, a remedy to the vexation of repetition? Levinas speaks of the cessation of the tediousness of the reiteration of the I, but not the cessation of the reiteration. "The diverse forms that Proteus assumes do not liberate him from his identity," he insists (p. 268). He continues, "In fecundity the tedium of this repetition ceases; the I is other and young, yet the ipseity that ascribed to it its meaning and its orientation in being is not lost in this renouncement of self. Fecundity continues history without producing old age." A marvelous concept to be sure, and perhaps not only that. Levinas finds that senescence, conceived in continuity, manifests a limitation on the infinitude of being in the form of the past. I'll hold off criticism on this point a moment longer. The theme of the monotony of identity noted here is one Levinas repeats in his conclusions (p.304). Breaking the monotony of identity ties in with the absolute necessity, in Levinas' eyes, of discontinuity established through death and fecundity.

Levinas is keen to recognize discontinuity at the core of ipseity. In the context of outlining his concept of childhood and filiality, he argues that resuming the thread of history, which must be regarded as distinct from continuity, is marked by an originality "attested in the revolt of the permanent revolution that constitutes ipseity" (p. 278). He speaks at length on temporal discontinuity:

Time is the non-definitiveness of the definitive, an ever recommencing alterity of the accomplished—the "ever" of this recommencement. The work of time goes beyond the suspension of the definitive which the continuity of duration makes possible. There must be a rupture of continuity, and continuation of across this rupture. The essential in time consists in being a drama, a multiplicity of acts where the following act resolves the prior one.

(pp. 283-284)

Now, here is where I find Levinas truly challenging my predilections: for me the face to face could be described as a modality of coexistence; Levinas believes nothing of the sort:

To say that universality refers to the face to face position is (against a whole tradition of philosophy) to deny that being is produced as panorama, a coexistence, of which the face to face would be a modality. This whole work opposes this conception. The face to face is not a modality of coexistence nor even of the knowledge (itself panoramic) one term can have of another, but is the primordial production of being on which all the possible collocations of the term are founded.

(pp. 304-305)

Levinas' critique of panoramic being comes as he bypasses existential phenomenology in favor of an ethics, perhaps an ethics at the limits of philosophy. At bottom of the face to face there is goodness in place of either being or nothingness, which "consists in going where no clarifying—that is, panoramic—thought precedes, in going without knowing where. An absolute adventure, in a primal imprudence, goodness is transcendence itself" (ibid.). He takes a strong position, which I sympathize with, against a certain style of existential phenomenology. Before I would follow him, however, I would be concerned about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A criticism of panoramic being could conceivably leave existence unscathed, criticisms of the clarifying work of existence can't make appearance go away, and rejecting a certain notion of pre-understanding doesn't make hermeneutics uninteresting. There are other modes of pluralism and other possibilities of existentialism besides those on offer in the pages of Totality and Infinity. Nonetheless Levinas has inspired me. I respond to a call to think repetition as operating within a temporality of limited scope, whereas the most vital temporalities take their shapes from the dramatic encounters with other persons. In a future post I will explore variations of the synkairotic encounter while keeping open the question of coexistence, as much as that's possible given my predilections.

Addendum. In a footnote to a passage in which he discusses the difference between his sense of "revelation" and "disclosure" (touched on here), Levinas tells us how he would have us interpret the term "drama":

In broaching, at the end of this work, the study of relations which we situate beyond the face, we come upon events that cannot be described as noeses aiming at noemata, nor as active interventions realizing projects, nor, of course, as physical forces being discharged into masses. They are conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term "drama" would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would have like to use it when, at the end of The Case of Wagner, he regrets that it has always been wrongly translated by action. But it is because of the resulting equivocation that we forego this term.

(p. 28, note 2)

Labels: continuity, drama, Levinas, logos, repetition, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:56 AM. 4 comments

Shahar blogs (naturally in a post one ought to read a few times in its entirety):

Levinas equates the Saying (to be opposed to the Said) with the immanence of the body, with the diachrony of ageing and pain, and with the sensibility of flesh. In contrast to structuralism, which synchronizes the relations between signs in an atemporal horizontal totality, Levinas posits the primordial relation with the other. In this instance, signs are given as gifts between interlocutors before they are fixed into impersonal structures. Time de-phases the identical.

My recent use of somebody's idea of the "unsaid" is similar to the Saying in that it points to the performance of the said, its illocutionary residue; its particular bias is textualist as well as dialectical. Levinas' formulation holds more promise.

Time de-phases the identical. Dephasis problematizes temporality, as if temporality could persist while Time (time's identity) passed underground, even beneath phenomenality, phasis, delivery. A model for this temporality is the gift economy, if only because it's already been described. Now, do we say Time, its reality bracketed out for the sake of exploring the problem of dephasis, neither phases in nor phases out the identical, its presupposition it would seem, but precisely deprives it of phase? Interlocution as the relation that absolves of the relation? We can use totality to undo totality at the "same time" we step outside it? Is this approach suggested by an inherited style of reflection, or perhaps guided by an eidos of reflection? Has structuralism justly been given a due?

I'm sure Kevin would have something to say about this dephasing of the identical, as evidenced by his commentary here. "The music of engagement is always richer than this." (I don't mean to deflect. Just curious.)

Labels: givenness, kvond, Levinas, pragmatics, Shahar Ozeri, temporality, the same

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:00 AM. 13 comments

"The veritable position of the I in time consists in interrupting time by punctuating it with beginnings" (Levinas, Totality, p. 143). What does the beginning begin from? Is there a time outside of beginnings that would allow for something coming before and after, or a beginning against which other beginnings could be measured? What would be the qualities of such a time outside of beginnings, a time from which beginnings could begin?

The primordial positivity of enjoyment, perfectly innocent, is opposed to nothing and in this sense suffices to itself from the first. An instant or standstill, it is the success of the carpe diem, the sovereignty of the "after us the deluge." These pretensions would be pure nonsense and not eternal temptation could not enjoyment tear itself absolutely from the disintegration characteristic of duration.

(p. 145)

Would joyless time be recognizable as time itself, or would we have to arrive at a recognition of joyless time by a process of subtraction?

We have sought to elaborate the notion of enjoyment in which the I arises and pulsates: we have not determined the I be freedom. Freedom as the possibility of commencement, referring to happiness, to the marvel of the good time standing out from the continuity of the hours, is the production of the I and not one experience among others that "happens" to the I. Separation and atheism, these negative notions, are produced by positive events. To be I, atheist, at home with oneself, separated, happy, created–these are synonyms.

