Fido the Yak

Allusiveness

Barbaras on language:

Against the intellectualist conception which posits the material sign and the signification side by side as positive entities, linguistics discovers that sign and signification become positive beings and are then ordered to each other only by a process of active differentiation carried out first on the signifiers themselves. It is truly by this process that the signifiers become signifiers in the strict sense, that is, carriers of significations. The signification is not attached in a univocal manner to a sign but is situated between the signs as the invisible place where the signifying acts intersect. The sense intended in speech is a "qualified nothingness" whose unity is designed by means of the incessant differentiation of spoken words. Consequently, the sign is never truly isolable and the sense never strictly present in any spoken word; it is sketched in them as their secret web and remains therefore allusive, by principle disappointing every attempt to possess it in person. The sense is reached only in a lateral fashion, beside itself, across the figures in which it is incarnated.

(Being, p. 179)

Chaosmic Metaphoricity

In my usage "spatiality" hardly ever refers to bare geometric space but rather to space as it is lived; similarly "meaning" refers not to a purely intellectual realm of displaced and displacable abstractions but to an embodied gesture towards the world, an expression of mien. The orders of extensa and cogitans are not originary. From such a viewpoint metaphor takes on an ontological and chaosmological significance. "Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed," Barbaras explains, "things proceed from a general 'metaphoricity,' from a universal participation that they concentrate or crystallize in order to be constituted into things" (p. 195, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold). This view of a general metaphoricity apparently describes an inhabited world, a universe of life and of leeway. Can there a cosmos in which leeway as such exists without the possibility of response to leeway?

Anarchic (}∅{) Individuation

Barbaras says that "individuation does not designate an incomprehensible phase preceding the individual whose clarification then necessitates recourse to a principle" (p. 183, Barbaras' emphasis) and likewise, "individuality makes sense only insofar as it does not proceed from a principle, and . . . the individual has individuality only insofar as individuality cannot be assigned. The individuality of the thing can be maintained only by remaining unfulfilled, just short of the point where it could fixed as a principle" (p. 184). Does this argument about things also hold for persons, unique, living beings? I think it's rather meant to: "individuality is characterized by its ability to foil every search for a principle of individuation; to be attentive to the individual is to understand that the search for such a principle is meaningless. One must instead say that the individual produces its own 'principles' as asymptotic poles of its pre-individual life" (p. 186). Does }∅{ designate the total absence of principles, or the autopoetic generation of its own proper extempore "principles?" Can these be separated? Is general metaphoricity not a principle?

An errant thought: "sense at its maximum degree of errancy, nowhere gathered together, pure allusion, horizon" (p. 181). I allege that allusion is like enough to a gathering, a playing along, or a play towards. I note a tension between errancy and allusion; at the same time }∅{ means the absence of an apriori gathered; the allusive gathers up in itself even prior there being an in in itself. The allusiveness of this very concatenation of thought has not escaped my notice. Not even direct quotation erases the allusiveness of sense.

Barbaras says that the "ultimate ground of the real consists of . . . 'rays of the world' which do not lead to the rank of principles" (p. 190). To speak of the ultimate betrays a desire for principles. "Ultimate ground," "ultimate moment": }∅{ issues no ultimata. "Ultimate" must be understood figuratively. The desire for the arche is born autopoetically, in the leap. Rays of the world never arrive at the arche, but they approach the arche asymptotically. The penultimate is truer than the ultimate to chaosmic metaphoricity. It belongs with the spasmoreal, though it is "almost" ultimate. It alludes to another order.

Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, metaphor, spasmoreality, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:56 AM. 0 comments

"The distinction between form and matter does not characterize all experience," Levinas assures us. "The face has no form added to it, but does not present itself as the formless, as matter that lacks and calls for form" (Totality, p. 140). Your body has neither a shape superimposed upon it nor does it appear as the absence of shape. Are we about to grasp an immateriality of the body? Your shapeliness intervenes, I insist, between imposition and absence of shape. It's your body that impresses, in the manner of an emanation. Flowing hand. Mutatis mutandis your bodiliness intervenes between stuff and emptiness. Thus your body is no more immaterial than it is unshapely. If we assign your shapeliness to singularity–to recognize your body is you, youtastically, that shapeliness is your gift to experience (experience thanks you)–then what of materiality, a singular materiality? Will materiality allow itself to be manifested uniquely-plurally? Levinas says that enjoyment is "an ultimate relation with the substantial plenitude of being, with its materiality" (p. 133). But hasn't your body, your body-with-a-face, compelled me to rethink materiality? Neither substance nor apeiron, but singularly you, your body. In pure expenditure, like dolphins, in pure loss, flowing hands.

Labels: body, form, formlessness, jouissance, Levinas, uniqueness, you

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:21 AM. 0 comments

Cavarero provides some texture to the idea of plurality:

Biographies and autobiographies, before being textual sites of a refined and professional hemerneutics, are life-stories narrated as a written text. For as much as they are necessarily constructed according to diverse standards, or according to the epoch or the tastes of the times, they nonetheless tell the story of a narratable self whose identity–unique and unrepeatable–is what we seek in the pages of the text. It is this identity, which may be rendered as a fragmentary or multiple segmentation of the self, which would deny its unity. [Those commas don't seem right to me.] Our thesis, once more, is that the etymological root that the terms uniqueness [unicità] and unity [unità] share does not flatten them out into a homogeneous substance, but rather renders them signs of an existence whose life-story is different from all others precisely because it is constitutively interwoven with many others.

(Narratives, p. 71, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)

What should we make of this association of uniqueness with unrepeatability? What does it mean to say that only the what is subject to repetititon (if it exists), that the who is exempt? What else would the who be exempt from?

Labels: Cavarero, ipseity, plurality, repetition, uniqueness, you

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:31 PM. 4 comments

The narratable self that listens to her story, and is one because of the familiar, narrative structure of memory, transfers this irreflexive unity, even in the most manifest fragmentarity of the text. Moreover, it is above all the autobiographical impulse of memory that produces discontinuous and fragmentary texts, which, although untrustworthy and elusive, can nonetheless never be exchanged for someone else's story–as happens in the magnificent textual games of Jorge Luis Borges. This everyday certainty of the self, which comes from sensing oneself to be 'this and not another,' indeed continues to resist both the inimitable pleasure of Borges' inventions, and the more refined enticements of contemporary theory–which continue to impose upon the self the pleasure, if not the necessity, of the infinite dissolution of her internal and multiple alterity.

