Two extra-textual prompts to share en route to making some commentary in response to OPM 113. The first is related to the libretto I'm writing for Sam Rocha's album Late To Love (see my blog posts from May 7 & 8 for context). Sam and I have agreed to use as the blueprint for the libretto a daily prayer book that Sam's father and grandfather have been reading each day for many years. It's called La Palabra Entre Nosotros, and, not coincidentally, it is categorized as 'meditacion diaria' (a daily meditation)! http://la-palabra.com/meditations It was most certainly an act of grace that we arrived at this as the model for the libretto, and I'm sure it will yield something powerful, if not originary. Indeed, from the onset the libretto was announced as part of the originary thinking project (that I can trace in my own work back at least to 1997, when I published my Adornoesque piece in Educational Theory) that became the central focus in 2004 with the thinking/writing experiment I am commemorating with this blog. And, on that note, I mention the second prompt, which I encountered this morning when reading the translator's introduction to Rodolfo Kusch's Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America, which I have mentioned in this blog (cf. OPM 94, 92, 87). The translator's (Maria Lugones & Joshua Price) offered me an important reminder, one I need to hear more often than not because the uncertainty and insecurity I experience when I read these meditations. Now, part of this is, of course, the result of the very existential situation I find myself in with this project aka the location where Being and learning is happening. This is documented again and again in the now almost 200 pages I have read and commented on! Why then the need for the reassuring reminders from elsewhere? Is this part of what remains, desperately hanging on, from the 'western' academic training I received? The hegemonic demands consensus. When that consensus is interrupted by an intentional refusal, the disequilibrium produced by the thinking that interrupts and refuses is felt as insecurity and uncertainty. Perhaps this is felt because one is uprooted from what is normative. And this is precisely where the need for a sage (teacher) arises!! And here I point to the example of the young Nietzsche, exuberant at having found Schopenhauer's writing. In the same spirit, I find inspiration and guidance from Kusch, whose project resonates with my own. I'm also drawn to him because he remains totally under the radar. Only one of his many books has been translated, and he is hardly a household name in gringodemia. So unlike Dussel, for example, one can study Kusch without being placed within an ideological agenda, while at the same time experiencing in that study a sense that one is working on something truly originary because it is truly original, and, most importantly, is grounded in an existential crisis, the very same that I announced in my LAPES paper! And all that brings me to the quotation of Lugones and Price, that second prompt of this day, one that, I feel, speaks to the struggle I was making in with the daily writing I undertook ten years ago; a struggle that refused to write about ancient cosmologies, but, rather insisted on writing from them, as much as this can be accomplished:
"[Kusch's] descriptions [of indigenous culture] are not so much an ethnographic inventory as an insertion without translating himself to the familiar. He is not offering us an ethnographic, archaeological, or otherwise social-science description of Andean life. He is not attempting to offer an understanding of the Andean cosmos in terms that fulfill the requirements of Western rationality. Rather, he inhabits Andean culture and cosmos and indigenous life in its density, and seeks to dwell on the questions, paths, possibilities that do not yield easily to Western philosophy and its requirements. He is rejecting in part the rationality of a Western cosmology preoccupied with causes and explanations. What he gives us instead is a record of his attempt to work into another world and worldview."(p. lxvii)
Now, this prompt speaks to the writing insofar as the writing is a phenomenology of Being and learning, and, specifically, with the writing that is now being commemorated (aka what was published as chapter 7) a phenomenology of the teaching figure called the sage. At the very least, and without becoming totally exaggerated or demanding a deep metaphysics, this figure is very generically any philosophical teacher that is attempting to teach their way into another world and another worldview; that is, away from the dominant cultural worldview that is being systematically reproduced in formal schooling. And the figure I am portraying (in the sense of making a portrait of one who is 'sitting' before me) is making a move away from that location through the very simple guiding gesture of hearing and listening; a gesture that indicates the way of the 'open region.'
"[Kusch's] descriptions [of indigenous culture] are not so much an ethnographic inventory as an insertion without translating himself to the familiar. He is not offering us an ethnographic, archaeological, or otherwise social-science description of Andean life. He is not attempting to offer an understanding of the Andean cosmos in terms that fulfill the requirements of Western rationality. Rather, he inhabits Andean culture and cosmos and indigenous life in its density, and seeks to dwell on the questions, paths, possibilities that do not yield easily to Western philosophy and its requirements. He is rejecting in part the rationality of a Western cosmology preoccupied with causes and explanations. What he gives us instead is a record of his attempt to work into another world and worldview."(p. lxvii)
Now, this prompt speaks to the writing insofar as the writing is a phenomenology of Being and learning, and, specifically, with the writing that is now being commemorated (aka what was published as chapter 7) a phenomenology of the teaching figure called the sage. At the very least, and without becoming totally exaggerated or demanding a deep metaphysics, this figure is very generically any philosophical teacher that is attempting to teach their way into another world and another worldview; that is, away from the dominant cultural worldview that is being systematically reproduced in formal schooling. And the figure I am portraying (in the sense of making a portrait of one who is 'sitting' before me) is making a move away from that location through the very simple guiding gesture of hearing and listening; a gesture that indicates the way of the 'open region.'
