There
is no question that I attempt practice what I preach, to use that old
adage. Specifically, I am experimental
with my writing, as exhibited for all to see in the pages of this blog, and in
my teaching. And sometimes the venues
(studios, labs) for those distinct forms of experimentation overlap, or sometimes
they collide. I’m not sure if I’m
heading towards a harmonic overlap or a discordant collision today as I make my
way to campus for a day that will begin with the discussion by my mostly music
education major filled philosophy of education
of my paper “Feeling the Funk: Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a
Music-Making Philosophy,” and continue, after the general lecture, with a study
of Rocha’s Late to Love, and project
that I’ve been part of before, during and after it was recorded in the first
week of May at Aardvark Studio. Today the
class will watch Sam’s video taped response to the student questions, which
they posed after listening to his album.
Next Tuesday we will focus on my threshold meditations that appear in
between the song lyrics and/or titles, my Palabras
Entre Nosotros. But first my paper
that I wrote for and presented in February in Chicago for Rocha’s Society for
the Philosophical Study of Education, which was meeting at the Midwest meeting
of the American Philosophical Association.
The train is arriving now to Mineola Station, and now time to grab the
taxi to campus. I will return later
today, in the afternoon, with a reflection of what happened in class, and also
to document the connections between my “Feeling the Funk” paper, Late to Love, and the meditations and
commentaries…
I’m
not sure I’m ready to offer a description that will capture the unique energy
that was moving through all three sections today as we moved through ‘my stuff’
aka the article I shared with my philo of ed class, and part two of the Late to Love experiment.
I can only offer fragments of what was said and felt: the announcement that in my writing I am
inspired by symphonic composition, or any composition that is made up of
multiple, parallel running thematic lines…how to re-present this form of
thinking [take a standard 8 x 11 paper, turn it on its side and arrange the
parallel lines of thought…]; DuBois’
story of Jones shows us a vertical transcendence that is analogous to the one
in Plato’s cave allegory; but what of
the re-turn? What moves Jones and the
emancipated cave-dweller to return?...If there is one and only one thing allowed in a
school it would have to be an acoustic piano [this in the wake of thinking
about Nietzsche’s ‘hammer’]; music is
hope…\\...Arabian Nights was a
favorite of Borges, and some have said one cannot understand Borges without
having read and studied and enjoyed Thousand
and One Nights…\\...because I wrote Los
Palabras Entre Nosotros under the direct influence of Borges, our study of
Augustine through Late to Love
extends into the next work, and we should read the Palabras alongside Nights…the
dark night of the soul; the twilight of reason; the shattering of expectations
the moment Rocha begins his video; the
adrenaline rush compounded by the anxiety over the students’ ‘getting
it’…and then they do!!!...the rush of pride and then gratitude. YES!
Ever
since the koinonia took hold of my
focus there has been a return to the diminished subject as a necessary
consequence of learning community’s formation.
The past two weeks, in conversation with Paul, this diminishment has
been thought in terms of the totalizing subjectification of the self by the
learning community. And only yesterday
did the practical character of the learning community as a work in process (its ongoing unfolding in the flow of becoming)
emerge as not only the work of faith but a work that falls under the category
of τέχνη
(technē)
in the sense of being the ‘messy’ and ‘dirty’ undertaking “associated with
people who were bound to necessity…chiefly operative in the [unfree] sphere…and
not in the free realm of the polis.”
This makes even more intriguing the mapping of the learning community as
the location of the political, for in what sense can the political be defined by
a human activity that is not a realization of freedom? Unless of course what is meant by τέχνη
(technē),
precisely as the ‘messy’ work of the folk, is something that does not
correspond to the liberal sense of freedom as liberty (i.e., the freedom from the communal, and the so-called
freedom to pursue one’s private ‘happiness’) but to something we might call the
work of emancipation and liberation, a vertical transcendence that actualizes
the force of a movement into an not yet known future under the sign of
hope? What else would the work of faith entail?
