I
had to listen this show from
Bellarmine College 12/7/68. There are some
excellent choices from this day in GD performance history, but today called for
an early show, one that included a Dark Star>St. Stephen>The Eleven
[nb: from a Dead Zone perspective, it is interesting
to note that this is one of the very rare shows when Garcia speaks didactically
to the audience. At the 3min mark after the
4th song “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” Jerry tells the audience that
they don’t have to pay attention to the band, and, in fact, they should try
dancing, as “you might like it.” I
suppose the context of the performance is relevant, but it a rare gem of a
moment nonetheless.]
This work day started in Saint’s Café [cf. OPM OPM 231(32), October 3rd, OPM 260(261) November 2nd] and I mention this because in the course of striking up a conversation with a Penn State doctoral student in Rhetoric who is writing term paper that includes a study of Aristotle’s De Anima, specifically on memory and imagination, she directed me towards an entirely new place (pun intended) for thinking/writing on koinōnia: the category of rhetorical invention, which includes the topics (topoi – also means ‘places’, hence the pun). Within the context of Aristotle’s study of rhetoric the topoi “are the basic categories of relationships among ideas, each of which can serve as a template or heuristic for discovering things to say about a subject. ‘Topics of invention’ literally means ‘places to find things.’ Aristotle divided these into the ‘Common’ and ‘Special’ topics of invention, the former being more general, the latter relevant to each of the three branches of oratory.”[http://rhetoric.byu.edu/, emphasis mine] The common places to find things to say is the koinos topoi. Within the literary and rhetorical fields of study that have evolved over the millennia since Aristotle the two terms have been collapsed and reduced to topos or topoi, which denotes theme or motif, convention; and it is easy to see how memory is related to the topoi as places to find things to say. And at a very fundamental level what we are encountering is the foundation of all later scholarship and criticism: the topoi are the topics of study, scholarship, criticism. When the koinos topos (Latin locus communis) are ‘topics of invention’ they are the places where we locate things to say. When the koinos topos are gathered in the προγυμνάσματα (progymnasmata, ‘fore-exercises’) they denote the introductory or preliminary exercises of students in rhetoric that moved into those common places to locate figures of thinking. In order to learn how to think from a specific perspective, the student would practice a declamation, or ‘declare’ himself as another. To complete the trinity of possible usages, a third denotation of koinos topos is as a short, pithy, statement; synonym of maxim, adage, proverb, or what I generically call ‘fragment’.
The preceding is an
important promissory note for all future writing/thinking on koinōnia, as well as experiments with
the learning community. Here I have in
mind an entirely new way of orchestrating what I have been this past year
calling apathetic reading. And I foresee how this will work well at the
beginning of the spring 2015 terms with Rocha’s revised and newly published
primer. What seems most
significant is the commonplace of community learning as a place of resources, and ‘topics of invention’ or,
for me, places of experimentation. To be
continued…
So what happened this
morning at Saint’s Café is a demonstration of what is stated at the very
beginning of the meditation from 12/7/14: “Only someone who has experienced the
futility of the conversation of ‘I’ and ‘me’ is capable of being a [colleague]…”(BL 302) [nb: at this point ‘friend’ has been replaced by ‘colleague’ or the
Spanish colega, which I prefer for
both scholarly and personal reasons. Colega does better the work of offering replacement
that is also a displacement. But
colleague will also be deployed. The
choice will be random, for now. However,
for anyone who might be checking my citations in the first edition of Being and Learning (Sense:2012), please
be warned of the changes I am making here in BL 2.0] The conversation between
‘you’ and ‘me’ offers us the possibility of learning. It begins by the identification of something
we have in common, such as ‘Aristotle.’ I ask of your relation to Aristotle,
and in the course of our dialogue you disclose to me a new ‘Aristotle’, one
that has not yet been said to me before, and one that I have not yet said. It
is obvious that ‘self-study’ is only partially important for the work of the
learning community; in being preparatory, or what Irigaray describes as the ‘thinking’
that builds the self each and every day (and thus prepares it for the next day’s
work with others). But when measured against
the force of the learning community, the
conversation between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is futile in the sense of being ‘useless’ or
impotent, powerless or without potency.
The power of self is discovered in self-overcoming, when the self is “projected”
beyond itself “through learning unfolding through poetic dialogue…the creative
performance where the apparently unified ‘self’ is received in its radical [diff’rence], as ex-ceeding itself…To be
a learner is to be an artistic project in the process of be-ing created, a
project that can only be realized in the context of be-ing received as work of art, as a project spilling
over with meaning.”(BL 302)
On this day I’m more
comfortable with the preceding, which focuses a la existentialism on the ‘self’
as a work of art. To speak of the making of ‘persons’ is not
entirely problematic in the sense that the focus was then and remains today on
the emergence of learners via the learning community. The technē
(work, poetics) of the learning makes
the community, but the community is only ever made through the people who are gathered together. First and foremost the learner who has
something to say, something to offer, and someone(s) who is/are ready to
receive and respond to the offering.
