OPM 247(248), October 20th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 245-247

The meditation from this day ten years ago, which is a longer than usual piece of writing, moves in two different directions:  first, it begins by asking a set of questions that are meant to extend the thinking on the musicality of the learning community; second, it moves into the dialectical opposition of the ‘calculative voice’ of the self-certain juridical subject and the silence of learning community.   And between these two directions there emerges another dialectics, because the first direction takes us into a dialogic situation, while the second takes us into one that can best be described as monological, if not monomaniacal.  Indeed, the latter is the habitus of the ‘speculative philosopher’ who designs the blueprint of the grand theory where everything is resolved, and, in effect, history comes to an end.  In contrast is the ‘practical philosopher’ who experiments with poetic projects, making and remaking, repairing and renewing the world, as Arendt puts it.   The philosopher of education is the latter, and, for this reason, is one who takes up what Sam Rocha calls ‘folk phenomenology’, especially when we think that project as one that re-turns to the historico-cultural ground of el pueblo, what I have been describing these past few days as ‘the street’.   It is also a blues project, because the ‘music’ of this project expresses an effacement with the present injustice of the world, which, ontologically, is the presence of absence and withdrawal of Being, and, historically, is the incompleteness of the epic narrative of humanity. 

There are contradictions moving through these meditations and Being and Learning.  This is to be expected, because, after all, the experiment demanded phenomenological bracketing such that each day’s writing would, more or less, tap into the modality of originary thinking.   Making this happen required that I not read back or review the previous day’s writing (something I am not doing with this commemorative 2.0 experiment!)   The result, from time to time, were reversals and contradictions.  An example of that happened on this day a decade ago when I started the meditation by claiming that the heart was offered “improvisational  saying” and in this offering was given the “occasion to appear with the attentiveness of close listening.”  (10/20/04 BL 245)   The careful reader would immediately catch the contradiction with the assertion that follows: “Sayers sing songs.”   Two days earlier I claimed “what is sung is not yet spoken”(10/18/04, BL 243), which, today, raises the question if ‘saying’ and ‘speaking’ are distinct?  

A response to the preceding question, which will indicate that saying something is categorically distinct from mere ‘speaking’, requires that I back track to the commentary on the claim that “what is sung is not yet spoken.”  I wrote: “The claim indicates that what is ‘spoken’ is what is familiar or easily understood; it is commonsensical; what is ‘spoken’ does not offer up anything ‘new’ and thus is not the basis of learning.  If learning is an event, then it happens as a movement, and we can call the learning community ‘a movement’ with the full awareness to the historical significance of this description in the public-political sense. [Indeed, if we are going to speak of the common (koinon) and of koinonia then we have to think in terms of the transformative political movement. More on this to come…]  Singing stands for what is ‘new’, and the song for what is studied: “the voice of the stranger as stranger, and with this recognition [the affirmation of] the novelty of this voice….this affirmation is the essence of the listening that receives the novelty of this ‘new’ voice that has ‘not yet’ been heard within the learning community itself.” (10/18/04, BL 243-244)  Reception of the song is an affirmation of novelty, the affirmation of the offering, the offering that gathers the community into learning.” OPM 245(246).   

The song moves the community by extending it.  The song(s) is (are) offered by someone(s) who are saying something.  [As I write these words I ‘hear’ a book calling out from my desk.   No, not the volume of early Marcuse essay  Heideggeraian Marxism, but Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction]   Both  “what is sung is not yet spoken” and “sayers sing songs” are true, and this is no Heraclitean sleight of hand.   Singing is saying something that has not yet spoken.   Singing [making music] is never mere speaking, so the first fragment needs to be refined: “what is sung is not spoken” or “what is sung has not yet been said.”  Saying and speaking are categorically distinct, and understanding that distinction is a way to ‘resolve’ the apparent contradiction.

The meditation from 10/20/04 offers up a most audacious set of questions, and I suspect I had done the writing on a Sunday morning: “What is the sound of the learning community?  What are the songs of learning? How does the hidden harmony make its appearance upon the quiet and still realm of peace? Does not the improvisational performance of freedom, with its irrupting of the static same, violate the peace of the Open?  Do we not, with our identification of the learning community as a co-arising of peace and freedom, seek to reconcile the ethereal stillness of Jerusalem with the worldly busy-ness of Babylon?” (10/18/04, BL 243-244)   The questions are a stand alone paragraph, and are apparently addressed to my future self.  None of them are taken up in the meditation from that day!

What interests me most in the writing from 10/18/04 is the attempt to describe saying something/singing, or what is moving the event of dialogic learning.   The attempt begins by reiterating what is meant in that essential category ‘not yet’, the one that was called upon just now in the writing of the fragments “what is sung is not spoken” or “what is sung has not yet been said.”  The place of the learning community – that “equalizing space” -- is described as “the ‘un-settled’ and ‘in-complete’ abode of the ‘not yet.’  What remains ‘not yet’ complete is the be-ing of human.” (10/18/04, BL 245)  Singing is thus the movement into the fundamental ontological situation of human be-ing.  Learning is made up, on the one side, by the receptivity of this singing (“compassionate listening”) but is prompted and moved by the offering made with singing: “this offering…occurs with the renouncement that enacts the ineffability of the ineffable, and presents the ‘not yet’ in a saying that is offered as interpretable and thus in-definite...to enter into the precinct of the Open is to submit one’s saying to the unforeseen, and surrender to the openness of the other…”(10/18/04, BL 246)   At the very least, what is disclosed in the meditation is the pivotal shift to a phenomenology that prioritizes (and is reduced to) the receptive perception of hearing.   This reduction to hearing (v. seeing) invokes the necessary power shift happening with the symmetric reciprocity of dialogue: the not-yet in saying, “this in-definite saying is the venturesome singing of the learner who has renounced the positionality of the ‘over-seer’…”(10/18/04, BL 246)