But all this to say that the
description of the learner as one who is radically subjected (de-subjected) was
worked out in unique way through the early Nietzsche in the paper I shared with
my philo of ed class. Indeed, re-reading
and presenting this paper today confirmed the claim made in said paper that all
work after Being and Learning is a
further working out of the form and content of that writing, which is precisely
what this commemorative blog has been all about. But already, in the first weeks of 2.0 I was
working out what I’m hoping will be a more refined set of reflections on the
main thematic line of Being and Learning,
such as the existence of the nonself (anatman). In “Feeling the Funk” I leap (appropriately)
from that Wagnerian moment in DuBois to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, probing further the totalizing subjectification
occurring when Being takes hold of the artist and renders him a work of
art. “In turn, with this paper I take a
turn towards the early Nietzsche… in order to describe the transcendental
moment experienced by Jones as music’s capacity to reveal the force of the
Dionysian original unity…I show how ontological education offered by music
takes us into an effacement with the tragic dimension of Being’s ceaseless
nativity.” Further “what Nietzsche is
heralding with the writing of his book:
the sacrifice of the subject, the individual…“the annihilation of the
ordinary bounds and limits of existence,”(BT23) and the subsequent birth or
resurrection of the Dionysian artist: the artist as artwork, the individual
human subject as subjected to the totality of Being, the Primal Unity.” Birth of Dionysian artist: “as Dionysian artist he has identified
himself with the Primal Unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music has been correctly termed
a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he produces the copy of
this Primal Unity as music…The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity
in the Dionysian process.”(BT 14)
The preceding is shared as a way
of indicating the emergence of the learner and the new comer to the community,
and what occurs when crosses the threshold that separates the restraining hold
of apathetic reading (apatheia).
On this day 11/13 ten years ago
the gathering of the learning community is identified as a re-collection. This description serves to emphasize the
community as a gathering, a collection of a many into a one, but also to
emphasize the gathering as mediated by the force of memory. The gathering of the learning community is a
re-membering, an (re)incarnation perhaps, and a conversion in the sense of
being a re-turn to the originary offering of Being with the bestowal of
existence. With the return to this
bestowal Being is though as becoming, and with this thinking we encounter the
disclosure of the ontology of learning.
This “re-membering…produces [forms, makes] a community of learning” and
for the first time in the project the congregation is described as “the
gathering reconciliation.” (11/13/04 BL
271) To describe the gathering as a reconciliation is to recognize the founding
and ongoing building of the community is work that involves struggle, strife
and the violence inherent in all construction.
“We are beginners because we can begin” is the crux of the matter for
Arendt, but when she cited Augustine she is aware of the Roman and Christian
syncretic that allows to characterize the actualization of natality via action
as a second birth, an event that always entails breaking, cutting, blood, sweat
and tears. Reconciliation in this sense
is the resolution of the necessary tension that is never fully resolved. “Here we identify the estrangement of ‘self’
that unfolds in the releasement of the learner, the ‘one’ who becomes a
question to herself….Here we identify the uncanniness
of the learning situation…”(11/13/04 BL 272)
But reconciliation is possible only through re-membering, “when the
originary dispensation is re-collected,” when we re-collect in the sense of
picking up again what has been offered to us, which on this day denotes a mimesis that imitates the originary
offering of existence, creation, via the technē
of creativity, the work of poiein,
the formation of art, art-work, and the artist becoming the artwork aka the
learner becoming the learned, and/or the student becoming the studied. “This is
the way of the learner who is diminished…[and in the process becomes] the
revolutionary,”(11/13/04 BL 272) the
one who re-turns again and again and again to originary: agape.
3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME). I can feel energy/excitement expressed ten years ago with the description of what was a memorable day of teaching. I hadn't recalled Fall 2014 as an especially inspired semester, but reading these accounts reminds me that it was indeed! The days of teaching described in the 2.0 commentary are examples of the lived experience that have inspired "LEARN." About an hour ago I completed the edits on the third and what will be the final draft of "LEARN." Any changes that will be made prior to submitting it to Routledge will be cosmetic, including the organization of the citations and reference list, table of contents, etc. For now, I'm in a celebratory mood and share two passages from the just edited last ten pages.