(p. 148)

How does one freely commence enjoying a time apart from the dreary blur of hours? Does one simply say "Let's enjoy ourselves?" Before we produce our freedom, as the possibility of commencement, mustn't we recognize our unfreedom (I'm not going there just yet), our being in the thrall of miseries or at the whim of passions? In what time does this recognition take place? The break from time, or the interruption of duration, appears then to have occurred prior to the onset of beginnings. This being prior bespeaks a felt time, or a response to temporal passions that may itself be passionately felt–indeed if it does give rise to the production of enjoyment it would be passionately felt, though it may appear as passionately felt only after the fact of an enjoyment, or, rather more precisely, a commencement which signifies enjoyment. Commencement would then be prior in its appearance to the ego, the nexus of feeling, prior even to time, which, if it is constituted by the feeling subject, is constituted only after the fact of its being felt, and perhaps also then after its quality of feeling had being signified, even meontically. Hmm.

Labels: jouissance, Levinas, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:44 AM. 5 comments

If we pose methexis as an alternative to mimesis how do we account for spontaneity? Conceivably it doesn't fall on the side of methexis. Levinas tells us that representation is itself pure spontaneity, a thought which is by no means self-explanatory (Totality, p. 125). Let's see how Levinas talks about representation and, in particular, the temporal qualities of representation, because if we can make sense of what he is saying in these respects we will have some foothold on his equation of spontaneity with representation. (I've proffered a defense of spontaneity already; now, as a sort of rejoinder, we need to refine our understanding of representation.)

Levinas sees in representation, against expectations, the power to repeat the event of enjoyment, which is to be understood not as an involvement but as a break (p. 123). This implies to me that something like a whole person takes part in representation, whole enough for enjoyment, though one step away from involvement. However, for Levinas, the whole person who ages has no place in representation, or, rather, the temporality of such a person who represents is put on hold for the sake of a repetition which also means a step into eternity, a repetition that is foremost a break.

At the very moment of representation the I is not marked by the past but utilizes it as a represented and objective element. Illusion? Ignorance of its own involvements? Representation is the force of such an illusion and of such forgettings. Representation is a pure present. The positing of a pure present without even tangential ties with time is the marvel of representation. It is a void of time, interpreted as eternity.

(p. 125, Levinas' emphases)

So mimesis does not simply oppose methexis so much as it erases it, avoids the participatory, wipes away all traces of past involvements in the present while still it returns to them. And yet–this is surprising–in Levinas' account the unfolding of representation is sonorous rather than visual, a modality suggestive of both ongoing methectic entanglement and, less surely, enjoyment.

The "I think" is the pulsation of rational thought. . . . The subject that thinks by representation is a subject that hearkens to its own thought: one has to think of thought as in an element analogous to sound and not to light. Its own spontaneity is a surprise for the subject, as though despite its full mastery qua I the I surprised what was taking place. The inspiration [génialité] is the very structure of representation: a return in the present thought to the thought's past, an assuming of this past in the present, a going beyond this past and this present–as in the Platonic reminiscence, in which the subject hoists himself up to the eternal. The particular I is one with the same, coincides with the "daemon" that speaks to it in thought, and is universal thought. . . .Universal thought is always a thought in the first person.

(p. 126, Levinas' emphasis)

Is eternity broken off from any putative pulsation of the cosmos? Where does pulsation come from once even tangential ties to time have been broken off? Does enjoyment have its own separate vibe? And inner speech? I have a doubt about whether my inner voice coincides with me, the person of universal thought, a person who would have to be appreciably acosmic yet alive in their own vibration–no, not their own vibration, this is precisely what is in question. Who among the living will answer for the pulsation of thought? Is this something we just pick up on, or do we relate to it more ingeniously? Do we ingeniously talk to our inner voice? Alternatively, if we can, from a position of analytical subjectivity, wipe out a cosmos of the inner voice, the power of an illusion, of a return, yet still recognize it as a voice, the unsaid in every saying, how will we make a space for the acknowledgment of its singularity? Would such an acknowledgment be like breaking off a time, interpreted as eternity, for the enjoyment of time? Arguably the singularity of the inner voice needed no acknowledgment but was, despite its being an inner voice, already plain as day. And time never needed to be made personal, but always existed through the sonorous as well as hyperspherically. (A tangent? No doubt. But it is Levinas who said "pulsation" and not without reason–it remains to us ask what kind of activity pulsation represents, whether it is anything like a continuation, or its opposite, and how we should measure it.) Imagine the peripherality of time's reaches, if we can finally risk a personification. Instead of making a break from time that would run contrary to methexis, mimesis repeats a movement into the periphery of time. Such movements can be described as unfolding hyperspherically–the concept time merely reminding us that the person's full range of movement extends into many dimensions. Insofar as mimesis presents itself as a locus of all points, the very pulse of the cogito, it would have to be regarded as delusional. We can't be sure, however, that mimesis will follow this rule, that it won't ever lapse into perfect clarity. Methexis and mimesis may be rhtymosophically homeomorphic, but we must concede a difference: whereas methexis participates roundly in the hyperspherical ballet of existence, mimesis jets into the peripherality of movement (an absurdity, you will notice, though an absurdity with a surplus of sense), passing itself across the stage of the delusional, briefly, wing to wing, only to spontaneously discover the question of a locus. Was the question already there waiting to be asked? Waiting wouldn't have been enough to make it a question. More to the point, we can't rule out the possibility that the mime will one day be able to spontaneously answer the question he discovered in his own voice. Nothing will have happened spontaneously in representation that wouldn't have been an absurdity had representation been spontaneity–but that doesn't preclude our finding any sense in the equation, naturally.

Labels: inner speech, Levinas, methexis, personhood, spontaneity, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:39 PM. 0 comments

At the moment I'm unable to deliver a proper meditation on the rhythmic listener. I'll get back to it. For now I need to mention that if you're going to be in Seattle you need to check out the Jason Parker Quartet, all of whom are sensitive listeners.

A passage in Nancy's Listening serves to amplify an idea of Lefebvre's that rhythm requires another time besides or outside of time in order to meditate upon time. Here's Nancy:

We should linger here for a long while on rhythm: it is nothing other than the time of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall, passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time: it bends time to give it to time itself, and it is in this way that if folds and unfolds a "self." If temporality is the dimension of the subject (ever since Saint Augustine, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger), this is because it defines the subject as what separates itself, not only from the other or from the pure "there," but also from the self: insofar as it waits for itself and retains itself, insofar as it desires (itself) and forgets (itself), insofar as it retains, by repeating it, its own empty unity and its projected or . . . ejected [protojée, ou . . . jetée] unicity.