Signigicantly, with this spontaneous resistance–which seems, at first sight, to be based upon the banality of good sense–the narratable self ends up doing a good service for philosophy. Indeed, philosophy ought to be more cautious in playing around with the endless game of the other. By continuing to transport the category of alterity into the intimacy of the self, contemporary philosophy in fact produces the inevitable consequence of impeding every serious naming of the other in so far as he/she is an other.

As Arendt teaches us, a unique being is such only in the relation, and the context, of a plurality of others, which, likewise unique themselves, are distinguished reciprocally–the one from the other. The story of a unique being is obviously never the monotonous and monolithic story of an idem, but is always the unpredictable and multi-vocal story of an ipse. Although it changes in the course of its life and in the course of its story–even to the point of no longer seeming or feeling the same–this ipse, like Oedipus, is 'this and not another' from the beginning to the end of this life and this story.

(Relating Narratives, p. 43, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)

Nancy's intrus has been haunting me. As I've been doing physical exercises the body I call mine has been changing. What makes this body a body, what gives it the consistency of a body? The heart–but Nancy's intrus haunts me, stands between me and the heart–and yet I feel the heart grow stronger. It doesn't feel disembodied, yet I can't precisely give it boundaries. I drink water prodigiously. It feels like water is also my body, woven in with my muscles. Pumped. A realization about my watery body came to me Monday night after forgetting to take my meds. I couldn't sleep. It was as if a demon possessed me, the mirror image of a beast that comes to me sometimes in nightmares. The beast is not exactly familiar, since it always frightens me, surprises me, it takes many forms, and still I am familiar with its force and its anger, its refusal to lie down. It feels like I'm repressing a tremendous rage, and also something more vital. Joy perhaps. Who is this person who refuses to sleep? How can I have an everyday certainty of the self in this situation? And is it really so unusual to be uncertain about the self? Whose thoughts are these? I don't imagine I'd want to give Nancy a big wet kiss, but I take his words (translated mostly) and put them in my mouth, allow them to circulate, allow them to go to my head. I read a description of psychasthenia and think oh yeah, this too describes a reality. Under the right set of circumstances it could be my reality. The psychasthenic self would be no less of a self than Cavarero's narratable self with its everyday certainty. In counterpoint to this certainty of self, Cavarero notes an unpredictability and a multivocality of the self. Could my familiarity with my unpredictable and polyvalent ipseity be anything but a desire? If I recognize the uniqueness of existents I wouldn't want to say that estrangement draws its boundaries in and around me exactly as it does in and around you. The boundaries of estrangement are negotiated in the context of a plurality of others. In our life together there is the remains to be seen. I have my doubts about the exposure of the existent, chief among them the sense that the existent is exposed in an instant, or already always exposed. If there is a desire for narration of one's life story, perhaps there is also desire for the remains to be seen. Oh yeah, and ghosts.

Labels: body, Cavarero, ipseity, Nancy, uniqueness

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

Adriana Cavarero speaks of a paradox of Ulysses, by which she means the situation that we recieve our own stories from the narrations of others (Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul Kottman, Routledge, 2000, p. 17). In other words, we are the protagonists but not the authors of our own life stories. Cavarero's perspective, suspicious of autobiography, contrasts with László Tengelyi's (The Wild Region in Life-History) emphasis on a life history that one tells oneself, although on the question of the irreplacable uniqueness of the existent there is perhaps some agreement. Where does the unicity of an identity come from? It is tempting for me to think that experience has a unicity, that all of my experiences seem to belong to me alone, and thus perhaps my consciosness could be a source of my identity. Cavarero (and in a different way Tengelyi) will have none of that. In her view the unicity that pertains to identity is given by others; identity is not substantial but rather relational and expositional. On the topic of the expositional character of identity, she is of course interpreting Hannah Arendt, which is her strong suit. When discussing the self-disclosure that pertains to action, she says that identity is expressive. It is not then consciousness which exercises an esemplastic power over experience; rather, relations between singular exposed existents constitute identity and, if I'm reading her correctly, give meaning to a course of life events.

When Jean-Luc Nancy says "birth" I'm not sure if he literally means birth from a womb. Cavarero, who reads Nancy affectionately, leaves no doubt that natality is about birth from the womb. The mother, she says, "embodies the ex- of existent" (p. 19). She says appearance is "rooted in the materiality of the context" (p. 21). I think maybe she means "the context of exhibition," which doesn't really say much, but the mere acknowledgement of a context is perhaps important, and of course there's the question of its materiality, which primarily interests me. Cavarero's thoughts on materiality are fleshed out in For More than One Voice which argues against the primacy of the visual that she posits in Relating Narratives. In any case, she appears to be committed to a kind of materialism. We might call it an expositional materialism, though it is also a materialism of natality. Here is a display:

The expositive and the relational character of identity are thus indistinguishable. One always appears to someone. One cannot appear if there is no one else there. It follows, to say it again with Nancy, that 'the un-exposable is the nonexistent'; that is, existing consits in disclosing oneself within a scene of plurality where everyone, by appearing to one another, is shown to be unique. They appear to each other reciprocally–first of all in their corporeal materiality and as creatures endowed with sensory organs. Put another way, the language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness. Starting from birth, from the 'naked reality of our originary physical appearance,' [Arendt, The Human Condition] each of us is who appears to others uniquely and distinctly.

(pp. 20-21)

"[T]he language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness." I find this intriguing, but I wonder about the distance between language and the existent that has been opened up in the paradox of Ulysses. Whose story is the Odyssey, or the story told at the court of the Phaecians? I'll quote another paragraph at length which shows, I hope, why the paradox of Ulysses is a paradox, or at least an irony.

To be sure, by emphasizing heroic action, the constitutive unmasterability [impadroneggiabilità] of the 'who' is made hugely evident. No one can know, master or decide upon identity. Each one of us is only capable of exhibiting it, of exhibiting that unrepeatable uniqueness which he is, as he appears to others in the actual context of his exhibition. Our Ulysses, who interacts with his peers on the Trojan plane, is thus not an extraordinary case at all. As happens not only with heroes, but also with all of the other actors, he does not know who he is because he could in no way know it. The one who is revealed never knows whom he reveals. Given that everyone's identity lies completely in the exhibitive character of this who–who the agent reveals is, by definition, unknown to the agent himself.

(p. 23)

Is the narrator a master of identities in any way? A master of anybody's language? When Cavarero goes on to speak of a desire for one's life to be narrated, I rather doubt she will be thinking of a desire to be mastered. What exactly is the power that the narrator holds? Who speaks the language of the existent?

