Thinking/Writing in the stream of
[Skipping
ahead to “Candyman”: “I come in from Memphis where I learned to
talk the jive. When I get back to Memphis…”
My daughter
Kat is coming home today from her semester at Bocconi University in Milan, so I
hit the ground running this morning.
First things first B&L 2.0,
at Crema Café. And I’ve taken a different
approach this morning, reading the writing from 12/22/04 before starting the commentary. The approach is departing from what
has become normative with the commentary writing, which has entailed leaping
into the meditation from a high point, dropping deeply into the thinking, and
then emerging for air sometime later. Today
I read slowly and carefully before beginning the commentary writing. And on
this day, anyway, that has thus far proven to be the better course of action
because it is by far one of the most synoptic meditations written in
2004/5. With that in mind I want to pull
out all revelatory sentences that in some ways are able to stand on their own,
but, nevertheless, work best side by side.
In this way, then, I want to retrieve a form that I have encountered in
Wittgenstein, whom I have admired from afar, but also in Marx with his Theses.
I won’t go so far, as I have done on other occasions, to enumerate each
sentence…or perhaps I will?
First,
however, I want to reiterate [because that is where I stand in this threshold
between mythos and logos, poetic hermenuetics and
phenomenological description] two moments from OPM 304(305), December 20th, when I found myself in that strange place of
thinking, what Arendt maps as the nunc
stans (the standing now), eternity.
The re-collection of that moment on 12/20/14, which is a recollection of
12/20/04, includes a re-collection of the writing on 8/4/14. In meditative thinking all moments collapse
into One:
“I can feel ‘ceaseless nativity’ is
ready to burst on the scene! On 12/20/14
a day after the excursus back to the
East, where I had spent a good deal of the…
- [ I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP: but
just now when I looked up from my
screen I saw that my hour glass had stopped…REALL?!??! C’mon!...What are those lyrics
from William Blake?:
“To
see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heave in a Wild Flower
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Or,
maybe, “Once in awhile you can get shown the light in the strangest of places
if you look at it right!” (Scarlet
Begonias)] –
Chuang Tzu brings us back to that
Law of Nature that I was thinking/writing under in July and August when I was
taken into the Maine wilderness with Thoreau and there, with him, re-collected
our primal past, and on August 4th
in my commentary cited The Philosopher himself:
Here is the important citation
from Aristotle, Rhetoric (book 1,
chapter 13):
“By two kinds of law I mean particular
law and universal law. Particular law is
that which each community lays down and applies to its own members: this is
partly written and partly unwritten.
Universal law is the law of nature.
For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural
justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no
association or covenant with each other.
It is this that Sophocles’ Antigone
clear mean when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite
of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature.
Not
of to-day or yesterday it is,
But
lives eternal: none can date its birth.
(Sophocles,
Antigone, 456-7)
and of COURSE as I cite THAT
PASSAGE the “Eternity” jam opens up from the 12/10/93 show where I am
streaming…flowing. Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) "everything flows". -- listen to Branford and Jerry trading
licks!!! -- [Weir wrote “Eternity”
with Willie Dixon…bluesman extraordinaire, whom Weir called “a true
genius.”] “Love won’t ever die, won’t ever die, love won’t ever die.” Lives
eternal.
Eternity, Eternity, Eternity.
Before
pulling out the Sentences, I need to make a list of the principals from
12/22/04: Socrates, ‘Make music,’
Dialectic, Excess, Performance, Work, Improvisation, Eternal, Blake.
Here are the
Sentences from 12/22/04 (fundamental descriptions of learning):
11. Learning is the modality of rapture, the aesthetic state that
receives and responds to the essential sway of Being.(BL 319)
22. Learning is
the making of music with others.(BL
319)
33. Learning is
the improvisational chanting that expresses the en-chantment of be-ing seized
into the essential movement of scattering-gathering-dispersal,
the dialectic of openness that ‘ends’ not in the synthetic result, but always
already conveys the mysterious un-bound and un-predictable arrival of the other
which remains hidden and concealed.(BL
319-320)
44. Such is
learning as estrangement, as the work unfolding from the rapture of the
aesthetic state, the wide awakeness. (BL
320)
55. To be
learner is to be an artist and to remain a stranger, a seeker, with-held in the
state of perplexity and the disquiet of questioning. (BL 320)
66.