(p. 17, Nancy's emphases)

A quick thought. In addition to thinking about the methectic quality of listening, which Nancy invites, we should mull over the improvisatory attribute of (contribution to) methexis. Where is the methexis in a trumpet full of my emptiness?

Labels: Jason Parker, Lefebvre, listening, Nancy, rhythm, subject, temporality, trumpet

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:49 AM. 2 comments

Assailably: thought coheres with the eidos of bodily movements; the power of thought and the power of the body congrue like music because one is simply a mode of the other; to think is to live, to experience life in physical movements, to journey through the living physique and its habitat; thinking is one with life. I'd like to briefly challenge that idea, the last formulation in particular. Ong alleges that human knowledge (what might that human mean?) emerges from time, and he says, nicely to my ear, "[l]yric poetry implies a series of events in which the voice in the lyric is embedded or to which it is related. All of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time" (Orality, p. 140). Suggestive. But let's keep a watch on this concept of flow. An allowance for interruption.

Ong says, displaying his knack for the apophthegmatic, "the experience of real life is more like a string of episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid" (p. 148). So real-life human experience is embedded in the flow of time and it is rather like a string of episodes, of additional entrances, additional ways of coming into. Now, according to Ong, it is not the episodic which heightens consciousness, or congrues with heightened consciousness, but rather it is the literary narrative adhering to the Freytag pyramid that congrues with conscious thinking, with heightened consciousness in particular (p. 151). The episodic has then only to do with the unconscious?!? (Well, sometimes we need to deploy superstitions in order to be critical; we need to engage the imagination in dialectic exercise.) This doesn't add up for me. Knowledge emerges from time, but consciousness is at a distance from the episodic, the form of narrative time most consistent with lived experience. In an important respect Ong holds that thinking is culturally constrained, that people think according to the dictates of a noetic economy, an economy we experience as structured by technologies of the word, which might imply the force of something like the unconscious, or, better in my view, the nonthematic elements of consciousness; yet in his view the effects of culture are not equal, particularly with respect to the "freeing" of consciousness. (For Ong the life of the mind in a literate noetic economy is at once constrained by technology and free in a sense that could be imagined as free and elaborated culturally (only a free, conscious intellect could imagine the conditions of its freedom, which is thereby put into question). The literate's intellectual life is both enriched and impoverished, in touch with the experience of thinking and alienated: contradictions which I reckon are brought to the analysis rather than emerging from careful study.) It may be worth noting that I don't regard the physique of the animal to be "natural" in a sense of existing apart from, or having existed before, consciousness. Further, if the episodic feels natural I wouldn't jump from the recognition of this feeling to the conclusion that episodic thought must be more primordial, elementary, lower, or any less transcendental (whatever that could mean) than thought which might appear in a certain aspect to be out of touch with the episodic.

I'll preface these next few comments by saying that I am skeptical of silent voices, though the topic interests me, and I have spoken of inner voices (not without some modicum of skepticism, I hope ("Why believe that inner speech points to silence instead of the possibility of conversations yet to be realized?")). "Outside drama, in narrative as such, the original voice of the oral narrator took on various new forms when it became the silent voice of the writer, as the distancing effected by writing invited various fictionalizations of the decontextualized reader and writer. . . . But, until print appeared and eventually had its fuller effects, the voice's allegiance to episode always remained firm" (p. 148). Is the silent voice then also a fictionalization, just a metaphor? How distant is any thought from life? No thought could be more distant from life on Earth than Walter J. Ong himself, yet here is a book open to his thoughts. Incredible. However, as I've argued in a similar vein, Ong's thoughts must be read to become thoughts once again, proper thoughts; they must be embodied by a reader. How distant is this embodiment from living? (That's not a rhetorical question.) Perhaps there's a mode of embodiment that isn't life itself, an idea we should contemplate if only to be clear about what we mean by saying "life" or "body." A convolution: to even have a concept of the body is to stand at–thus to embody–a distance from life.

Labels: body, inner speech, life, narrative, noesis, Ong, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:41 AM. 0 comments

Walter J. Ong's landmark Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word affords us an opportunity to critically examine the nexus between language and thought, even though we should be wary of too quickly adopting his distinction between oral and literate (chirographic, typographic and electronic) cultures with all of its implications. The fact that most language acquisition, beginning in the first months of human life, takes place before the acquisition of literacy gives us one reason for believing that the features of orality, or what Ong terms "massive oral residue" (passim), are in fact evident in every actual, lived language. We could, though I won't bother at this precise juncture, rigorously explore other reasons for believing that by and large language remains intertwined with speech even among the most sophisticated of literate communities. Instead I would simply ask you to reflect on your own experiences with language, even as you're reading this. What is your body doing while you read this? What feelings are in your throat, or in your hands as you formulate a thought that could be expressed in some form of language? What peoples your imagination?

"Sound exists only when it is going out of existence," Ong insists (passim), and this passing out of existence favors a semiotics of spoken words that ties meaning directly to situations of use. "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 setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs" (p. 47). Indeed. The passing out of existence of spoken words means, as well, that spoken language, that is, the culture of speaking, places a premium on memory, that mnemonic technologies are well developed in the absence of writing, technologies which involve the whole body in the act of memory (p. 67). Ong tells us that experience is intellectualized mnemonically in oral cultures (p. 36). Do we generally intellectualize experience mnemonically? I don't feel as if this idea were totally foreign to me, though I am unsure about what "experience" actually means. (There may be a contradiction with Ong's belief that "[s]elf-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking" (p. 54), insofar as self-analysis is an intellectualization of experience, though, naturally, the contradiction would be in our thinking and not in Ong's, who rigidly distinguishes between oral and literate economies of thought.) Should it be incumbent upon the thinker to develop a style of embodied, situational awareness that corresponds to the ephemerality of communications, or do we accept the styles of awareness that seem to come as second nature with our technologies of communication? (These may not be mutually exclusive).