Labels: Arendt, Cavarero, Nancy, narrative, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:54 AM. 0 comments

I want to follow up on one of Nancy's ideas in a sober voice. He says that in the experience of freedom that is thinking as freedom, we know that in every thought there is an other thought, which is the burst of freedom (The Experience of Freedom, p. 59). This reminds me of Tengelyi's discussion of the wild sense, the spontaneously emerging shard of sense that appears as other than belonging to one's life history determined according to a retroactive fixation of sense. Dylan, who has begun reading Tengelyi's The Wild Sense, notes a difficulty in the distinction Tengelyi has drawn between singularity and self-identity. Nancy, of course, has had a few words to say about singularity, but so far his thinking is a little opaque to me. It's fair to say that his thinking about singularity is existential. Ex-istence, he says, "signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is 'itself'" (p. 14, Nancy's emphasis). If we put these two ideas together, the argument would seem to be that singularity is given by that which is other in thought, an other that is not thought but that thinks thought itself. (This strikes me as a thinkerly way of approaching existential singularity) Nancy speaks of a hither side of difference: "a difference of being in itself, which would not simply convert being into difference and difference into being (since precisely this type of conversion between pure substances would become impossible), but which would be the difference of its existence, and in this existence, inasmuch as it is its own essence, the difference and division of its singularity" (ibidem). Nancy's singularity is tied to essence, and even though essence is understood existentially, it appears to be a markedly different approach than Tengelyi's. And yet Nancy speaks of the division of the singularity of existence. So far in this work he has not thematized plurality, but the idea seems to be nascent, presaging a dominant theme of Being Singular Plural. This idea of a division or a difference in singularity does not seem far from what Tengelyi means by the positionality of singularity, despite the noticable differences between their two approaches.

In the last decade or so the problem of singularity has been noticed in many corners, but the thoughts around it still appear to be inchoate. The later Nancy (along with Adriana Cavarero) insightfully conjoin the problem of uniqueness with the problem of plurality, and I believe this conjuncture is an implication of Tengelyi's approach as well. Of course Luce Irigaray deserves credit for treating plurality as an ontological problem, though her works are not cited by these other authors. (I mean to take up To Be Two again before too long). The question of finitude seems to be a problem for plurality; can a world consist of as many nows as it takes to make a world? I'm sure I'll be rereading Being Singular Plural again too.

Labels: Cavarero, freedom, Irigaray, Nancy, plurality, Tengelyi, Trigg, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:45 AM. 0 comments

Is empathy grounded in the play of signs? I'm putting the question to Jesper Hoffmeyer even though others (Donald Favareau, for instance) have already expanded on his work and reformulated the problem. Hoffmeyer remains, however, an exemplar of the semiotic point of view on empathy. He sees empathy as a therapeutic response to a uniquely human existential terror stemming from the thought that one could be replaced, a thought that creates a split between an emotionally whole self and an emotionally neutral player who is free to contemplate his or her mortality (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 132). He says:

The interchangability of the players implies an emotional and cognitive relationship between them. Human beings could never have learned to put themselves in someone else's psychological place if they had not already learned to see themselves reflected in that other person, to see the other person as a creature just like them.

The terror and the empathy go hand in hand and language is their medium. In actual fact it was not humanity, much less erectus, who engendered them. It was a little child. Lacan's reflection theory holds the key: the mutual empathy between mother and child provided the protection necessary to cope with the unleashing of the awful isolation inherent in the idea of "not."

(pp. 132-133)

Phenomena like atruism in chimpanzees suggest that either chimpanzees are more intellectually capable than Hoffmeyer gives them credit for (calling into question the uniqueness of the existential terror of imagining oneself as interchangable), even though they lack language. Such phenomena might also call into question the notion that empathy emerges as response to a kind of cognition. We needn't turn to the behavioural studies of primates however in order to philosophically question this premise. Kojima, for instance, talks about the ontic meaning of the other being present to us immanently prior to any perspective that would allow for an exchange of viewpoints, and he speaks of an ontological anticipation of alterity that precedes any introjection of one's own being into other bodies. Favareau might tell us that such ontological anticipations are also a kind of neurological interpretation (and therefore also "cognitive"), but I wonder if instead we might question the semiotic nature of empathy.

If empathy is semiotic in anything like a Peircean sense, it would seem to involve multiple interpretants. The stubbed toe affects its owner and any empathetic witnesses at once. I can't say whether Peirce ever provided a satisfactory account of empathy or compassion, but the very idea of com-passion challenges my understanding of the idea that sign relations are purely triadic. Sign relations in empathy appear to be tetrahedral, at the least. I see meaning in the relationship between interpretants, but I don't know what semiotic model would be capable of exploring it.

I've quoted Jean-Luc Nancy before as saying:

Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.

(Being Singular Plural, pp. 86-87).

Now I want to ask whether meaning is always meaning towards something, or more simply meaning something. (A secondary question concerns whether meaning is always for somebody–I'll leave that aside for the moment.) Is meaning towards a thing qualitatively the same as meaning towards another person? Nancy invites us to roam in a region of meaning between singularities. Can this meaning of the with also be thought of as a meaning towards, or would that necessarily imply a kind of foundation that Nancy rejects? I'm not sure.

All told the semiotic depiction of empathy feels a little cold to me. Perhaps there are senses in which empathy is grounded in the play of signs, but I'm having a hard time envisaging a semiotic approach that doesn't obliterate the meaning of the other or, alternatively, the meaning of being with others. What sense of meaning, if any, does the phenomenon of empathy call for?

Labels: chimpanzees, compassion, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kojima, meaning, Nancy, Peirce, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:32 AM. 0 comments

I'm having trouble with Deleuze's account of individuation in Empiricism and Subjectivity (Chapter 5) because he seems to imply that the problem of uniqueness is merely a problem of unique mental contents. I'll return to this problem in a moment.

Deleuze discovers that subjectivity is a practice (p. 104), and rightly thematizes the inventiveness of the subject. One of the conditions of possibility for invention that Deleuze pinpoints is the subject's ability to transcend its own partiality (p. 86). I'm not so sure about that.

I'd like to reimagine a poetics of the subject, one that sees the subject as practice, but a practice more akin to poiesis than technê. A poetics of the subject will be ameniable to the problem of existential uniqueness, and also to an empiricism of sorts. The poetic subject constitutes itself within the given, and the given is "movement and change without identity or law" (p. 87). In a sense the poetic subject is its own logos, its own poetry. However, the subject is not therefore solely regulative. Regularity emerges from the ongoing touch with the movement without identity, but regularity is only one timeline of the poetic subject's rhythm. Rhythm dances on the threshold between regulation and spontaneity. The regularity, the ensemble of movements in a straight line, is only one many of the senses of rhythm. Rhythm also opens the door to a prosody of the contour. It's sense is that it strives (sinnan), and in its striving the way is never set beforehand. The way opens.

