OPM 262(263), November 4th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 261-262

In the past two weeks or more my writing/thinking has overlapped intensely with my teaching and this commemorative project.  At times it’s been difficult to distinguish one discursive location from the other, especially in the past two weeks when I’ve been teaching Paul and DuBois in the wake of my visit to Memphis.  The intensity of the overlap has offered me a uniquely clear sense of purpose that does not always translate into linguistic fluidity.  On the contrary, the felt movement of thought and emotion is overwhelming and reminds me of those days of sailing the aptly named Dancing Bear, my 14ft Hunter that is most enjoyed when wind and tide are pushing the limits of my skill to sail.  Like a tumultuous day on the water, the past two weeks have been nothing short of a dynamic collision between the material in these mediations (both the originals and the commentaries), the reading I am exploring with my students, my students responses to the readings, and PES Memphis.   There have been moments when I sense its all too much, but, then, I hear the voice of my daughter saying, “Dad, you can’t be out there and then become self-conscious about being out there.”  Translation, you are either ‘out there’ – dwelling in the ek-static place of the Open – or you are not.   ‘Out there’ is the heart depicted on the ‘outside’ of Howlin Wolf.  He is depicted as the one empowered by the courage of his convictions, the faith that sends forth his music in the manner of fire; flames that not only emerge from his thorn encircled heart but also from his mouth, rendering him analogous to the Pentecostal figures in the streets of Jerusalem.

The figure of the ‘lone wolf’, however, can misrepresent the direction of my commentary if it takes on too much of the authority of Kierkegaard’s subject, that strong fearless figure of faith.   I want to retain that figure’s strength and courage as an exemplar of the sage, the one who gathers together and leads the community of learning.  Socrates is an example of the sage, but not Heraclitus, although the latter prophetically announces the one who can gather and lead the community that emerges in that place  (time and space) that exists outside of the law of the state and disrupts the logic of marketplace.   It remains to be seen if Paul qualifies as the sage of the learning community.  I might want to read his epistles as another kind of writing that, as Agamben explains in a compelling way, happens in the kairological temporality that exists ‘outside’ the chronological and in the messianic, which is to say, the ‘time that remains’.  Here I am recalling the co-existence of the three temporal horizons (past, present, future) that I wrote about yesterday as co-existing in the movement of the learning community.   Paul is writing from outside the law but inside the congregations he has organized. Yet he also remains outside those congregations in the sense that he is not present and writing from another location in time and space.  What’s more, his letters are written to a future community, to ‘his’ community that has evolved in his absence.  All this to say that I could read his letters to his communities as compelling resources for the learning community, although I’m not quite sure how to work them into my thinking on koinonia.

The writing form 11/4/04 returns to Heidegger’s musings on Rilke’s “song is existence”.   On 10/17/14 while in Memphis I wrote on the fragment: Rilke’s aphorism/fragment “Song is existence.”  Song is existence!   The mimetic making, a copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music making.  Music is existence, the existence of human legein the saying that imitates the flow ῥεῖ (rhei) of Logos.   But this musical existence needs to be learned, it is the hardest apprenticeship.  Learned first and foremost through listening, which is what is emphasized in the preparatory work of apathetic reading, where the phenomenology of reception is practiced.” (OPM 245(246)  On 11/4/04  “song is existence” expresses the article of faith in the human poetic response to Being’s Becoming that is experienced as an offering.   The reception of the offering in its full force gathers the learning community.  Put otherwise, the learner is the one who receives the call (klēsis, calling or vocation).  Here is not the place to return to the relation between calling and saying something via vocare.  (cf.PPM10 2/22/14, OPM 218(9), 09/20/14)   It is the place to note the importance of the gathering call as having such a force that the one who receives it is totally turned around, such that the original (and originary) question raised in Being and Learning regarding the turning around of the soul to contemplate Being (ie., to begin learning) is here ‘answered’ again via the force of the call (klēsis) that is uncompromising and we might even say total if not totalizing of the subject.   This is the other side of Kierkegaard’s muscular subject: he is radically subjected by his faith.  But if we follow the Pauline congregational we end up with the learning community that is gathered together by muscular subjects, a powerful chorus, the proverbial Fisk University singers whose faith is actualized in the congregation they form and that forms them.  Heidegger is cited on 11/04/04 to express this: “The more venturesome are those who say in a greater degree, in the manner of the singer.  Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion.  It is not a willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be produced.”(‘What are Poets For?’)

On 11/04/04 I read this as insisting the work of the singers, the dialogic learners “the production of the song is not…the making of a commodity…who value stands to be weighed and measured by those ‘traders’ who appropriate it.  Songs remain within the community.”(BL 261)  However, against Heidegger, the saying of the singers, the songs, is indeed an act of solicitation, and one that is always already happening before the singers saying anything at all.   Their song solicits in the sense of requesting and calling for, making an appeal for compassionate listening.  Singing solicits the productive work of listening. 

The meditation on 11/04/04 thinks dialectically, identifying the work of the learning community as a contra-diction.  It speaks acoustically against the digitized and mechanized regime of schooling “that functions under the machination of technologies that package and reify…all learners to the status of quantifiable ‘objects’ that can be measured and standardized.”(BL 261)  If Memory gathers the community of learning in music-making thinking, then mechanized education (‘schooling’) represents the “abandonment…a forgetting of Being’s originary dispensation and presencing.  The mechanical, the repetition of the same, supplants the spiritual, the improvisational performance of the free.”(BL 261)   Spirit bursts on the discursive scene as the excess not simply to cybernetics, but to the organizational logic that programs it.   Here is not the place for an extensive presentation of their discussion, but in their seminar on Heraclitus, Fink and Heidegger delve into the strange way that Hereaclitus’ kuberman (to steer) is delivered down to us as ‘cybernetics’ (kubernētēs).  [Recall: Heraclitus, fragment 28: Τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός. 

It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things. cf OPM 253(254), October 25^th]  The steering that Heraclitus denotes in fragment 28 has become totally degenerated under the hubris of cybernetics that is not limited to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence.   The more perverse and insidious manifestation is happening in the so-called ‘application’ of the cybernetic to the organization of ‘schooling’, with the mechanization of knowledge under and plan and control framework that replicates the supply chain strategies of large scale retail industry.  “The machination is a true abandonment insofar as it has relinquished all recognition and affirmation of Being.” (BL 261)