Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Eduardo Duarte Being & Learning 2.0 OPM 89 from May 13, 2014 12:23 PM

Read from the 7th floor of the Glickman library, this reading of OPM 89 is fast but not furious and, in fact, incomplete, because I spent a good 5 mins discussing the blog post I wrote to commemorate OPM 89 (see below).   In the spirit of the original writing experiment that happened ten years ago, and which I am commemorating with the videos, I have decided today that I will write these 'descriptions'/blog posts prior to reading the meditation:
Going in slightly different directions, I am writing this blog post as a kind of prelude to the reading of OPM 89, which will happen momentarily up here in the 7th floor of the Glickman Library (USM Portland). I want to make one further comment on what I have for the past two blog posts called the ‘ultimate context,’ which is both a ‘name’ for the most originary location or space (what Lao Tzu calls the Nameless Beyond), but also a sign for the prioritization of the geographical/cartographical/spatial that is happening in the writing that produced Being and Learning.  I was inspired to make the further comment when reading this morning  Elizabeth Boone’s introductory essay to the volume she co-edited with Walter Mignolo Writing Without Words.   The thrust of the book is the conversation around ‘alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes,’ with a specific attention on the glyph and other forms of writing that ‘exceed’ the hegemonic narrative that “writing is the documentation of oral speech.”  Prior to the examples she offers, such as  mathematical writing and musical composition, both which communicate what ordinary language can not, Boone offers important context for the larger question when she cites Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the hegemonic equation between writing and ordinary speech.   In his Of Grammatology, Derrida offers that “the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language,” or, as Boone explains,  “it embraces language but goes beyond it.”  Now, this is quite important and relevant to both the form/process of the writing that I am documenting in this blog, as well as the content, specifically what is being written in the series of meditations that make up chapter six “The Saying of the Sage.”  In terms of ‘form’ the writing is demonstration of ‘poetic phenomenology’ which might be described as a method of writing that is a deliberate attempt to push beyond the boundaries of language through writing.  If phenomenology is a descriptive account of what is appearing (being given, disclosed), then poetic is a qualifier for how this description operates in terms of the pushing beyond.  But given that what is being described is the disclosure of ‘free thinking,’ then the content of the writing is the form, and what is appearing is free thinking via poetic phenomenological description.   For example, when I write of the saying of the Sage, I am deliberately playing with the word ‘Sage,’ which is an unstable signifier insofar as it is a bilingual term:  ‘Sage’ read both as the English word for “wise teacher; teaching of wisdom,” and the German word for “saying.”    Writing can offer what ordinary speech can not achieve, and in doing this it better captures the excessive and multilayered character of free thinking, especially when it is highly conscious of itself as symbolic, or as pictorial.  Now, having said all that, I would be entirely off course if I were to make it seem as if writing ‘surpassed’ speaking, or rather, sound.  The rhythmic and musical quality of speech, or the ‘language’ of music (rhythm and melody) are equally up to the challenge.   Indeed, it is the poetic, and not the symbolic, that expresses the freedom of free thinking.







1 comment:

  1. 3.0 - I continue appreciate reading back the 2.0 commentaries, especially going back to the locations where I wrote them and recorded the videos. Last summer the USM Glickman library was my writing den. I wrote the 30k words draft of my Nancy paper in the 5th group meeting room. I'm excited to get in there as soon as this semester concludes. On that note at this point, mid-May, I would normally have already relocated for the summer back home in Portland. But circumstances require that once again I'm on the NJT on my way to Hofstra on this 13th day of May, 2024.
    It was also fun to read reference to Elizabeth Boone's excellent introduction to "Writing Without Words," an essay I have taught a few times. Boone is really good at summarizing some of Derrida's central claims about a writing that goes beyond language, which is in and for itself a funky claim, but makes so much sense when we are trying to make sense of non-alphabetic writing, which can include glyphs but also musical notation, not to mention mathematical and scientific writing. For me the key line is the description of a kind of writing that "embraces language but goes beyond it." To describe a communicative action, a 'speaking' that "exceeds" language is to call attention to the saying of the Sage, which might even be a singing, or generally described as a poetic pointing. It would have to be poetic insofar as it is evocative and conjuring up the making of meaning in response to the object of study. Pointing out first and foremost that the object is worthy of attention, by showing it as significant. But already that is sound like an intentional pointing. If the saying of the Sage is evocative then it just does that: evokes (calls forth). It doesn't "say" as in making a claim or an assertion: "THIS is significant!" That would be the performance of exactly what the Sage is not: the traditional figure of educational authority, whom Irigaray describes as the "master" who attempts to communicate the world that he perceives, and thereby reproduce it. To evoke is to call out, but also to invoke: to call upon. In this case the Sage is the teacher who calls out to the student to turn towards the world, if we are following Arendt, and is also invoking the world's significance, calling forth the spirit or soul of the world as it is manifesting in the object of study, the work of art. And this is all happening in an embodied manner. Is this pointing through embodied performance, through speaking, a form of "writing"? Not for Derrida. And here is where, again, we are reminded of Heidegger's portrait of Socrates as the one who did not write but stood in the draft of thinking. For me the resolution of this question might be resolved through the writing of notes on the board in the classroom, some prefigured others scribed spontaneously. The digital slide is NOT an example. But writing on the board a fragment or single words, this is a writing as evocative pointing insofar as it is able to communicate the iconic power of words.

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