Deleuze says, with reason, that "we can understand the phenomenon of the passions only through the corporeal disposition" (p. 98). To follow where Deleuze is leading with this argument, it is necessary to note that the mind is not the subject. The mind is not transcendent; the subject is. The mind is what is given, and Deleuze's reading of Hume's empiricism means essentially this: "if the subject is indeed that which transcends the given, we should not initially attribute to the given the capacity to transcend itself" (p. 88). Here I won't question the poetic subject's capacity for transcendence of the given, but I will question the nature of its transcendence, and whether it also thereby transcends its own partiality. "The impressions of reflection," Deleuze says, "consititue the subject in the mind" (p. 97). Further:

The problem, thus, is knowing which new dimension the principles of subjectivity confer upon the body when they constitute impressions of reflection in the mind. The impressions of sensation were defined by means of a mechanism, and referred to the body as a procedure of this mechanism. The impressions of reflection are defined by means of a spontaneity or a disposition and are referred to the body as the biological source of this spontaneity. As he studies the passions, Hume analyzes this new dimension of the body. The organism is disposed to produce passions. It has a disposition which is proper and specific to the passions in question, as an "original, internal movement."

(p. 97)

The impressions of reflection constitute the subject while the principles of subjectivity constitute the impressions of reflection. Let me just reiterate that the poetic subject is defined by its rhythm, impassioned even in its dispassionate stance, neither purely spontaneous nor purely mechanical, but precisely a disposition, a style of the body.

Suggestively, Deleuze argues that ideas must be designated to somebody.

These ideas [suitable to be grouped into complex ideas] are not designated within the mind without the mind becoming subject–a subject to whom these ideas are designated, a subject who speaks. Ideas are designated in the mind at the same time that the mind itself becomes a subject. In short, the effects of the principle of association are complex ideas: relations, substances and modes, general ideas. Under the influence of the principles of association, ideas are compared, grouped and evoked. This relation, or rather this intimacy, between complex ideas and the subject, such that one is the inverse of the others, is presented to us in language; the subject, as she speaks, designates in some way ideas which are in turn designated to her.

(p. 101, Deleuze's emphasis)

The logos of the subject is neither langue nor parole but poetry. And so we come by way of the association of ideas to the problem of uniqueness.

In his [Hume's] work, the association of ideas accounts effectively for habits of thought, everyday notions of good sense, current ideas, and complexes of ideas which correspond to the most general and most constant needs common to all minds and all languages. What it does not account for is the difference between one mind and another. The specific progress of a mind must be studied, and there is an entire casuistry to be worked out: why does this perception evoke a specific idea, rather than another, in a particular consciousness at a particular moment? The association of ideas does not explain that this idea has been evoked instead of another. It follows that, from this point of view, we must define relation as ". . .that particular circumstance, in which, even upon the arbitrary union of two ideas in the fancy, we may think proper to compare them." If it is true that association is necessary in order to make all relations in general possible, each particular relation is not in the least explained by the association. Circumstance gives the relation its sufficient reason.

(p. 103, Deleuze's emphases)

Deleuze notes that for Hume, circumstance "always refers to affectivity" (p. 103). He continues:

We must take literally the idea that affectivity is a matter of circumstances. These are precisely the variables that define our passions and our interests. Understood in this way, a set of circumstances always individuates a subject since it represents a state of its passions and needs, an allocation of its interests, a distribution of its beliefs and exhilarations. As a result, we see that the principles of the passions must be combined with the principles of association in order for the subject to constitute itself within the mind. If the principles of association explain that ideas are associated, only the principles of the passions can explain that a particular idea, rather than another, is associated at a given moment.

(ibidem)

Deleuze says it's "as if the principles of association provided the subject with its necessary form, whereas the principles of the passions provided it with its singular content. The latter function as the principle for the individuation of the subject" (p. 104), and, finally, he says that the subject "cannot be separated from the singular content which is strictly essential to it" (ibidem). I humbly suggest that this is the wrong path to take towards an understanding of the uniqueness of the subject. The problem of existential uniqueness is not one of why this particular idea instead of another, and it isn't really one of why this circumstance instead of another, or even why this mind instead of another. An essential point of Barbaras' critique of sufficient reason as it found its way into the phenomenological epoché was that it surreptitiously made an object out of the world. (Of course I mean to distinguish between the world as it appears in the reduction and the world as it appears in the natural attitude.) Sufficient reason hinders the appreciation of the uniqueness of the poetic subject because it hints that the non-being of the subject might be prior to its being.

Might the passions rather be unprincipled? Might they be so unethical as to transgress the subject's transcendence of its partiality? And might they do more for us than merely sift out ideas to establish a region of unique mental contents?

Labels: Deleuze, Hume, rhythm, subject, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:55 PM. 0 comments

How do we define life in such a way as to include mules and other non-reproducing organic entities? This debate has found its way into the field of astrobiology. Vera Kolb takes the position (pdf) that we should distinguish between life (zoë) and the living being (bios). Her position is taken in response to a paper (pdf) by Carol Cleland and Christopher Chyba, who argue that if life is a natural kind, there should be a single definition to describe it. I am partial to Cleland and Chyba's view, but Kolb raises an interesting point regarding our old friend ouisa. Kolb says:

In his 'Categories' Aristotle developed a theory of classification of existing things (Aristotle 1963). He introduced the notion of a substance, which is a fundamental ingredient of reality. He proposed ten categories : substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection. Substances may be primary or secondary. His examples of primary substances are an individual man or a horse. He terms the species such as 'men' and the genus such as 'animal' as secondary substances. It is fascinating that Aristotle placed an individual living organism higher in the classification than its species or genera. He stated that the individual substance does not lose its qualities as it becomes part of a species and genera. However, this is a one-way road, since the converse is not true. The species and genera are, in today's language, information poor as compared with the individual. Aristotle concluded that manhood, which would be a generic description of the properties of all men in the species, is not contained in the primary substance, which is an individual man. General is not present in specific ; abstract is not present in the real. This approach places the individual above its species and points to the uniqueness of the individual. More on Aristotle's views on substances are found in his 'Metaphysics', Book Z, and also Book H (Aristotle 1979). While Aristotle's concept of substances changed somewhat, for our purposes his original view, from 'Categories', is most applicable. Aristotle's view of the primary substance acknowledges that an individual is unique. In 'Categories' he also stated that the individual substances cannot be ranked. We believe that this principle is still valid. Each individual living organism has its unique place in the Universe. This view assigns the utmost importance to an individual living organism, in contrast with some contemporary reductionist views such that an individual organism is just a carrier of the selfish genes (Dawkins 1989).

