I was bit rushed when reading this meditation, because it's one of the longer ones and youtube seems to be monitoring my recordings, because I'm consistently 'disconnected' at around 9mins and change. Indeed, in the first take I did some post-reading commentary but then was caught off about half way through the reading.
I wanted to say in the video that material I had supposed, yesterday, to be deleted from the final edition of this material aka Being and Learning, was not actually deleted. Rather, it was interrupted by material that was written later in the yearlong experiment. Chapter 6 "Aristotle's Critique" is that interruption. There is certainly a break that happens at the point where I begin to move beyond Heraclitus and into a more general description of learning with/from/through the Sage. And I suppose it makes sense to insert Aristotle's analytic and critical voice into the conversation after taking up his story of Heraclitus. Now, after having spent the past week in Aardvark Recording Studios observing and participating in the production of Rocha's 'Late to Love' album, I can appreciate why the original take (or in my case, the original writing, which are much close to musical 'scratch' takes than they are to so-called 'rough drafts') evolves through editing and layering. In turn, inserting the Aristotle chapter in between the chapter on Heraclitus and the long chapter 7 on "The Saying of the Sage" makes sense from musical point of view, for its something of a bridge.
So much for the re-arrangement of the original meditations, and now the highlight of OPM 88. I remarked yesterday in my commentary, as well as in my blog post, that OPM 87 revealed to me that I had in fact been working on a 'secondary' level these past years post Being and Learning, with the intense emphasis I was placing on temporality. Indeed, more originary than these modalities of temporality is the space and locations where they unfold. Space is primordial, and originary thinking emerges from a dwelling that is not the figurative existential way of being, but the location where Being is disclosed. I'm struck by this 'discovery' not simply because I the project of originary thinking was understood to be one grounded in temporality, but, more so, because the recent 'cartographical' or 'geographical' turn I have made in my work. This is captured in my recently completed paper for Lapiz (the journal of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society). In that paper I write: "The question of the indigena (indigenous philosophy) is thus the question of the nativo, the one who is born at that inceptual encounter, and who remains moving there in the heights of this convergent boundary, but also concealed in its caves (pacarinas), and drinking from its highland springs (puqyos). What we discover through the reduction I am proposing is a phenomenology of originary thinking arising from the originating huacaslogical question: ¿Dónde Estamos? (Where are we?). [‘Huacaslogical’ is a neologism that combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek word logos (philosophical account, wisdom)]"
This move is already present in the meditations that produce Being and Learning, specifically the emphasis placed on the locations where learning/thinking happens. And the key moment in OPM 88 on this account happens when it is suggested via Heidegger that learning happens in a dwelling (the open region) which is the proper 'home' of humanity in relation to Being. This 'home' is constituted by what I call the learning community, the congregation of friends gathered in dialogue, and it is qualified by its concern for human freedom as opposed to things: subjects and not objects (if I can be allowed that notorious distinction).
In turn, the priority of location leads us to understand the desire to find a 'home,' or 'homeland' for collective thinking, so as to overcome what Heidegger calls "a homelessness' in which not only man but the essence of man stumbles about aimlessly about. Homelessness so understood consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of the oblivion of Being. Because of it the truth of Being remains unthought. The oblivion of Being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that man always observes and handles only being." In contrast, OPM 88 writes: "The relation of Being and Learning is thus our 'proper' abode which 'consists in [our] dwelling in the nearness of Being. [Humanity] is the neighbor of Being."
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 - Cal Lax! Love seeing that on this Mother's Day weekend when lax is in full swing. Yesterday the best game of the day was not one of the first rounders from the NCAA Men's Div 1 opening round, but the JV game I reffed between Cape Elizabeth and Thornton Academy!
ReplyDeletePutting aside the lax for a moment, which has become a bit of a teaching moment for me, I turn to the 2.0 commentary from 10 years this day and my first impression is that I am no longer feeling quite as emboldened or audacious with the ontological claims I am making. A summer ago (already last summer?!), with the writing of the Nancy paper alongside reading Glissant, who made a few cameo appearances in that paper, I made a turn towards a position of humility, one that is much more reserved in making grand assertion. Derrida influenced me as well. The large section on Derrida's "performance" on stage with Ornette revolved around Derrida's use of the 'as if.' So now I am either explicitly or implicitly writing with the spirit of the 'as if.' For example, above I emphatically state that "the proper home of humanity is the Open Region." Now, I continue to hold the position that for learning to happen we must move into the Open, which, today anyway, I am not claiming is primordially spatial, and secondarily temporal. I'm not sure how I arrived at the claim, but it probably had to do with a reduction I was working with 10 years ago. Today if I were to make that claim, I would say that the originary (culture, works of art) emerges from what we might call the origin or the primordial, the place that is always already and remains before and after our arrival. Drawing on the discourse of human geography the primordial is described as both spatially and temporally primal. Together we encounter the primordial place of learning. And I want to describe by using the term scholē. I'm so excited and anxious to incorporate this category into my work that I will bring it into the Routledge book. I could see it appearing in the preface or intro of the book! Getting back to the more measured approach, today I prefer to write in the hypothetical and thereby speculate and write description of possibilities that unfold 'as if' this or that were the conditions of such possibilities. In other words, 'if' we conjure and then deploy a neologism like "Huacaslogical," where would this take our thinking about, say, Latin American philosophy, or Caribbean Philosophy? Where do we go when we raise the question as such: ¿Dónde Estamos? (Where are we?). I remember the feeling of discovering this path of discursive humility and the pathways that appeared suddenly, which no longer seemed daunting. The claims no longer felt heavy and burdensome. A lighter approach means less stress to support what has been said. Rather, lighter claims propel forward and outward, and the orbits or circulation of ideas is a bit longer, or so it seems. But I think this is the energy that has propelled this project throughout and is felt more intensely now although the writing is much less dense. And THAT is the key to the current project, especially as I am literally days away from beginning the writing of the Routledge book: writing that is less dense, perhaps less poetic or poetic in a more accessible lyrical way, more Cole Porter and less William Carlos Williams.