Ong finds that communication in oral cultures is redundant and formulaic (passim). Copia (pp. 40-41). Undoubtedly one could jump from repetition straight to copia, though that doesn't exactly ring true to my ears. Probably copiousness is not generated directly by repetition but by a patterning that makes use of repetition. They are woven together, just as they are in Ong's book, whose redundancies and reliance upon formulaic expressions are apparent to any reader. Here my feeling is that "repetition" is actually an abstraction of a rhythmic phenomenon explained by the instrument of the body, which is always in some measure a rhythmic existence which leaves its stamp on everything that passes through it. Ong's body is imprinted in Orality and surely Presence too, though it is uncertain as to whether Ong the author was ever conscious of the fact. Ong says that "[r]eal time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous" (p. 76) when in fact lived time, the only time worth being called real, is rhythmical, polyrhythmical, and as such no stranger to either continuity or discontinuity. Words are sounded and sound is dynamic, Ong rightly points out. Dynamism–and we mean here an existential dynamism–however, changes things. It transforms. If repetition existed dynamism would change it into something else. The word is an occurrence, an event (dabar, passim). "The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word" (p. 75). Well, there is apparently some practice involved in speaking, something to do with recurrence and temporal horizons. Here's Ong:

In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man's sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world (Eliade 1958, pp. 231-5, etc.). Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or 'world', think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be 'explored'. The ancient oral world knew few 'explorers', though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.

(p. 73, my bold)

Labels: depth, language, Ong, repetition, rhythm, speech, temporality, worldview

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:33 AM. 0 comments

To touch rhythm is to be touched by rhythm. Though he doesn't say "touch," Lefebvre invites us to see touch as a model for how we interpret rhythm. There is more to understanding rhythm, however, than being absorbed by it. Before proceeding I have to step back and look at what Lefebvre is doing with the concept of perpetuity, the uninterrupted reach, the going through, or the seeking through that has come to be synonymous with diuturnity. Once again he distinguishes between the cyclical and the linear and says that "[t]he linear is the daily grind, the routine, therefore the perpetual, made up of chance and encounters" (Rhythmanalysis, p. 30). He has said that the linear and the cyclical combine, but he clearly means here to define the linear as both routine and grind, both the aleatory and the perpetual. The first thing to note, then, is that there may be a cyclical element to Lefebvre's "linear" time. It encompasses the beaten path and the breaking of paths. It does not however foresee the end of paths, or the ends of journeys. It does not anticipate heat death. It apparently has no significant relation to finitude nor to exhaustion. What then is the difference between the linear and the cyclical? Let's look at a couple more instances of Lefebvre's sense of perpetuity. Speaking of "the lessons of the street" and the "teachings of the window," he says that they "perpetuate themselves by renewing themselves" (p. 33). A pleonasm, or rather a tautology? Well, should we think of the linear as renewal, or is there a contradiction at work here, a paradox whereby the beaten path is also the path of renewal? He also says that people "come in crowds, in perpetual flows" (p. 34). We say "perpetual flow" readily enough, but in doing so are we speaking in riddles? What do we really believe about flows? Are our beliefs consistent with a polyrhythmic grasp of being such as Lefebvre recommends?

What is the relation of perpetuity to memory? To meditation? Lefebvre has given us an interesting idea to puzzle over: to grasp the rhythms of the street, he says, requires "a bit of time, a sort of meditation on time" (p. 30). Can we say that to be touched by rhythm is to be in two times at once? Would these be separate times, joined only by rhythm, or might they be modalities of a unitary time? Should we acknowledge our creation of other times or of time itself? Lefebvre says that memory is required to grasp the rhythms of the street, "in order to grasp this present otherwise than in an instantaneous moment, to restore it in its moments, in the movement of diverse rhythms. The recollection of other moments and of all hours is indispensable, not as a simple point of reference, but in order not to isolate this present and in order to live it in all its diversity" (p. 36). Wouldn't touching rhythm then also require protention, anticipation of the coming moment, the next moment and perhaps additionally the constitution of "next" by consciousness? How would we meditate upon the next moment without transforming the next moment into a meditation? Are our routines meditations? What about our routine meditations? Where is the finitude in rhythm? Might there be a rhythm to the way things slip away, slip away from even memory or from anticipation? Is the by in touched by rhythm the place where rhythm slips away from consciousness, from meditation–but the touch of rhythm requires meditation! I find it puzzling. Can we be sure that the touch of rhythm doesn't instigate meditation?

Labels: heat death, Lefebvre, rhythm, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:24 AM. 2 comments

The synkairotic moment is not carved out of time by logos. If any carving is done it is with the synkairos, in the sense that one can accomplish something with an opportunity, a coming towards port. Said another way, it is synkairos which gives us the "not ever" in never allowing us to forget that the logos is an ongoing work. In one sense synkairos appears to be parachronic, which might, in a paroxysm of sloppiness, be taken as a substitute for achronia; however, this appearance can be explained as an artefact of mismeasurement, i.e., only by misapplying the methods we would use to measure chronos, were we to grant that such an entity exists that would adequately correspond to the concept, could we be led to the conclusion that synkairos is achronic.

So what is accomplished by saying synkairos? Well, the word springs from a dissatisfaction with synchrony, and it must in some sense be associated with all that the synchronic would stand for. That can't be denied. I'd like to make it mean something a little less, though, this little twist on the kairotic. The synkairotic captures the sense of the kairotic utterance being ensconced in response. The synkairotic utterance, by which I mean any utterance, is from and towards response, a discursion in the sense of being to and fro response. It is for response. Saying "synkairotic" makes its ensconcings explicit. (Perhaps you can see from another angle why I have such anxiety about thinking repetition?) In the language of opportunity the synchronic is the discourse of the passerelle, the concourse of embarkings and disembarkings that bracket a passage even if we cannot say what that passage means. Any fast distinction between the real and the symbolic may be jettisoned as need arises. The passerelle teaches us that opportunity.

Synkairos is not fictive, then, though it is fictile. The reason one cannot answer a question like "what is the duration of the synkairotic?" is not because the synkairotic is totally made up–again, it is with the synkairotic that made-up things are made up–but rather because if we mean for "duration" or its cousin "durée" to be of any use as a concept we should want to affix it to something permanently whereas properly synkairotic fixings are opportunistic, transiting towards port for reasons that are essentially transitory. They are neither fixatory nor nonfixatory, neither fixional nor nonfixional in any enduring sense. We might precisely say then that synkairos is not presumptively fictive, though fictions may surely be worked out synkairotically. This of course reiterates our initial proposition.