(pp. 4-5)

I'm sure some thinkers will see a problem with linking uniqueness to ousia. Should astrobiology acknowledge the uniqueness of every living organism? On what grounds?

Labels: Aristotle, Chyba, Cleland, Kolb, life, mules, ouisa, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:40 PM. 0 comments

It's time to take another gander at the ontological difference in light of Barbaras' philosophy of living movement. We begin with Husserl.

As Husserl affirms forcefully in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, phenomenology brings to the fore the correlation between the transcendent being and its subjective modes of given[ness]. This means that there is an irreducible distance or tear, constitutive of phenomenality, between appearing and the being on which manifestations rest, so that the search for a univocal sense of being that would embrace the appearing being and the "locus" of constitution is not pertinent. The difficulty is rather to think of the difference of the being conditioning the manifestation in such a way that its "beingness," its intraworldliness, is not compromised by this difference.

(Desire and Distance, p. 149, emphases Barbaras')

Patoĉka's philosophy of movement, to which Barbaras is deeply indebted, leads to the following conundrum:

Determining Dasein's ultimate sense of being as movement of realization compromises its unicity at the very moment when its singularity is fully revealed, as if a rigorous determination of the subject of the manifestation's sense of being had as its counterpart a questioning of the tear inherent in the correlation–as if, therefore, we abandoned phenomenology at the very moment in which we succeeded in establishing its possibility.

(p. 150, Barbaras'emphasis)

Barbaras is exactly right that the Patoĉkan idea of being as movement compromises the unicity of Dasein, which I will refer to as the "existential subject" while adopting the term "living subject" for the compromised entity whose basis is living movement. If the living subject's singularity remains intact while its unicity is compromised, is it possible then that it retains an esemplasticity, a capability or even a tendency towards unification? Or does the ontology of living movement also forcefully compromise this capacity? If the latter is the case, can this really be an acceptable rendering of who we are? A phenomenological cogito, for all of its brittleness, would then seem to have its advantages. Perhaps, however, the living subject truly is esemplastic, even while, or precisely because, its unicity is in doubt.

These are Barbaras' concluding thoughts:

These, then are the ultimate questions that I have invited my readers to consider: Is it possible (and on what conditions) to account for the difference between the appearing and the subject of manifestations on the basis of the monistic cosmology envisaged by this philosophy of movement? Does the concept of movement as realization allow us to maintain the originary difference between the movement of existence and the beings that it makes appear? How can the univocality of the ontologico-cosmological concept of movement be reconciled with the correlation and therefore with the difference of phenomenology's constitutive sense of being? In short, does the cosmological monism outlined by Patoĉka by means of an unprecedented deeping of the human subject's sense of being threaten the phenomenological undertaking, or does it constitute its most radical accomplishment.

(p. 150)

I can't help but feeling, as I've indicated before, that the ontological difference is intolerable. If I am to go beyond phenomenology towards a cosmo-ontology, however, I don't want to sacrifice the test of experience. Does this ontology make sense in terms of what I can know based on my own experience? I am unsure of my fundamental unicity, yet I don't doubt the esemplastic character of my experience, the fact that it seems to belong to me. How do we think uniqueness? I just don't know.

Labels: Barbaras, ontology, Patočka, phenomenology, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:05 PM. 0 comments

Is repetition possible as an imitation of oneself? The question springs from an aside by Merleau-Ponty. Under the heading of "The Phenomenon of Imitation" Merleau-Ponty discusses the problem of the consciousness of other people, and relates this to certain facts of language acquisition (Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, pp. 31-53. Early on he says that "imitation of oneself (repetition) or of others is founded on something besides the representation of movements" (p. 33). If we assume that Merleau-Ponty is on track about the consciousness of others, as I intend to do for the nonce, though the problem may ultimately be intractable, then the problem of repetition may not be easily disentangled from the problem of other people. That is, even if it is assumed that repetition is possible as an automimesis, the question of the self's relation to self in repetition may remain rather opaque, which isn't to say that nothing at all can be said about it.

What is automimesis founded upon? At the outset we can reject the idea that the mimetic subject forms a representation of his own bodily movements and then recreates these in accordance with that representation. The critique is twofold: on the one hand the awareness of one's own corporeal abilities is nonrepresentative, if you will, precognitive; on the other hand it seems that what is aimed for in imitation is a goal or object of movement. Following Paul Guillaume's argument in Imitation in Children, Merleau-Ponty says that "imitation is founded on a community of goals, of objects" (p. 35). Yet this view of imitation is incomplete. From the analysis of affective imitiation, which is putatively just as precocious as the imitation of gestures, Merleau-Ponty concludes that imitation must also involve a "human component" besides an interest in the object alone (p. 39). In imitation the person is regarded as neither body nor mind, but as behavior (p. 35), which is interpreted as expression, as style. Style, Merleau-Ponty insists, is not an idea, but a manner that is apprehended in imitation (p. 43). We might say that what is grasped in imitation is a "melodic totality" (p. 40) of gesture and ability. Automimesis, we can say, is founded on the development of one's own style.

Is automimesis an accomplishment of the cogito, either in its inception, its process, or its conclusion? If automimesis were a capability of the cogito we would have to question at some point the originality of the cogito. It's doubtful whether the cogito can sustain such doubts. Yet if we take the view that automimesis begins with an apperceptive act that, following Husserl (Cartesian Meditations, § 50), is not a cognition, and that is enacted by a more primordial self, a tacit cogito perhaps, we still face the problem of the self's orginality. To phrase the problem in other terms, is there such an animal as an intersubjective self? What would its mineness mean?

It is precisely the sense of mineness that is unsettled in automimesis. I won't yet make the leap to say that repetition is possible only as difference because there is still something to be said about the unsettling of mineness. If repetition is possible on the basis of an intentional transgression, could it be that the mineness of experience is routinely, practically transgressed? Is there any sense of mineness that attaches to transgression, just to carry it through? Merleau-Ponty argues that the expression of what is most personal in experience is constantly being perfected, not just in children but in adults (p. 53). Can we separate the expression of mineness from mineness? Could it be that mineness is constantly under revision? Can we designate a basis upon which repetetion as automimesis is possible as the unsettled, or is that one step beyond transgression, a step we need to be cautious about taking? Say it exists as such. Is the unsettled situational, or is it more deeply personal? I don't really know how to answer that.