ReplyDelete"Bachelard combines “resonance” with “repercussion.” He calls their relationship a “phenomenological doublet,” and the relation can also be described as a dialectical one. They don’t oppose one another, per se, but designate the dimensions of interiority and exteriority, the spiritual and the worldly. Each denotes a different way that meaning circulates from the work of art (the book/text) and resounds in the discussion. “The resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world, while the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence.”(PS, xviii) The resonance of the text’s fecundity is felt in the solitude of study (reading), and again in the learning community’s re-reading (recitare). In both cases the philosophical learner is listening to the work and receives its arrival into the sonic present, reverberating poetically. Inspiration, the flicker, is experienced with this reverberation. The response, first in the writing of the précis, next, in the dialogic interpretations of the essentials, the students are “speaking” the work. The discussion is an amplification and a remixing. In the repercussions or “reverberations we speak it, it is our own. The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the [author’s] being were our being. The multiplicity of resonances then issues from the reverberations’ unity of being.”(PS, xviii) What Bachelard is suggesting it that the significance of the work takes hold of the student, “possesses [them] entirely,”(PS, xviii), and in this Moment of captivation there is an occurrence of a ‘unity’ or what Nancy calls “truth” through which the totality of referrals resound and is remixed. The errantry of the discussion, the non-linear jam, is enabled by this remixing, the interpretation that circulates and spins, often pausing and moving back, scratching and scrubbing what has been said and thereby maintaining a syncopated rhythm. The discussion spins away from the direct path and the telos of “outcomes” demanded by schooling."
3.0b AND: "The discussion is underway when that original reception in the solitude of study is repeated in the company of others. That repetition, which welcomes the arrival of the presence of the text, resonates with the original inspiration experienced by the author of the book. This is why Bachelard can describe the multiplicity of resonances and reverberations as placing us in a new existential modality, “a change of being…as though the poet’s being were our being.”(PS, xviii) The return of the original moment of inspiration during the discussion is a repercussion of the poetic imagination that struck the author. The fecund text arrives, neither finished or unfinished. It is presencing with an enduring significance that is received as the possibility of thinking poetically, as if for the first time, improvisationally and spontaneously defying the dictatorship of no alternatives. When the student in the solitude of study, and then again in the company of others, is called by the text she is inspired by the spirit of creativity, by the poetics of making, that breathed life into the author who then “birthed” the book into being. In turn, we might describe the circulation of that inspiration with the retour that Foucault describes as the rebound effect happening in the encounter with the “truth.” Recall that the “conversion” Foucault describes is the one that turns the subject of learning away from the quest for certainty. The retour is the possible encounter with the author’s inspiration, and this (re)turns the student to the poetic relation to the book, an encounter with its being (existence) as a becoming, as enduring in its arrival with meaning. The retour of the author’s inspiration is felt as a repercussion and thus an amplification of that original inspiration. The discussion is a repercutere (a rebound): a remixing of that original inspiration. The inspiration, the flicker, arriving with the aphorisms that break through, is re- ‘back again’ and it ‘strikes’ percutere the student in the solitude of study and again with others in the learning community. The aphorisms break through the banality of schooling, detonating above and beyond the text, revealing, in the way Picasso’s guitar played with negative space, the khaos through which the presencing of the text emerges and around which the discussion circulates. The essentials that were inspired into being are amplified and remixed but not rewritten. They are heard anew, heard as new, and the poetics of the discussion unfold from the retour of the author’s inspiration. Bachelard describes this moment’s reverberation as “bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation…in the soul of the reader.” (PS, xix) Whatever essentials have called out to the students, what Bachelard calls the “poetic image,” returns them to the original moment of inspiration, “the origin of the speaking being.”(PS, xix) They listen and respond from that originary location where the poesy of language arrives both in the solitude of study and the commonality of discussion."
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