Perhaps I have missed the boat on duration. (I don't ask your forgiveness for showing my mistakes, but perhaps some forbearance.) It is important, if one seeks to understand the synkairotic, that duration be fixable, which also implies, perhaps, that it be unfixable. It seems that there is not a fixed or unfixed state that would be allowed to endure prior to duration. The same logic would apply to ephemerality, or the ephemerus, I think. That is, it may be assumed that duration and ephemerality are mutually exclusive or conceptual opposites while in fact here and now we can apply them to each other freely. This freedom of movement suggests to me that, as with something like affirmative negation, perhaps, the difference between duration and ephemerality, which seems to be carried on in the heart of duration, is not really a matter of dialectics or opposition, but rather it's a matter of two or more concepts inhabiting the same conceptual form, or making the same conceptual passage. Can you say "duration" of things that were thought to have no duration? We come to the concept of duration with other concepts in tow. Fixity, for instance. Yet we can reverse course. We can think duration otherwise than we have been given to think it. We can decouple it even from habit itself, which would keep duration forever in its hold.

If the synkairotic seems to decouple duration from fixity it is not on behalf of a prior (enduring) ephemerality, but only for the sake of allowing other couplings. The synkairotic then allows for the coupling of duration to fixity by allowing for the decoupling of duration from fixity.

I feel I'm in danger of disneyfying duration, but there are a few more words that need to be said about the question "what is the duration of the synkairotic?" The poetic function teaches us that the opposition between the axletree of the synchronic and the axletree of the diachronic cannot be permanently fixed, that the opposition admits of transposition. Well, we haven't even begun to think the diakairotic because we aren't prepared yet to think through passage. Perhaps thinking through the synkairotic will prepare us to think through passage, or perhaps we are avoiding a necessary step. In any case, evidently a doubt can be sustained. An aporia can be sustained. This is an important discovery which may help us address the question about the duration of the synkairotic. Unlike the synchronic, the synkairotic should not be expected to unfold all at once.

The synkairotic moment is multiple, complex. This is not so difficult to wrap our brains around, a complex moment, yet I would find it difficult to specify exactly how such a moment would relate to duration, or to temporality, ontologically conceived. (I won't say "synkairotic instant" because the instant is both overdetermined and etymologically all wrong–the moment does not stand still.) I suspect that there is some temporality at play in the synkairotic. I am playing with it. Yet if I were asked to define it with reference to what, I might rather think it were defined with reference to a complication of whats and whos. This is our synkairotic moment, and who we refers to, dear readers, is never definitively pinned down.

Labels: kairos, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:52 AM. 4 comments

A memory of taking the blue bowl down from the kidaka. A secret object enclosed in a pouch will have been placed behind the bowl. Or in the bowl. It will come back to me, but it won't all come back to me. In the center of the room a bowl of oranges. Come sit. We may be on Lamu, or we may be on Unguja. We may be in Malindi. My thoughts return to the mountains, as always.

Sean M. Kelly (not to be confused with the Sean Kelly of Seeing Things), in an essay (pdf) for the latest Integral Review, quotes part of a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga concerning a capacity for having a memory of the future. Kelly's quotation leaves off just before Aurobindo says, "But this capacity works at first sporadically and uncertainly and not in an organised manner" (Part 4, Chapter 26). This sentence of Aurobindo's vitally qualifies the idea of a memory of the future. It invites us to examine experiences of imagination, or specifically imagined events (and thus also our understanding of time) in such a way as to not obliterate the vicissitude or otherwise completely level out experience–it should be clear that here I am not pursuing a perfection of consciousness but rather attempting to gain some insight on a phenomenon of experience. How would a memory of the future be experienced? Would we say that the future is remembered, or might it be memorized? What can't we commit to memory?

What is the relation between memory and thought? If it seems that the cogito remembers, that it exists temporally, is it also apparent that memory thinks?

What is the relation between memory and imagination? If we view a relation to the future through memory as paradoxical or nonsensical does it follow that we are viewing memory as something other than a mode of the imagination? Must there be in memory an unquestioned relation to the past? I ask again, what is passage? If we reject memories of the future on the grounds that memory must concern the past, are we in danger of being baffled by passage? Are transcendental consciousness and the passage of time ideas equally about passage? (It is not my place to deny extension to consciousness, and I have not yet assigned any such meanings to interiority.)

We may be lead to believe that the dream takes place in the loneliest of lonelinesses. If we stay true to the path of the dream, however, the loneliest of lonelinesses is shown to be a place reserved for the appearance of demons who offer demonic choices as to how we are to respond to their riddles–demons only ever offer demonic choices. They are after all not sphinges but demons. Let's ask whether the oneiric temporality properly takes place, or whether it represents a passage out of place. Have I just presented you with a demonic choice? To answer dreaming with dreaming. The residue of a contour.

What would oneiric translucency say to us about passage? I follow the aporetic ways of anamnesis; aporetically is how I begin to see through to the meaning of passage.

A trailing off into the dew. It's still like being inside the brool. The bedroom window. Waking up from a heart attack into a heart attack. Adrenaline. They dragged the lion off for questioning, the police. They broke his throat. Two or three blows and he went silent, limp. They dragged him away while we lay dreaming. For anamnesis.

When I hand you an orange the surprise of your laughter has been no less dreamy for having been remembered as a surprise. To live with our vicissitudes means to allow for surprise. Does memory concern those things which may be repressed, things which may be disallowed? What would make surprise irrepressible? That surprise would be irrepression itself?

Labels: aporia, dreaming, imagination, memory, Sean M. Kelly, Sri Aurobindo, surprise, temporality, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:59 PM. 0 comments

Nancy thinks that freedom must be thought in its absoluteness, which means that it must be distinguished from every concept of freedom that would be opposed to, and therefore relative to, anything like fatality (The Experience of Freedom, p. 110). In the course of exploring this idea Nancy thinks the temporality of surprise in a way that put me in mind of Tengelyi's idea of a present that has never been future. However, whereas Tengelyi thinks such temporality as belonging to a destinal event, Nancy wants us to imagine a suddenness of time that would happen without happening in time. The time of the surprise seems to be a time outside of time that, if it belongs to anything, belongs to freedom. "This is the structure of surprise (and it will form the exact reverse of the structure of the present): it takes place without having happened; it will therefore not have taken place, but will have opened time, through a schematism of the surprise whose 'I' would surprise itself" (p. 114). Nancy doesn't explain what "the structure of the present" means, so I am a little fuzzy on what he means by its reversal. I note his consistent use of the future perfect tense to talk about the time of the surprise, and wonder if it's something paradoxical like a future that has never been present, but, then again, the sudden time doesn't really happen according to Nancy, which is another kind of paradox. He offers a few concrete ways of thinking about the time that happens without happening in time, the open time. "Open time could be the time of astonishment and upheaval, or that of interrogation and explanation" (ibidem).