Re-reading this a year later, there is so much that jumps out at me. But none more than the line that is an almost prophetic in describing the events that would occur 8 months later in Memphis: "The hegemonic demands consensus. When that consensus is interrupted by an intentional refusal, the disequilibrium produced by the thinking that interrupts and refuses is felt as insecurity and uncertainty."
ReplyDelete3.0a - "The hegemonic demands consensus" Indeed! I have to laugh when reading that 10 years later. When I first wrote it my son was 4. He is now 14 and about to finally finish what has been the worst 3 years of schooling I have ever experienced with any of my kids or myself for that matter. There are way too many details to unpack, but the line from 2.0 that jumped out at me and that I cited at the beginning of this entry says it all. There's an expression about "getting along"...you have to get along to go along?...something like that which more or less implies that if you want to move along within the institution where you have been thrown (to use a Heideggerian phrase) then you best be part of the normative consensus. Otherwise you'll be tormented. Hegemony demands consensus. Grazie Antonio!
ReplyDeleteThat comment was originally written as a way to describe the anxiety I was feeling when we re-reading the original meditations. The 2.0 project was much more demanding than this 3.0. I recorded myself reading and commenting on the original meditations, and then wrote a blog commentary. 3.0 is more or less a brief daily diary that may or may not have something to say about the original writing, which I'm not always re-reading. This short entries have become a morning ritual that I share with my first cups of coffee. And these days in early June I'm writing from the patio at my home in Portland. These early morning writing sessions get the flow of writing going, and a few days this past week I have started the day writing material for my sabbatical book. Yesterday I completed the second of the intro pieces. One of them will be the Preface and the other the Intro. I'm happy with the writing which is very much in alignment with the hegemonic consensus of "acceptable" academic writing. Actually in some ways it's on the other end of the spectrum from the OPM poetic philosophical writing. Nevertheless if my project, generally speaking, is about tapping into and expressing free thinking, about feeling inspired by the desire to be one of Nietzsche's "Free Spirits" then the feeling of freedom can be felt in any number of ways. In the OPMs from earlier this week I emphasized one of the central themes that I learned from Heidegger: freedom possesses us, we don't possess freedom. In turn, to be a free spirit is to be captivated by the spirit of freedom, to feel uninhibited, and at the very least to feel free from thinking along with the norm.
3.0b - The poet is writing from an island. I was reminded of this last week when I was reading William Carlos Williams' "Patterson," I work that inspired some writing earlier this year. But the philosopher doesn't dwell on an island, at least if he is an educational philosopher, what I call the sage. A poet writes from the heart, and the writing is a response, a documentation of what the heart is saying and singing. The philosopher may also be writing from the heart, but is responding to the world, to history and culture. Philosophy emerges from the place where the heart and the world intersect. As a teacher, however, the philosopher is bound by the responsibility to communicate, even if his desire is to inspire his students. The teacher is responsible to gather the learning community. And the teacher is responsible to point to the significant object of study, and in pointing to it evoke a response. In communicating to his students and gathering the learning community the teacher must find a way to invite the students to learning. Above, at the end of the 2.0 commentary I write about the sage: "this figure is very generically any philosophical teacher that is attempting to teach their way into another world and another worldview; that is, away from the dominant cultural worldview that is being systematically reproduced in formal schooling. And the figure I am portraying (in the sense of making a portrait of one who is 'sitting' before me) is making a move away from that location through the very simple guiding gesture of hearing and listening; a gesture that indicates the way of the 'open region.'" 10 years later I continue to agree that the philosophical teacher's invitation is one that invites the students to move with him into the open region of thinking, which is a location that is outside "schooling." And in this sense the sage is educating in a counter-hegemonic way, and attempting to form a community of learning that is moving outside the constraints of schooling, in the open and thus away from the closed mindedness that persists in so many ways. If hegemony demands consensus, a philosophical educator is attempting to form an alternative consensus.
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