Tuesday, March 4, 2014

PPM20 March 4, 2014 ...

I begin PPM20 with a pre-reading commentary that offers some context for the experiment by turning to the Grateful Dead's performance of 'Sonic Space' from this day March 4, the year 1994.   I discuss the analogy between my project and this kind of experimental and improvisational music, and suggest they are two different ways of expressing the same philosophical form of thinking, which is hermeneutical and phenomenological.   The actual meditation returns to Lao Tzu, and contrasts his 'earthly' musings to the 'other worldly' Plato and 'inner worldly' Descartes.  Building on Lao Tzu's 'return to the roots,' I say that this is horizon of beings as the destiny of learning, because it is the horizon of Being's presencing.   Being comes forth as offers us something to think about in this horizon.   I also take up Heidegger's claim to have moved toward hermeneutics  in an attempt to "abandon my own path of thinking to namelessness."  I muse on 'namelessness' as signifying the moment of learning as the encounter with the ineffable, 'the limit of language,' but also the moment before language appears through expression (e.g., in writing, or music playing, etc.).  In either case, the encounter with 'namelessness' is akin to the 'return to the roots' when we are faced with what remains beyond us, and in that moment we encounter the possibility of learning.  In sum, the relationship between Being and learning arises on the threshold of language, in our effacement with the nameless.



1 comment:

  1. (20/10 yrs later) - 3.0 a few things jump out to me. First, the playing of "Drums/Space" from this day in 1994 - I put it on as inspiration. That strikes me as quite the coincidence given the current focus of the poetic praxis project, which is working with Nancy. Current emphasis on the evacuation and re-placement of the intentional subject (ego) by music is amplified by something like "Drums/Space" that seems designed in effect to push beyond the usual boundaries and in doing so take the audience with it outside the realm of the familiar. The music in effect is evocative. The next term that jumps out at me is the "nameless," which, again, in the context of the current state of the project aligns with the attempt to gesture towards the aesthetic event of listening to music listening to itself, which is described as ineffable or beyond language, or beyond words, exceeding the boundaries of writing, even poetry, which comes closest. If the intentional subject is re-placed, then the silence of listening seems also to be the muting of a writing that would attempt to make an "account" of the experience. Perhaps the thinker can only let be what has happened, in the same manner that, as Heidegger suggested, Socrates remained in the draft and did not write, and all who write seek refuge from the draft, which I am identifying with the circulation of music.

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