Labels: cogito, egology, Merleau-Ponty, repetition, transgression, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:03 AM. 0 comments

The appearance of something is always also the appearance of a world. The exploration of this thesis leads Barbaras to a radical phenomenological ontology. Let's see where he's going with this idea. He says that the world is constitutive of manifestation:

Appearance is always appearance within the world; any manifestation of something is in principle a comanifestation of a world. Indeed, the world is this open totality, this encompassing absolute, a field for all possible events. It is neither the sum of beings that emerge there nor a sort of super object, whether we conceive of it as an empty framework or a specific environment independent of what appears, but instead the vital force of any manifestation, an element that is not distinguished from it, precisely because it is not an object, an element that is therefore none other than the ensemble of manifestations and is constituted at the same time as they are. As Patoĉka writes: "The world is not sum, but preliminary totality. We cannot set ourselves outside the world, raise ourselves above it. The world is, by all its being, midst, in contrast with what it is the midst of. For this reason, it is never object. For this same reason, it is unique, indivisible. Any division, any individuation is in the world, but has no meaning for the world."

(Desire and Distance, pp. 63-64, emphases Barbaras' and Patoĉka's)

Appearance, Barbaras argues, is not originally appearance to consciousness, but appearance within a world. Instead of dealing with the problem of uniqueness as an attribute of consciousness, or of a subjective being, Barbaras' analysis puts forward the manifestation of the world as the locus of uniqueness. He again quotes Patoĉka's Papiers phénoménologiques:

There must be a unique connection at the interior of which is everything that there is. This unique connection is in the strict sense what is. . . . [I]t is the condition of all experiences. However, it is also the condition of all particular beings in their particular being. Thus the form-of-the-world (Weltform) of experience is also what makes an experience of the world possible. This all-encompassing being unique, it follows that it must always be there as the permanent backdrop to experience. This also implies that there cannot be two totalities of being and therefore, that experience as experience of being is necessarily concordant.

(quoted in Desire and Distance, p. 65, emphases Barbaras')

Barbaras says that the comanifestation of the world cannot be reduced "to the presence of a content, a being that would presuppose appearance" (p. 65). (Neither can it be reduced to a form, for "[a]s the originary unity of a given and a condition of givenness, the world is the identity of form and content, or rather their indifference" (p. 66).) And so we come to Barbaras' most radical departure from Husserl. If appearance is essentially characterized by a belonging to a world, this also holds true for the "extraordinary appearance of the human person to itself called consciousness" (p. 67, emphasis Barbaras'). I would not refer to the person as an "it," so immediately I am wondering whether Barbaras is keyed into the existential uniqueness of the world, and what he could possibly mean by emphasizing the world's uniqueness. The thrust of Barbaras' departure from Husserl is that reality is given priority over consciousness; [f]ar from the notion that the world is constituted in lived experiences, there are lived experiences only on the basis of the world" (p. 68). According to Barbaras, the lived experience, like the thing, is given in adumbrations (p. 67). So what does this mean ontologically? Barbaras argues that if all manifestations are simulataneously comanifestations of a world, then the appearing cannot be fully present in its manifestation, and manifestation is, therefore, characterized by obscurity or distance. This, he says, is the expression of appearing's being-in-the-world (p. 67). (Barbaras does not reference Heidegger; I suppose there is some question as to whether Merleau-Ponty's being-in-the-world is the same as Heidegger's.)

At this point I'm tempted to go straight for the problem of being. Barbaras' text, however, is rather sophisticated, and resists drawing easy conculsions. He hasn't done away with the notion of a conscious subject so much as displaced it.

[I]n subordinating consciousness of the self to the general structure of appearance, the subject is not reduced to insignificance; nor is any specifity in relation to other appearings denied to it. Clearly the autonomy of appearance cannot be understood as the autosubsistence of a being, nor therefore as an anonymous manifestation that would not imply constitutively someone to whom this appears. Indeed, it must be said that if the essence of appearance implies the manifestation of a world, the essence of this world implies that it cannot be distinguished from its manifestation. If it is true, as Patoĉka states, that appearance is the universe itself, it must be added that this universe is its appearance–in accordance with the unity of the esse and the percipi that Merleau-Ponty thematizes–and that this universe cannot be conceived of without reference to a "who" to whom it appears. In short, the fact that the subject (the one to whom the universe appears) is not a constituent part of the world but, on the contrary, is dependent on appearance as manifestation of a world does not rule out but rather implies that this subject is equally constitutive of this structure inasmuch as there is appearance of the world only as appearance for.

(p. 69)

Now that the who of the world has been restored (as a for whom), I wonder if there is an essential way of relating to the world. Do we essentially relate to the world personally or impersonally? Do we understand our own appearance (consciousness) as a person or a thing? Or is there a possiblity of polyvocality in all of our relations? Is appearance itself polyvocal? Barbaras says that appearance is univocal (p. 67), but I'm not sure of this. Does the structure of appearance determine how we relate to the world? Bodily? This is a strange aspect of Barbaras' argument: the subject is essentially incarnated becuase incarnation is demanded by the structure of phenomenality. "It is not because one is incarnated that one has a point of view on the world; rather, it is because the essence of phenomenality implies that the subject to whom the world appears be inscribed in it that one is incarnated. One's inscription in the world, which is realized as a body, is merely the consequence of the structure of any manifestation's constitutive belonging" (pp. 70-71). I don't know if I buy it, but let's see what happens to the question of being when embodiment is subordinated to the reality of the phenomenon.

Barbaras designates the being-in-the-world of the appearing as the horizon (p. 77). The horizon, he says, following Merleau-Ponty, is a new type of being (p. 78). It is a "mode of being that defies the principle of identity" (p. 79). Givenness by adumbrations is rooted in the horizon: "the act of adumbrating that gives meaning to the notion of adumbration is the work of the horizon. To conceive of appearance as structured according to a horizon is to think of adumbrating as being" (p. 79). Finally, Barbaras says that "the nature of originary givenness, insofar as it is the givenness of a world, is precisely that it involves a dimension of invisibility or transcendence that the concept of horizon names" (p. 80).

I'm left with a few questions about this ontology of the sensible, this notion of adumbrating as being. Is it existential? Is it empirical? It's certainly counterintuitive to make embodiment dependent upon appearance; if it has the effect of keeping the phenomenological reduction honest, there might in fact be a problem with the reduction. Lastly, does Barbaras' ontology tell us anything about uniqueness? Is uniqueness more a qaulity of our reality than it is a quality of our subjectivity?