"Freedom always surprises when there is no longer or not yet time. That is, when there is no longer or not yet time for time, and for the oppostion of a 'freedom' and a 'fatality,'" says Nancy, returning to his theme of freedom's absoluteness (p.115, Nancy's emphasis). He says, "Freedom separates itself from resignation and revolt not in order to do nothing, but in order to open up this separate place, which is that of the free act in its proper and revolutionary force" (p. 116). He argues that freedom is neither free will nor destiny, but an exposed existence. And, importantly, he says that surprise does not determine existence but exposes it "as an infinte generosity to time's finitude" (p. 117).

Does the revolutionary force of the free act pertain to anything that actually happens, or is it completely outside of happenings? Is it vulnerable? Exposure connotes vulnerability, and I can easily imagine the vulnerability of the giver. Does existence possess revolutionary force or any agency that would have within it or about it revolutionary force? Would "I" be surprised to find a revolutionary force at the heart of "my" exposure?

When I really start to imagine a free time, I imagine a floating time, time unmoored, dipping in and out of the course of events, giving birth to rhythm. The forces that touch upon the rhythm of events, do they have a quality of irreality? We need more ways of talking about reality. Alloreality and spasmoreality. Spasmoreality is a revolutionary force that touches upon the course of events, a force of reality sustained not by belief but by surprise.

If tragedy can be imagined according to a spasmoreality of the free time, the time of the question among other things, without opposing free will to destiny, what then becomes of destiny? On the side of freedom, we have not leveled a skepticism but instead pursued a radicalization of freedom. Do we likewise pursue a radicalization of destiny? Might that lead into a synthesis of freedom and destiny that wouldn't compromise freedom? Or do we abandon destiny to its fate? If freedom and destiny aren't spasmoreally opposed, does destiny surprise itself, as if it will have become unrecognizable? According to Nancy we are born to and die to freedom. They are verso and recto of the infinite generosity that is existence, in which we infinitely accede to freedom (p. 119). The generosity of existence is surprising, and for this reason "destination" and "liberation" say too little, because they mark conscious, willed action (p. 120). Should we be surprised by the generosity of the tragic hero?

What, concretely, is a politics of generosity? Just throwing it out there.

Labels: astonishment, freedom, generosity, Nancy, reality, surprise, temporality, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:10 AM. 2 comments

Corradi Fiumara insists that we should want to be able to find time for listening. We should not merely listen to others, but to our own inner voice. Exploring this idea, Corradi Fiumara says some interesting things about time. To begin with, she puts forward an idea of biological time in order to criticize a concept of time defined by a rationality that does not know how to listen.

With the technology of informatics and the achievement of 'real time', which constitutes precisely the annulment of the time spent in waiting, we move ever further away biological time, undeniably contained within the limits of birth and death and scanned by such rhythms as sleeping and waking, diastole and systole. Structured by a sequence of rhythms that are in evidence as early as in pre-natal life, biological time is conspicuously different from the concept of time created by western rationality: a time, that is, which has lost all rhythmical flow and only speeds up in a planar, uniform and unhalting way. It is a notion of time that can be integrated more easily with a technology of treatment than with the prevention of pathological states; two different views of time, linked to horizons that seem to diverge ever more and that render one another both alien and alienated.

(The Other Side of Language, p. 134)

Corradi Fiumara considers Heidegger's idea that time, as the basis of the possibility of selfhood, enables the mind to be what it is (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 196-197). She comments as follows:

An number of queries thus emerge: first and foremost whether selfhood represents an indisputable fact or a simple possibility of realization. And if it is really the function of time to make the mind what it is how can we know whether time fulfils its role and whether the mind exists as such; we must ask, therefore, if time is 'alive', if it works. Time, which can not be seen, touched or controlled by following it as we choose, is nevertheless capable of paralysing humans with boredom or disintegrating them with haste. If we actually believe that time 'enables the mind to be what it is', it is only fair to ask ourselves how we can have experience of it. And it, in our haste, our boredom, or other forms of deterioration, time fails us, the mind might cease to be what it is. And what might a mind be when it is no longer what it is?

(pp. 140-141)

It occurs to me as I write that I have an inner voice that holds me back and never urges me forward. It is the voice of an editor. Obviously I can tune it out. It can become boring, and if it sounds boring maybe that's because it's bored. Dreadfully bored. Other times it's much too hasty, to quick to edit. Well, I can't be sure. Is it me or my inner voice that's too hasty? Probably both. There's a reciprocity even in our deterioration, our getting down, which may or may not be getting down for real. Do I long to have an inner voice that wouldn't be mine? Would such an other voice be a disintegration, or a deeper integration? If I say I am mindless, it is only in the sense of not having a mind. My mindspace is shared with another voice. I mind it, and I don't mind it. I mind it, though I feel minding it doesn't completely block our getting down. But Corradi Fiumara has a point. If I'm going to get down with my inner voice, the last thing I want to be is arhythmical.

Labels: Corradi Fiumara, Heidegger, listening, psyche, Socrates, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:30 AM. 0 comments

Tengelyi, following Marc Richir, speaks of vibrations of sense exhibiting a constant surplus of meaning, a boundless multitude that can be referred to as apeiron (The Wild Sense, pp. 80-81). Presumably then Tengelyi would translate apeiron as "infinite." However, he says that the most significant characteristic of newly emerging shards of sense is their undecidedness (p. 85). What sort of temporality does the indefiniteness of sense in the making imply? Tengelyi reviews Husserl's idea of the primal impression as presented in the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, and as interpreted by Emanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. (See Dylan Trigg's post here for a quick visualization of Husserl's analysis). Tengelyi is concerned with the primal impression's strangeness to consciousness, and its quality of initiality. In his interpretation of Husserl's analysis of temporality the quality of initiality is evident in the primal impression's disruption of "the order of time organized by intentionalities" (p. 59).

The time of the reality which becomes available as a destinal event gets unfolded along the lines of the conflict between. . . the retrospective and the progessive temporalization. Consequently, this reality appears as present which has never been future, since only after this reality has commenced and has thwarted the previous expectations do the expectations start to take any shape at all–those expectations which are able to harmonize with it.