Dialogue that follows from the birth of the new (maieutics). “The philosopher
as learner, then, must be seized (pathema)
outside of him-self…This seizure implies the very ‘contradiction’ or negation
of the ‘self’ that Socrates fears most. From the perspective of the mystical
tradition that is most closely associated with meditative thinking…the ‘releasement’
of self implies the ‘obliteration’ of the ‘I’ in the ec-static transcendence
where ‘I’ is extinguished into the One that is be-held. But to say ‘be-held’ is mis-leading, because the
meditator ‘holds’ no thing. Rather, in this noumenal realm it is the
meditator who is held, comported and transported in the manner of Parmenides
who was carted away beyond the gates of night and day. And an analogus situation unfolds in the phenomenal
realm, where the truth and beauty appears in the poetic voice, that voice of
the ‘self’ that always exceeds the self.
This is the ‘loss’ of the self experienced in learning as the performance
of freedom. And this ‘loss’ of ‘self’
occurs when the ‘self’ is estranged from it-self, becomes un-recognizable. Dialogue is the situation where self becomes
un-recognizable to it-self and, is thereby, able to learn.”(12/7/04 BL 303)
3.0 (Saturday, Portland, ME) - I didn't recall being in State College (Kelly's hometown) on this day 10 years ago. Saints Cafe is one of those memorable cafés I've worked at over the years. They include: Cow's End (Venice Beach, CA), the coffee shop at the Better Bagel (Amityville, NY) where I wrote many of the OPMs, and Crema Cafe up here in Portland. I wrote the Foreword to Being and Learning at Saints Café. This morning I printed the 5th and final copy of "LEARN," I'll take that copy with me as I head out to Big Sky, MT tomorrow for a celebratory week of skiing! I'm planning to submit the final manuscript to Routledge on or before Wednesday but the current word count is 52, 947 and the contract states the limits is 45k, including bibliography. So I have a bit of cutting to do! Meanwhile, here's the fragment from above that jumped out at me as it resonates in "LEARN" although not so much in terms of the 'power' of the self, as with self-overcoming: "The power of self is discovered in self-overcoming, when the self is “projected” beyond itself “through learning unfolding through poetic dialogue…the creative performance where the apparently unified ‘self’ is received in its radical [diff’rence], as ex-ceeding itself…To be a learner is to be an artistic project in the process of be-ing created, a project that can only be realized in the context of be-ing received as work of art, as a project spilling over with meaning.”(BL 302) "LEARN": "Self-overcoming, for Nietzsche, isn’t only the turning away from the private self, but the turning outward, to “our books and our handwriting.” This outward gaze can reveal a stepladder that the student can climb in order to complete the overcoming of an “identity” that is indeed the consciousness of “sameness,” the unthinking herd instinct. With each study session, a book taken up in the khaos of the deconstructed library can become what Nietzsche calls a revered object." AND: ". “Death” is a cipher for what Nietzsche calls self-overcoming. And ownmost “possibility” can be designated as the potentiality of learning that is granted by our incompleteness: the possibility of something happening or of someone doing something in the future. This is how the learning community constitutes what is always already “before” the student, both as the negation of solitude and the present potentiality of further learning. The solitude of study (reading, writing) is suspended when the student is moved into the dialogic community by the force of the realization that “what I am thinking I have not thought all alone.” His incompleteness always already indicates community (the coming together with others), but also his singularity, which indicates that what he will share is his own original digestion of the reading." AND: It is an education that gets underway with what Nietzsche calls self-overcoming. And because this philosophical education is a kind of liberation, it is part of the tradition that is inspired by the power of the book (liber) to free (liber) the one who studies it. Indeed, the philosophical education described here is an example of the studia liberalia (liberal arts)." AND: "Yet, there is a collective sense that the seminar discussion has “produced” something meaningful, which is to say, a significant learning experience, or what I will describe below as a collaborative performance of freedom." AND: "Perhaps amplifying Aristotle’s description of thinking as enduring in-and-for-itself, we can describe the thinking enacted in philosophical learning as sui generis (of its own kind, unique), but also akin to a performance that has no goal, end or outcome beyond itself (autotelic). And because discussion is a process without a product, a rehearsal that is not a preparation for a “final” performance, the one who conducts it appears “useless” from the perspective of schooling."
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