Labels: Barbaras, experience, givenness, horizons, Merleau-Ponty, ontology, Patočka, phenomenology, uniqueness, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:14 AM. 0 comments

If we hold the view that consciousness is unique, what does that entail about the phenomenon of language? Does it mean that language that is no mere thing? This is one of the questions that arises from Merleau-Ponty's introduction to Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Merleau-Ponty says that language "cannot be observed or grasped directly; it can only be exercised" (p. 6). Possibly he is completely wrong about this. Does rejecting this idea imply that we are bound to an idea of universal thought, to a sense of thinking that is not unique?

I was surprised to see Merleau-Ponty cite the work of Wolfgang Köhler (whose The Mentality of Apes I've just requested from the library.) Merleau-Ponty describes the anthropomorphism of Köhler's approach as "indispensable," because it ensures that "the life of the animal will not be reduced to the behavior that is under observation" (p. 9). Merleau-Ponty's brief defense of anthropomorphism reminded me of Hans Jonas, but I'd like to focus for a moment on what anthropomorphism means for the problem Merleau-Ponty has asked us to consider. If we can acquire a knowledge of language that may be described as intersubjective, must we resort to anthropomorphism? If we hold that language cannot be observed directly, it would appear that there is no other option. But is there another reason to favor an anthropomorphic method? Does the problem of the infant compel us to think anthropomorphically? (Now I am wondering to what extent Daniel Stern's work relies on anthropomorphism; does the problem of infancy necessarily lead one to imagine the subjectivity of the infant, and raise all the issues associated with such an imagination?)

Is language essentially mysterious, as Merleau-Ponty suggests? If language is a mere thing, does this mean that there is concievably a limit on the things that can insightfully be said about it? The ambiguousness of language is hardly deniable, but is it more or less swept under the rug by certain assumptions about what language is? If language is mysterious, then can we expect that judicious anthropomorphism may be in some instances demystifying, or would that merely compound the mysteries rather than solve them?

Labels: anthropomorphism, infant, Jonas, Köhler, language, Merleau-Ponty, Stern, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:53 AM. 0 comments

In For More than One Voice Cavarero said "uniqueness" many times but she ultimately doesn't have a whole lot to say about uniqueness. She fails to establish that the metaphysical shunning of uniqueness which she assails isn't due to the simple fact of there being very little to say about uniqueness. This failure to meet my expectations, however, doesn't mean that her project as a whole is a failure. It's not a question of whether or not my expectations were reasonable, but rather that they simply belong to me, to the interests and problems arising from my own intellectual development. When I quote a passage, highlight this or that phrase, or explore the meaning of this or that word, the last thing on my mind is providing an authority for a way of thinking. What I am after is a philosophical conversation with an author, a conversation that acknowledges the uniqueness of the author, seeking to elucidate an aspect of the author's world as it is revealed in her or his texts, while at the same time cultivating my own abilities to grapple with problems and formulate questions. I'm frequently neither as sensitive nor as insightful as I'd like to be, but I believe there is a call for both sensitivity and insight and I try to meet it.

As it happens, I am ready to push the idea of uniqueness even if it means leaving Cavarero behind. If every thinker is irreducibly unique, does it follow that every thinking is likewise unique? Is there a fundamental connection between uniqueness and thinking, or is the existential uniqueness of the thinker more or less an accident with respect to thinking? If I take the position that thinking is tied to uniqueness, that thinking is in essence existential, what then do I say about the massive fact of language? How can I then account for grammar? Or quoted speech, the fact that the words of language are not my own?

Dialogism may be the easiest hurdle to cross. In saying something again, I have the powers of recontexualization and emphasis. Emphasis in text signifies a vocal intensity. It could also be thought of as gestural. It's a meaning that the body gives to words. To use Cavarero's language, quoted speech is like any other speech in being destined toward resonance. This too is a fact of language and it means that far from being obliterated by language, the uniqueness of each speaker is affirmed dialogically. Is the uniqueness of each act of speaking thus also affirmed in the destination toward resonance? I don't see why not.

Is grammar something that exists apart from habits of speech, apart from a process of structuration or systematizing language that begins in infancy? I don't really know, but I'm willing to explore the possibility that grammar is a kind of sedimentation rather than a program, and that each speaker comes to grammar uniquely. This is of course highly speculative, and it doesn't resolve the issue of whether the process of structuration involves any universals of thought. Against an enormous body of linguistic evidence I have only the knowledge that you are unique and that any thoughts you share will be uniquely yours. How that actually plays out is unclear to me.

Is uniqueness a struggle or is it just simply given? For me it doesn't often feel like a struggle to say something uniquely so I more or less take uniqueness for granted. However, I have to wonder whether this is true of others. There are people, it seems, for whom the recognition of uniqueness is a problem, people who either fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of others, or fail to see what in their own thinking is unique, or both. Many bloggers that I read are more eloquent or more erudite than I am. I often wonder whether I shouldn't feel more of a struggle to say something unique, whether I rely too heavily on block quotations, or whether the questions I pose deserve consideration. My insecurities have never led me to pass off the words of another as my own, but I can imagine the reasons why somebody else would do such a thing. Perhaps uniqueness is a burden. Perhaps thinking doesn't want to be unique. Is thinking fundamentally at ease with itself, or is being at ease anethema to thinking? Well, I've wandered.

Labels: Cavarero, philosophical conversations, quoted speech, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:17 PM. 6 comments

Cavarero asks us to think of uniqueness as "an understanding [un'intesa] and as a reciprocal dependence" (p. 182). The latter term suggests what Cavarero might mean by "understanding," but I'd like to begin by asking what kind of understanding is possible in the absence of consciousness, for Cavarero's privileging of speech over thought in the logos comes with a hearty dose of antipathy toward nous. She writes of a phenomenology of the voice, yet there is no place in her phenomenology for a conscious subject. Mouths communicate with ears and the recognition of vocal uniqueness occurs spontaneously, as if by magic. "The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears comes to the fore" (p. 174). By "autonomous" Cavarero means autonomous with respect to thought, that speaking isn't merely the acoustic manifestation of thinking. She intends to give back flesh and bone back to the subject, but unlike the phenomenologies of Patočka, Herny or Merleau-Ponty, she has not elaborated a notion of bodily awareness–actually she sort of does have such a notion, but it comes in bits and pieces. For example she says that the "ear distinguishes sound and knows it to be human not only because it vibrates in the specifically human element of speech, but also because the ear percieves its uniqueness" (p. 178). Whereas Cavarero portrays the communication between mouths and ears of others as direct and instantaneaous, she cuts out of the picture altogether communication between the ears and mouth of a conscious subject. There is nothing to explain the unity of the mouth and ears, no explanation of how the knowledge that the ear possesses pertains to the mouth of a hearing subject or anything other than the ear.