(p. 84, Tengelyi's emphases)

In a similar vein, he argues that if time is determined by intertwinement of the exigency of the past and the promise of the future, Marc Richir's chiasmus of retention and protention, then a third thread must be added: the belief that reality may at any time rip up the texture of intentional time, creating a space for a present that has never been future because it conforms to neither exigency nor promise, but precisely thwarts. This belief is an "empty horizon" that, when a destinal event takes place, "will be rich in premonitions which can be grasped in their reminiscences" (p. 88).

So what does Tengelyi mean by "destinal event"? He also describes this as a radical turn in life history. I wonder if "critical event" wouldn't capture his meaning, but he means to understand the destinal event in terms of a process of sense formation and its temporality. The "radical turn" or "destinal event" in life history "designates a sense formation which starts by itself, takes place without any control, as if it happened "underground," creating, simultaneously, a new beginning in life-history" (p. 81, my lack of emphasis). Sense formation creates a new beginning in life history by shaking or shattering "the dominant sense fixations which carry our self-identity, thereby giving rise to a split in the self, while, simultaneously, it makes a new sense available, which in turn will make it possible to anchor self-identity anew" (p. 82, Tengelyi's emphases). Not every event of sense is capable of shattering a dominant sense fixation. To become a destinal event a new sense must cross a certain threshold of difference (p. 88). It must be not merely strange, but really strange.

I had begun to think, clumsily, that possibility was contained in practice. Another way of approaching the problem is to say that possibility is contained within the real, or, perhaps, that the real exceeds its possibility. Following Levinas, we can ask whether a reality that precedes every protention (a present that was never future) also precedes its possibility. Reality here is meant in a special sense. We might call it the strangely real.

The "real" (le réel): it is by no means accidental that this word is put between quotation marks. The "real" is not talked about in the sense of an ordinary realism. Primal impression proves to be "primal source," "primal generation," or "primal creation" insofar as it gains significance and prevails in opposition to the "spontaneity" of the intentionality of consciousness constituting time. This "in opposition" does not only express a kind of contrast but a belonging together as well. What is real for us is real in consciousness. Husserl is right: the idea of a reality independent of consciousness is the product of a mere abstraction, or even of our forgetting about ourselves. Yet he is still not right: consciousness reveals a reality which prevails in opposition to the interplay of the intentions of consciousness, thwarting all expectations, countering all designs, "preceding and surprising the possible"; in consciousness–to put it in another way–such a reality gets organized whcih declares its independence from consciousness in this very consciousness itself.

(p. 72, Tengelyi's emphases)

When Tengelyi speaks of the initiality and the undecideness of the really strange sense (my words) being submerged, buried or pushed aside, I can't help but think of the traumatic experience and the psychological strategies for coping with trauma. Tengelyi means, however, to emphasize the other side, as it were, of the newly emerged sense, the side that is met with initiative, undertaking and adventure. The to be open to the really strange in experience is to be ready for adventure, to be open to allowing one's fixations of sense to be shattered. Why not go the distance and claim that reality is strange, staking out an extraordinary realism of the undecided?

Husserl says that "where there is a new experience a new science must arise." Perhaps the really strange–I hesitate to say the impossibly strange–rather calls for a poetics; however, the estrangement of the real from the subject of sense formation suggests yet another approach may be necessary. We'll see whether Tengelyi's diacritical method of phenomenology sheds any light on the strangely real when we tackle his thinking on the experience of alterity.

Labels: Anaximander, Henry, Husserl, Levinas, phenomenology, Richir, strangeness, temporality, Tengelyi, Trigg

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:17 AM. 3 comments

I have been reading against Kojima's account of time consciousness (Monad and Thou, Chapter 3) with the question in mind, What if time exists prior to any constitution of time? Is it possible, I wonder, for anything to escape the flux? As Heraclitus said, "everything gives way and nothing stays put" (panta chôrei kai ouden menei). Kojima's analysis, however, is extremely delicate. It will not be possible to get around it by simply disavowing idealism. In human terms, the issue is to imagine how it is possible for a person to endure over the course of a life; if we answer that it isn't possible, we are left with the uncomfortable fact that the various moments of my life all seem to belong to me, despite any changes that I may have undergone. So what's going on here?

Kojima asks us to acknowledge the existence of a "somatic ego," which (perhaps not yet "who") is not given "solely through self-reflection but also through the reflective-nonreflective mode of the self-consciousness of life" (p. 22).

Sartre introduced the concept of être-pour-soi or conscience non-positionelle de soi in connection with this probelematic, but he failed to connect it structurally to any reflective mode of self-consciousness. The nonreflective and reflective modes of self-consciousness are dialectically or circularly connected to each other, and no one can grasp either one of them without refering to the other. Indeed, self-reflection has as its necessary premise the nonreflective cognition of self, while the latter cognition progressively assimilates reflective recognition in the flow of time and thus builds itself up.

(p. 22)

I'll note in passing that Kojima may be asking us to accept a broadened concept of cognition. A key point, however, is that in linking the two modes of self-consciousness, Kojima is presenting us with an anthropological philosophy of life. Philodendrons need not apply.

Kojima then considers, following Husserl, two ways of understanding the present: (1) as the flowing now, a series of now moments that flow one after the other, and (2), as the standing present, "that which remains still at the origin of the flow and never flows itself" (p. 22). Before we jump to a critique of the standing present, let's see where Kojima is heading with this idea. Although he regards the flowing now and the standing present as analytically separable, he also sees a dialectical relation between them. Just as the non-reflective mode of life precedes and makes possible the reflective mode of life, the standing present, it is argued, precedes and makes possible the flowing now. This correspondence is no accident, in Kojima's view, "for the standing present is nothing other than the temporal form of presencing proper to the nonreflective mode of consciousness, and the flowing now is the form of presencing proper to the reflective mode of that consciousness" (p. 23).

Kojima's insistence on the stillness of the standing present leads him to discount the notion that the standing present is a dividing point between the future and the past, with time flowing in one direction from the future to the past. In his view the standing present is absolutely still. Yet, like the absolute Hereness of the ego, it "cannot be grasped thematically from any reflective standpoint because it is the dimension of the absolute encounter between consciousness and transcendent objects as well as the absolute encounter between consciousness and its own Being-in-the-world, namely the kinesthetic living body (Leib-Körper)(p. 23). Now, Kojima seems to argue that the fact that the standing now and the flowing nows exist on different levels can lead us to conclude that it is meaningless to describe the proper length of the standing present without reference to the flowing nows (p. 24). I'm not quite following how that argument that leads to that conclusion, but he wants to draw our attention to the "deep structure" of the standing present, so we can try to follow him there. He argues that "what connects the different nows to each other is the effect of a vertical intentionality that accumulates past moments into momentary simultaneity" (p. 24). I would like to question how stillness pertains to vertical intentionality, but we can go a little deeper yet into Kojima's analysis.

