An interesting piece came across
my desk this morning from Public Seminar,
online forum published by my alma mater, the New School Graduate Faculty. The
name of the forum is inspired by Arendt, who was a faculty member there when
she wasn’t off giving lectures or teaching as a visiting prof somewhere like
Berkeley or Chicago. The Public Seminar piece by Cinzia Arruzza’s is
a kind of review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. I’d never heard of the book before, but was
obviously interested, since the ‘heart’ has been one of my foci this
summer. It has been since my commentary
on OPM 148, July 12th, when I wrote: “As I’ve repeated many times: meditative thinking
begins with listening, hearing, with silence, and in this case, it is not the
silence of the restraint regarding critique of the past and present state of
affairs, but the silence of saying, the restraint from any speaking, the focus
on breathing, and the calming of the discursive mind. At this beginning we shift our energy from the mind to the heart, which is the
gateway or threshold beyond language and toward contemplation. The
event of appropriation happens through the heart.” Although I didn’t say so when I wrote
that a month and a half ago, it was a kind of breakthrough to claim the event
of appropriation happens through the heart.”
In that same commentary I wondered
about how we reach that point where Spirit and Nature intersect, and suggested
that it was the
human heart that guides us into that place where the epiphanic event
happens. The following day (July 12th)
in my commentary I wrote:
“There
is a turning away from the mind (ego cogito) and toward the heart that happens
with meditative thinking, which is contrasted with calculative and analytic
reasoning. When the turn happens it does
so because we can anticipate the shift from the cognitive to the emotive.”
And a week later, on July 18th,
I wrote an extended commentary that was inspired by the chance meeting of a
friend who was on her way to meet up with her son in order to have a ‘heart to
heart’ conversation. And I wrote the
following: “The heart to heart conversation is in this sense preparatory and anticipatory. But it is also precisely what it claims to
be: a communication happening between hearts.
“Again, the insight remains just that, and, to borrow from
Socrates, all I know at the moment is that I don’t anything about how to
translate the language of the heart because this language is ‘foreign’ to the
discursive style of philosophy I am comfortable with.
“But this is how things stand:
I am left wondering about the thinking
that happens through the heart, and I’m wondering how one writes philosophical from the heart?”
Cinzia Arruzza’s PS post
moves in a very different language game, and her interest is in thinking about
how Capitalism effects affect, and how our emotions are manipulated from
outside, but also managed by us within the social relations that are dominated
by the logic of capital. I’m fascinated
by that line of critical theory, which reminds me of the Frankfurt School,
especially Adorno and Marcuse. But I’m also
of a very different mindset when it comes to how we might respond to this
manipulation, and find myself becoming defensive when I read Arruzza dismissing
what she calls ‘artifical and romantic ideas of authenticity and
naturalness. “To conclude, in very broad terms, I would suggest that
decommodifying affects should be both our goal and a means of resistance and
struggle, without for this reason falling into a romantic ideal of
authenticity.” I’m not sure what ‘decommodifying affects’ actually means
[outside of its Marxist language game], but I sense that it is relying on the
same logic of authenticity as the naturalists Arruzza is dismissing. Authenticity may have been jargon in the
middle of the twentieth century when it had degenerated under the weight of second
wave existentialists, but no one who is serious about emotions and the shift
toward what I am calling the thinking
that happens through the heart, can avoid the presumption of authenticity,
which is only ever the premise that what I am feeling is genuine and real –
however it is that it has come into being.
The question is then how the
emotional state comes into being, how
we experience emotions. Indeed, for me
the ‘kind’ of emotions we experience are a secondary matter. First and foremost are the kinds of experiences we have that enable
us to think from the heart. Emotional thinking, how does this arise?
My own conjecture is that resistance and struggle can happen in
multiple ways, and one of those ways happens when we withdraw from the very
social relations that Arruzza seems to believe are the only actual domain of
human experience. There is nothing
‘romantic’ about struggling up a difficult mountain trail, soaked in sweat,
heart racing and lungs pumping for air.
And there is nothing romantic about finding yourself outside of the
direct range of the commodity exchange, far from the constant media blitz, and
the urban market’s assault on the senses.
It strikes me as fatalistic to use romanticism as an epithet, as if the
only ‘real’ experience were those meditated by social relations. The urban thinker must always find a way to
ignore the possibility that it may be otherwise.
On the surface, mediation from this day ten years ago appears to
have little or nothing to do with the preceding. The writing from 8/26/04 continued the line
that was started two days prior and wrote for the first time about the sage as
writing, suggesting he was a ‘scribe’ or a ‘documenter’. In sum, as a writer he can only be a
phenomenologist, or the one who merely describes what is happening in the learning
community. He is neither a theorist, nor
critic, nor didactician. When we step
back we see that the phenomenological writer, especially one who follows
Husserl’s epoche (bracketing or
suspension of our judgments about things that would prejudice our capacity to
perceive them on their terms), we
recognize that the phenomenologist is enacting a critical break, and that epoche is a form of resistance to the
external manipulation of our experience.
It is also assuming that we are capable of a ‘real’ encounter with
things. And I would add that this
assumption entails a degrees of these encounters, such that some are more real
than others, or to put it differently (and, perhaps, better) there are
situations in which we find that we are experiencing the facticity (materiality?)
of things in more intense way. For the
past few weeks I have been working under the conjecture that this intensity is related
to physicality, or the body’s exertion.
And, further, I want to suggest
that the body working in close proximity to the wilderness, to the place far
from human habitation, is likely to experience a highly intense state of affective states that are part of an economy
of ‘well being’ that is stands in stark contrast to Capitalism and its
discontents.
