The reading of OPM happens during the broadcast of my radio show The Dead Zone (WRHU.ORG), so I play a little of the show at the beginning and end of my reading. It so happens that tonight's DZ is the annual commemoration of May 8, 1977.
OPM 87 is one of the longer, free form meditations where I kinda go for it, and combine lots of the terms and concepts that have been building up in the course of the project. I go a bit overboard, actually, and its no surprise that only one of the three pages found its way into the Being and Learning. Indeed, chapter 5 on Heraclitus concludes with the first third of OPM 87.
Reading OPM 87 I think I was hasty in my editorial decision, because of the material that was axed, there is a concept that is perhaps the most important of all, what I call the 'ultimate context.' As I say in my post-reading commentary, for me temporality is significant, because the break in the mundane/ordinary happens in time, or through a particular temporal event: the kairological (time of opportunity when the chronological, repetitive unfolding of events is broken and something new comes into being). The kairological is the basis of natality, of freedom, and is at the heart of learning. However, the kairological event happens somewhere, and this is the 'utlimate context,' the space where Being appears. In turn, the truly originary is spatial or perhaps better stated as: space. And this recalls the question that gets the project underway: How is it with the Nothing?
A citation from Heidegger is important for OPM 87: "[Logos] names that which gathers everything present into presence, and lets it present itself." I read this as "Logos points to that which gathers everything present into presence," and thus points to what allows for presencing to become present. And this must be what is 'absent' (e.g., silence that allows for sound, hearing that allows for speaking). This 'space' is the crucial and necessary for gap (threshold) for poetic dialogue to happen. OPM 87: "to hear is to receive meaning from the other. But this meaning is offered and received over the profound gap that opens up between beings and makes possible their being together. This profound gap both draws beings together and separates them. It is the condition for the possibility of the horizon which joins them as a congregation. Here we name this gap the Nameless Beyond, the ultimate context. This gap appears to us in the practice of the art of learning as the condition for the possibility of our creative saying, of poetic dialogue."
But there are two legitimate reasons why the material isn't in Being and Learning: it feels a bit too free form even for this improvisational project, and because it abruptly returns to Lao Tzu. Cutting this material was one of the more difficult decisions, because the edit implied that I was compelled to organize the material into something that could be read like a 'book' and this seems to require there is some general linear progression. But therein lies the root of the challenge: taking a non-linear piece of most poetic philosophical writing and fitting it into the expectations of linear analytic prose. One could ask, Why do it? Indeed, Why? Did I compromise the integrity of the writing by re-forming the piece, but cutting the shaggy, unkempt moments? Perhaps. And as I read the work of Rodoflo Kusch these days, and his method of negation, which negates modernist logic and makes a turn to el pueblo (popular and indigenous thinking), I inclined to think that the compromise demonstrates the power of the academia, which, in some sense, has the last word, more or less. Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh, but I've often been told I'm my own worst critic!
OPM 87 is one of the longer, free form meditations where I kinda go for it, and combine lots of the terms and concepts that have been building up in the course of the project. I go a bit overboard, actually, and its no surprise that only one of the three pages found its way into the Being and Learning. Indeed, chapter 5 on Heraclitus concludes with the first third of OPM 87.
Reading OPM 87 I think I was hasty in my editorial decision, because of the material that was axed, there is a concept that is perhaps the most important of all, what I call the 'ultimate context.' As I say in my post-reading commentary, for me temporality is significant, because the break in the mundane/ordinary happens in time, or through a particular temporal event: the kairological (time of opportunity when the chronological, repetitive unfolding of events is broken and something new comes into being). The kairological is the basis of natality, of freedom, and is at the heart of learning. However, the kairological event happens somewhere, and this is the 'utlimate context,' the space where Being appears. In turn, the truly originary is spatial or perhaps better stated as: space. And this recalls the question that gets the project underway: How is it with the Nothing?
A citation from Heidegger is important for OPM 87: "[Logos] names that which gathers everything present into presence, and lets it present itself." I read this as "Logos points to that which gathers everything present into presence," and thus points to what allows for presencing to become present. And this must be what is 'absent' (e.g., silence that allows for sound, hearing that allows for speaking). This 'space' is the crucial and necessary for gap (threshold) for poetic dialogue to happen. OPM 87: "to hear is to receive meaning from the other. But this meaning is offered and received over the profound gap that opens up between beings and makes possible their being together. This profound gap both draws beings together and separates them. It is the condition for the possibility of the horizon which joins them as a congregation. Here we name this gap the Nameless Beyond, the ultimate context. This gap appears to us in the practice of the art of learning as the condition for the possibility of our creative saying, of poetic dialogue."
But there are two legitimate reasons why the material isn't in Being and Learning: it feels a bit too free form even for this improvisational project, and because it abruptly returns to Lao Tzu. Cutting this material was one of the more difficult decisions, because the edit implied that I was compelled to organize the material into something that could be read like a 'book' and this seems to require there is some general linear progression. But therein lies the root of the challenge: taking a non-linear piece of most poetic philosophical writing and fitting it into the expectations of linear analytic prose. One could ask, Why do it? Indeed, Why? Did I compromise the integrity of the writing by re-forming the piece, but cutting the shaggy, unkempt moments? Perhaps. And as I read the work of Rodoflo Kusch these days, and his method of negation, which negates modernist logic and makes a turn to el pueblo (popular and indigenous thinking), I inclined to think that the compromise demonstrates the power of the academia, which, in some sense, has the last word, more or less. Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh, but I've often been told I'm my own worst critic!
3.0 - One of the central themes of this semester was "presence." Reading Irigaray after Arendt, we were able to describe the positionality of the educator as one of "presence," of being present in between the student and the world. Remaining present is a matter of dwelling, the return to self or what Irigaray calls "thinking." Dwelling is also building, and here she remains within the Heideggerian discourse. Dwelling is a matter of building up the self, what Foucault calls the "aesthetics of existence," borrowing from Nietzsche's "self as a work of art." Yesterday I wrote about the third moment of the dialectic, poetic praxis, the making of a significant object, as potentially only truly relevant in conservatory situation. One could add students who are writing majors. Today I'm reminded that perhaps the most significant object that can be made is the subject themself, the "self" as a persona of freedom. But this runs counter. to what Irigaray is writing about, namely, the teacher withdrawing into the place of thinking, dwelling with herself. The trajectory of that withdrawal is the return of the teacher as existentially grounded, such that she is able to be fully present and capable of listening to her students, receiving them. Yet this is not where the project is at the moment, and currently I seem to be departing from the "humanist" or human-centered approach I was taking in the original project. Human-centered may actually not be the best way to describe the original project, because, after all, Being is positioned as the first in the order of things. It is Being and Learning. In OPM 87 I cite Heidegger who, in mood inspired by Heraclitus, writes: "Logos points to that which gathers everything present into presence." Being is perceived and receives many names: the Way, the Tao, Logos. In OPM 87 I describe Being as the 'ultimate context,' and the 'Nameless Beyond.' I like that phrasing because it identifies Being as a location or place and not a thing. Being is Existence prior to any Essence, as Sartre put it. If we follow Sartre's formula, the appearance of essence or any significant thing is the result of poiesis - making. Put otherwise, it is an act of freedom, or an enactment of freedom. The third moment of education is action, the act of making something, of contributing to the repair and renewal of the world. Today I am much more interested in learning as the dialectical relationship with the significant object.
ReplyDelete