Speaking of Levinas' ontology of the face-to-face, Cavarero says that "[r]ather than the atemporal dimension of a lasting permanence, the face to face evokes a discontinuous becoming, characterized by the ever-new 'present' of the 'nows' in which the gazes intersect" (p. 177). While reciprocity is sometimes an attribute of the gaze, Cavarero argues it always an attribute of the voice. "[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational" (p. 177). In one manner of speaking, relationality is not a contingency but a necessary condition of a kind of understanding. To make this argument was it necessary to dethrone to nous? I see two steps that had to be taken: (1) the critique of atemporality, or presence, which Cavarero sees as a property claimed for nous; and (2) a decentering of understanding. I don't see how the complete obliteration of a noetic faculty makes sense in this context, though I will admit that this is not the kindest reading of Cavarero, and what I am really after is settling a question in my own mind as to how understanding is possible.

Labels: body, Cavarero, noesis, plurality, reciprocity, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:26 AM. 2 comments

Cavarero, speaking of the sharing of voices between a mother and her infant, reworks the myth of Echo:

This is the very music that Kristeva and Cixous speak of when they name the maternal figure as the sonorous, presemantic source of language. Because they rely on a psychoanalytic framework, however, their attention goes to the pleasure drive that is inscribed in this musicality, linked to the mouth as the center of oral pleasure. The languelait of the mother, voice and milk, is given to the ear and the mouth. The shadow of psychoanalysis thus ends up obscuring the relationality of the scene, sacrificing it to the originary bond between mother and child. As a result, the phenomenon of vocalic uniqueness is once again effaced. Unlike the bond of mother and child, a relation carries with it the act of distinguishing oneself, constituting the uniqueness of each one through this distinction. In the case of the vocalizations and gurgles that the mother and the infant exchange, this uniqueness makes itself heard incontrovertibly as voice. The infant recognizes the mother's voice and sings a duet with her. Resonance, daughter of invocation, links the two voices in the form of a rhythmic bond. What makes the uniqueness of the two voices stand out, in fact, is this repetition, echo, and miming, becuase they duplicate the same sounds. The voice is always unique, but all the more so in the vocalic exercise of repetition. In fact, by challenging the economy of the same, uniqueness is here entrusted to nothing other than the singular voice. This does not mean that in this vocalic language mother and child are constituted as subjects. The phantasm of the subject is a fictitious entity generated by philosophy; it belongs to language as a system of signification; it comes from the devocalizing strategy of theoria. And yet this does not mean that there is no distinction between mother and infant. On the contrary, there is a process of self-distinction in the repetitive rhythm of the duet, in the reciprocal giving of uniqueness and relation, just like a song for two voices–communication, already regulated, of language whose rules are not semantic but acoustic. It is indeed a song, no longer intentioned toward speech, with which each invokes the other and communicates himself or herself in the interdependent form of the resonance. The uniqueness of the vocalic is inaugurated on a scene where, unlike what happens on the scene of the "subject," there are no dreams of autonomy or hierarchical principles. Free from the presence of Narcissus and from Ovid's textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice.

(For More than One Voice, pp. 171-172, emphasis Cavarero's)

I am, incidentally, enjoying Cavarero's style.

Labels: Cavarero, dyad, infant, l'écriture féminine, relationality, semiotic, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:07 PM. 0 comments

Cavarero criticizes Levinas' analysis of saying:

If I may be picky for a moment, it seems to me that the move Levinas makes in founding the uniqueness of the interlocutor in the showing of his face is rather illogical. After all, the face of the other is, by definition, unique and therefore it does not matter if the one who shows his face engages in interlocution or not. In interlocution it is instead precisely the voice that transcends the plane of speech and manifests the uniqueness of the other.

(For More than One Voice, p. 27).

Cavarero is wrong here, though it doesn't follow that Levinas is necessarily right. People can engage in conversation without use of the voice. In American Sign Language the verb "to say" refers either to a vocal utterance or to a gestural signing. So the possibility of saying without the voice is not merely fanciful. Naturally, the blind can engage in conversation without visual awareness of the face of the other. Therefore, the uniqueness of the other in interlocution is not founded in any single sensory modality.

Despite these objections, both Levinas and Cavarero following him are on the right track with regard to the privileging of the saying over the said. The proximity of those who speak does carry a meaning that goes beyond the verbal. In Cavarero's words, "As a radical sign of communicability, the significance announced by the who of saying precedes, generates and exceeds verbal communication" (pp. 29-30).

Levinas' pneumatism, the proximity of the other in breathing, doesn't require that one have a voice, but merely that interlocutors share the same immediate atmosphere. Cavarero sees in this idea a "risk of the human regression toward the animal" (p. 36). It does represent, I think, a regression away from technology. Were it possible for me to blog in the flesh, so to speak, I don't know that I'd prefer it. Is my preference a symptom of anxiety about direct confrontation with the uniqueness of others? An evasion of responsibility? Perhaps. I see plenty of uniqueness in the blogosphere and that calls for a certain responsibility. Most of the time I would rather say nothing than comment irresponsibly. I use the distance that blogging allows instrumentally to craft a persona that is more attuned to what I feel the uniqueness of others demands. On the other hand, this distance allows me to forget more easily the reality of the other person behind the keyboard. Bloggers as a class are not known for their sensitivity to others. So as I wonder about whether bloggers actually deserve a reputation for being insensitive, I also wonder about whether the discovery of face-to-face communication isn't a bit nostalgic.

Labels: blogging, Cavarero, Levinas, speech, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:11 PM. 3 comments

Adriana Cavarero directly challenges logocentrism: "Meaning–or, better, the relationality and the uniqueness of each voice that constitutes the nucleus of this meaning–passes from the acuoustic sphere to speech" (For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, p. 13). She argues that philosophy has ignored not only the uniqueness of the voice, but "uniqueness as such, in whatever mode it manifests itself" (p. 9). Is the inability to think uniqueness a consequence of logocentrism, as Cavarero suggests? Or might there be some other difficulty entailed in coming to terms with uniqueness? To give Cavarero the benefit of the doubt we will have to demand that she demonstate an ability to think uniqueness.

Labels: cadacualtez, Cavarero, meaning, singularity, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:24 AM. 6 comments