3.0 (Monday, Portland, ME) - I decided to write the Foreword to the sabbatical book this morning. I finished the draft last Friday, and celebrated on Friday night. I didn't have any specific plans related to the project, other than deciding I wouldn't start reading it until after Labor Day and maybe not until I go back up to Bar Harbor in mid September. But when I was on Monday mountain bike ride this morning I felt that I should try to describe the "method" I used in writing the book while it was still fresh in my memory. So I did just that and here is what I wrote:
ReplyDelete3.0b - This book is a kind of testimony to the course of study I have taken with my students for over three decades. And while the course is titled “Introduction to Philosophy of Education,” it is practiced as an introduction to the education offered by philosophy. This book is a kind of phenomenological description of the practice of study I (“Duarte” to my students) have invited my students to experience.
ReplyDeleteA “testimony” is defined as a declaration of truth, usually offered under oath and penalty of perjury. When it appears as Testimony it denotes the law of Moses that were inscribed on the tablets of stone, and even the ark where the fragments of those tablets were held. A testimonial can be a written statement testifying (declaring the truth) to a particular event, or the affirmation of another’s character, and it can also refer to a public declaration regarding a religious experience. If we were able to “blend” these various denotations together we would end up with something that approximates what I have written and am sharing with this book. The reference to the broken tablets is especially important because it speaks to the principal source that my thinking/writing is organized around: quotations, fragments, citations, aphorisms. This book is not so much a conversation with the writers, philosophers, critics and theorists that I have been reading with my students semester after semester, but a sampling and a remixing of these readings. My methodology, which I am borrowing from hip-hop, emerges as a joint collaboration with my co-author, DJ Professor Iguana.
Because the book is an attempt to offer a phenomenological description of the course of study, it is an attempt to offer an expression of the course’s non-linear organization. The education offered by philosophy does not have a predetermined “outcome.” It is experiential: an experience with meaning that is encountered in the readings (books/texts) -- first, in the solitude of study, and, then, again (repeated) in the dialogic community of learning. The fragments (quotations, citations) collected from the book/text are sampled as aphorisms. And this is how the book was written and should be read/heard. Indeed, when reading this book we advise you to listen to it. “Listen to Learn, Learn to Listen.” That aphorism, which was said again and again by my HS geometry teacher Mr. Klinkenberg, expresses well what this book is describing, and, more importantly, how one can learn from philosophy. And that aphorism is implied in the title of this book, Learn.
3.0c - While we are not replicating, imitating or even borrowing from him, the methodology followed in making this book, which is a dialectical interplay of Duarte’s teaching experience and Prof. Iguana’s radio production, is heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin, who had an “ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations.” (Arendt, Intro essay to Illuminations, 47) Hannah Arendt, whose voice is heard throughout this book, described the way Benjamin used quotations. Benjamin’s use of quotations, she tells us, “distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotations to verify and document opinions…This was out of the question in Benjamin.”(Intro, 47) While at times the selected fragments appear familiar and/or consistent with the way they were disclosed in the text from which they were collected, at other times they are clipped and sampled in a way that scratches (negates, strikes or even cancels) the context so as to reveal what was originary when it was originally written as a flash of inspiration. What we are calling scratching appears to be close to how Arendt describes Benjamin’s way of rearranging quotation, which “definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage.”(Intro, 47) Benjamin’s thinking/writing followed the path of the collector who gathered significant objects for his cabinet of curiosity. But Benjamin was also a proto hip-hop thinker/writer. As Arendt puts it: “The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were.” (Intro, 47) To describe him as a proto hip-hop thinker/writer is to recognize the artistic and spiritual dimension of Benjamin’s work. Like hip-hop, which is rooted in the history of the struggle for liberation through art, specifically music, and religion, Benjamin’s project was a quest for authenticity in a world choked by meaningless clutter. Quotations offer fragments of authenticity, moments of meaning, analogous to the way music discloses freedom. As Arendt puts it, “from the beginning the problem of truth” for Benjamin was the problem of listening for authenticity. “Revelation,” according to Benjamin, “must be heard” because “it lies in the metaphysically acoustical sphere.”(Intro, 49) For Arendt, the implication was obvious: “What else does this mean than that he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon?”(Intro, 50)
ReplyDeleteLearn to listen, listen to learn. Listen to his book and you will hear where philosophy and poetry overlap, or, rather, dialectically perform together. This book is an example of poetic praxis, a work of philosophy practiced under the assumption that language is an essentially poetic phenomenon. Learn is regifting of what has been offered both by the writers/thinkers we have studied together, and what we have offered in response. As Arendt puts it so eloquently, “we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.” (Intro, 50) It is not the book itself, but what the book is describing that is rare, namely, poetic thinking. While students are invited to study, they may not be blown away by the book/text, and they may not have been captivated by any fragments. In turn, in those cases when they arrive and have samples to share, the group might not find a dialogic groove. The rarity of learning is a recurring theme in this book.
3.0d - Learn to listen, listen to learn. Listening requires that we shut our mouths, and hold our breath. This is also what is required if and when we swim below the surface, and explore what remains hidden from the superficies. Arendt reminds us that the rare gift of poetic thinking is happening in the present (the Moment), but “works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself.”(Intro, 50) Those who receive this gift and share (regift) it with others, are likened to pearl divers descend “to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and strange, the pears and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface.”(Intro, 50-51). To listen for significance, to study and discuss what appears as authentic and meaningful, is to learn from a past that circulates in the present and arrives as something new, enlivening what for many students can feel like a dead end, schooling as the place where originality runs aground. Away from the shore, the pearl diver swims deep below the surface. Likewise the students who venture into reading, writing and discussion. They learn when, like the pearl diver, they recover samples of significance and “bring them up into the world of the living -- as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ as perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”(Intro, 51)
ReplyDeleteDuarte/Prof. Iguana
Portland, Maine
August 26, 2024