The conscious flow of passing nows and the standing present as its origin have a common immobile bottom ground called life (or the Lieb-layer of the somatic ego). This life never flows (contrary to many current interpretations of it) but stays still as a kind of nunc stans extending in indefinite continuity from the immediate present in the direction of the past. For example, my "I," as a time-object, is always changing in the flow of time. My I of five years ago and my I of now are quite different as time objects. For the sake of the continuity of life itself, however, both I's are always perceived to be exactly the same (except, perhaps, in a psychiatric case). This is to say that my identity as "I" has its ground in the standing present of life or of the somatic ego in its nonreflective stance. My somatic ego is always presented to itself as the same ego. The Leib-layer of the somatic ego underlying the I of five years ago persists in the standing present in the broadest sense, even though my I is passing away and thus varying as a time-object. Therefore I can ascertain that my I of five years ago and my I now belong to the same standing present, as the somatic ego in its nonreflective stance. This is what I do each time that I recognize my identity. The duration of time objects, for example, of a melody or of sensory data, is achieved through a reflex of the identity of my somatic ego. When the flowing nows with their contents are grasped in a quasi-direct relation to the continuity of my life-ego, that is, of their immobile ground, they appear under the phase of duration (That the duration given through noematic sense is also a modification of this type of duration will be indicated later.) Each flowing now is not connected to next through the retained memory of other nows mirrored into itself, but only through its continuous ground, namely, through life and the somatic ego. Only such duration causes the retention of the flowing now, because it flows away from the original present while nevertheless remaining still in the same present in a wider sense (with relation to life).

(pp. 25-26)

Before lauching into a critique there's just one more idea I want to get out there. "Vertical intentionality shows that time never ceases to flow, while time consciousness itself does not flow," Kojima says (p. 27). This precisely indicates what we're up against if we take up the argument that life never stands still.

Clearly Kojima has considered the possibility that life itself in flux. Why does he reject this idea? Let's ask three related questions: (1) In what sense can the ground of time consciousness be said to be immobile; (2) In what sense can it be said to be continuous; and (3), In what sense can it be said to be a ground?

The identity of my somatic ego appears to be nontransferable. Reproduction is a biological fact, and this would seem to have some connection to my body, and yet it doesn't seem possible for me to swap identities with my offspring. There's a fixity in the question of identity from this perspective, and if we associate this kind of self-awareness with a level of the somatic ego, or the fact of embodiment, we seem to saying that having a body cannot be understood solely from an objective viewpoint, that it contains an element, a reflexive if nonreflective awareness, that is purely subjective. However, does this really speak to the stillness of the standing present? Could there be such a thing as a walking present, a present in which successive I points are taken as belonging together, yet as not being exactly identical, just as one step is not exactly identical to the next step when we go for a walk?

How then would we explain the continuity of the standing present? Can we be certain that it is continuous? Possibly in dreams we can change our identity, become somebody who is not continuous with our waking self. If all of the characters who populate our dreams are in fact avatars of the self, we may still question the continuity of self-identity. Its continuity could be maintained by passing through, for instance, the unconscious, or through the body. In the latter case would we have to understand the body as something different from Kojima's Leib-layer of the somatic ego, even to pose the question of whether there is in fact a continuity? In other words, are we dealing with a presumption here rather than something that is self-evident. I'm not sure, because the continuity of the waking self does seem to be in evidence. The problem is how to explain that in light of what's possible in dreams.

We may question whether time-consciousness is grounded in the somatic ego. Is there any sense in which time-consciousness might be grounded in time itself? If that were the case, would we have to admit that time itself does not have a purely objective meaning, but rather it is also manifested subjectively? That's a hard one. The alternative would seem to be acknowledging a disconnect between time and time-consciousness. Or, on the other hand, we could question the idea of grounding. Perhaps there is no true grounding, but a relative positioning in timespace. Or a pure groundlessness. On that note, I'd like to summon up Ernesto Grassi, and his conclusion to his consideration of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Can it be that the only valid thing left is the appeal of the abyss, wherein we exist as characters playing our assigned parts in a quick succession of scenes and acts? Will we ever overcome the cruelty of the appeal of existence, which reveals itself as indifference for the individual, as the relentless demand on the individual to play an everchanging succession of roles? And as a result, will we never cease to wonder whether passions pertain to human beings at all, or whether they are solely the expression of the magical essence of life?

(The Primordial Metaphor, p. 94)

Finally, then, Kojima is fully aware that he arguing against a doctrine of panta rhei. He rejects the idea that life is in flux, despite the observable fact that the body undergoes changes in the course of a life, because the evidence from his own consciousness tells him that his previous identities are continuous with and, indeed, exactly the same as his current identity. I think Kojima's way of thinking may lead to an impasse. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if there is a way to think the problem of time-consciousness without coming to an impasse, so I think at the very least Kojima offers us an interesting way to begin to think about the problem.

Labels: body, egology, Grassi, Heraclitus, Kojima, life, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:43 PM. 19 comments

Daniel Stern holds that the present moment in everyday experience has a duration of between two and ten seconds, and is typically around three to five seconds. This is the length of a phrase (of language or music), and about how long it takes to breathe in and out (The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, esp. pp. 44-52). Stern dismisses the idea that in meditation one can expand the present moment beyond the ten second barrier because, he says, "In the meditative or flow states, the idea is to lose the sense of self and for consciousness to maintain a concentrated focus, relatively impervious to other stimulation" (p. 43). This doesn't ring true. The obliteration of self isn't necessarily a goal of meditation, and even when it is, there seems to be something to the accomplishment of expanding a moment of awareness beyond the normal range. A horn player, for example, may practice pranayama solely for the purpose of honing his or her breathing skills. He or she might also experience improved phraseology, rhythm, or the ability to concentrate. All of these skills can be put to use in crafting moments of musical experience that are longer in duration than the normal duration of the present moment. It's fascinating, I think, that there would be a normal range of duration of the present moment, but there will always be people who challenge and exceed conventional limits, even those limits apparently set by their psychological nature. This too is a reality of everyday life.

Labels: kairos, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:58 AM. 0 comments