PPM45 continues the slow and steady reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," which is chapter four in Being and Learning. In this meditation the important move that is made is the delineation and interpolation of the cave dwellers (the prisoners, the oppressed) as a demos that is unique and apart from the overseers, or those who have created and are staging what I call the 'theater of deception.' In PPM44, I spoke of the Allegory "as a tale in the tradition of blues, that intends to re-collect our memory of trial and tribulation, of struggle..." If this is indeed the case, then our memory is properly gathered around the emergence of the blues from that moment when the master/slave dialectic is ruptured by the articulation of the slave's self-consciousness. The cave-dwellers interpolated as a unique demos are (re)called into emancipation by the blues time signature of the Allegory. The blues, first heard in drumming and singing, is always an expression of the continuity of time before slavery and a prophetic expression of a time beyond slavery. The interpolation is a (re)calling of this continuity, this time of freedom. In turn, slavery is rendered literally and figuratively a 'middle passage' and time in-between that can and must be endured within the time of freedom that is past and future, and which is in fact a larger presence. PPM45 offers this insight much more in spirit than in letter. Indeed, it is an implication that I can emphasize in this commemorative moment, reflecting upon what I wrote ten years ago on this date: "The 'Allegory' enables us to recognize that a 'people' is always constituted insofar as people dwell together...In this first part of the story, Plato is allowing us to think through the phenomenon of demos as a phenomenon that will persist in appearing wherever human beings are together in the world. The state of 'ignorance' is a condition of any and every philosophy of a people at the moment it is articulated as such. Only a dynamic, ever changing, flexible demos is capable of participating in, and thereby identifying itself with...the twofold play that is always the condition of the demos. Whereas 'people' are always already/not yet articulating a 'philosophy,' producing and reproducing a narrative of their dwelling together, not every demos has been released into the freedom of appearing, disappearing, and re-appearing, or fully rooted within the twofold play of Being's processural unfolding."
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
3.0 - So in yesterday's 20/10 yrs later commentary I noted the coincidence of describing Plato's Allegory as a tale of the blues on March 28, 2004 and then exactly 20 years later (yesterday) on March 28, 2024 (re)presenting the panel on Ma Rainey with two of my star students at Hofstra, Georgia and Makenzie. Their papers and presentations impressed me even more this second time we presented, and the conversation that was generated was one of the best we've had this semester in the class they visited. When I step back and get over the coincidence of the blues appearing way back when and again yesterday, I appreciate how cool it is that they were former students returning to what is supposed to be an Intro class, and just crushing it, and thereby demonstrating to their slightly younger peers: yes, it can be done, you too can take your education to the next levels! Super cool!!
ReplyDeleteReading back to the 2.0 commentary, today the following jumps out: "if this is indeed the case, then our memory is properly gathered around the emergence of the blues from that moment when the master/slave dialectic is ruptured by the articulation of the slave's self-consciousness. The cave-dwellers interpolated as a unique demos are (re)called into emancipation by the blues time signature of the Allegory. The blues, first heard in drumming and singing, is always an expression of the continuity of time before slavery and a prophetic expression of a time beyond slavery. The interpolation is a (re)calling of this continuity, this time of freedom. In turn, slavery is rendered literally and figuratively a 'middle passage'." That kind of fragment is incredibly dense and one that could easily be lost in the sweeping scope of this project. I suppose Glissant is the only one I am familiar with whose writing resonates with the claim I am making here. If the blues is heard as a continuity of the time before and after slavery, which in yesterday's commentary I emphasized is the time of freedom, or the time of the movement towards liberation, then there is an important circularity to that temporality. The time of freedom is nomadic in a cyclical sense, and can only be realized in a existential dialectic that includes moments of hardship, disappointment, trauma, etc. Liberation would be a transcendence beyond that dialectic, and hence, for me, remains utopian: existing in the u-topos (nowhere land). Connecting this point back to one of the evocative questions motivating this project, Heidegger's "How is it with the Nothing?," the U-topos (utopian) character of liberation is revealed in the encounter with the Nothing, the Open Region, the Abyss (Glissant's sense), the Gap, the (w)Hole, or what I call the "possibility of possibility." Liberation always remains the non-real Ideal, which, in the spirit of responding to Plato, is not unlike those Platonic Forms or Ideas that exist in a heavenly/non-earthly "beyond" and represent a perfection that humans can conceive, imagine, and perhaps perceive in a poetic-philosophical way. Some call this a regulative Ideal, something that can guide us, or motivate us. I concur so long as we realize it is unattainable, and remains beyond us. This is why the freed cave-dweller must return to the cave. And this is why the blues are real and honest, and the blues persona a truth-teller. They are neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but a romantic realist: one who is capable of sharing their a poetic reckoning with the human condition, creating art (song, music, beauty) in response to the tragic-comedy of human existence. And this is why I say, Art is the beginning and the end of humanity.