Learning, the dwelling in the aesthetic state, is the releasement
into the freedom of the in-complete, the futural that is preserved by the
eternal movement of Being. (BL 320)
I need to
clarify that the Sentences are listed in chronological order, but are scattered and dispersed within the writing that happened on 12/22/04. Today,
I am not interested in doing an exegesis of the Sentences, and want to
let them stand on their own, I want to
turn, instead, to the middle part of the mediation that describes the
dialectical logic of learning, and also offers a description of learning as work.
‘Dialectic’ and ‘Work’ are amongst the categories that have grabbed my
attention during B&L 2.0. Once upon a time (beginning when I was an
undergraduate student of Quentin Lauer,
S.J., at Fordham and through the writing of my Masters thesis under Agnes
Heller at the New School) I was completely caught in energeia of Hegel’s system and the dialectical force that moves
it. And today I find myself returned to
the dialectic via Heraclitus, and after reading the meditation from 12/22/04 I
realize that I never departed from the dialectic, which, it turns out, is ‘my’ logic. [nb: at this moment I think of my contribution to the first volume
of Lapiz and recognize, again, the
(not so) hidden presence of the dialectic].
As for work, one only needs to search this blog for technē…// All this to say
that the project has now re-turned back to the place of its origin (call it
Rose Hill): praxis.
But here a promissory note (with help
from Wikipedia...still totally not for profit! Have you made a contribution? I
have!):
the need to hold together in dialectical thought
praxis (πρᾶξις) and technē τέχνη; the first denoting “activity engaged in by
free men,” (Aristotle), and the second denoting “the imperfection of human
imitation of nature; it signified all the mechanic arts, including medicine and
music..” (Aristotle) “… saw it as kind of knowledge associated with people who
were bound to necessity. That is, technē
was chiefly operative in the domestic sphere, in farming and slavery, and not
in the free realm of the Greek polis.”
[12/22/78 was working for me and/or I wasn’t
working 12/22/78…so I flipped over to 12/3/81 (from my archive)…jumping to
“Scarlett Bs”]
On the
dialectic: learning is the enactment of
the movement of Being disclosed via Logos. In the beginning, Logos. Learning enacts the
presencing of Logos via originary
thinking: the singular learner via meditation, the learning community via
dialogue. Both moments are held within
the dialectic of technē /\ praxis.
On 12/22/14 this enactment is described
as a “dialectical process” that “ ‘ends’ with en-opening, with openness.”(BL 320) [nb: concealed in that description is an Eastern (from India) form
of drumming whereby the ‘last’ beat is ‘not played,’ which is to say that the
percussion performance ‘ends’ with the hand up and away from the drum head,
suspended so as to demonstrate that the drumming has not in fact ended but only
paused. I first learned about this style
of drumming when I was travelling on a bus from Pennsylvania to Penn Station
(bus terminal) NYC and sat next to a woman – about my age (at the time 24) –
who claimed she had read Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit in 24hrs when she was a student at Barnard. Despite the fact that during the last hour
of the bus ride she became increasingly ill from heroin withdrawal, I believed
every word she said.] In the dialectic
logic that I am describing, which is neither Hegel’s, Marx’s nor Adorno’s but
closer to that of Heraclitus’, the “‘ending’ is a ‘beginning,’ an artistic
performance that bears the stamp of natality…”(BL 320)
At this
point on 12/22/04 there is an important transition toward a description of
learning as making “the work of art”. (BL
320) [here is where the re-turn happens]
The dialectic is described as “aesthetic” and this is meant to capture
the ontology of the art work, the artistic performance. What distinguishes the dialectic of learning
is its third moment, which has to be
thought via what I am calling the huacaslogical
(cartographical phenomenology, originary place
thinking): “the third moment of the
aesthetic dialectic” is an “‘ending/beginning’” that is located in the ex-cess
of the work, and this ‘excess’ is called the
improvisational. “The
‘ending/beginning’ of the work – its excess – is conveyed in the
de-construction of the work, its ‘splitting’ or ‘shattering’ under the weight
of the beyond that co-arrives with
the appearance of the work as a public performance, an embodied
en-actment. The improvisational appears
with this ex-cess that always exceeds the performance.” (BL 320)
‘Splitting’
or ‘shattering’ discloses the third moment as diff’rence. But with this
disclosure and the appearance of excess, diff’rence
is the fundamental ontological difference between Being and learning. In this case excess spills over from the
artwork and into the art work, the hand suspended in the air. Being’s Becoming is always already exceeding
the work and thus granting the offer of learning to happen. “The ‘work’ is thus
‘not yet’ a unified whole. As art the work always exceeds the
apparent ‘finality’ of its ‘mortal’ limits.
The artistic work points toward the eternal. In the ‘Laocoon,’ Blake sings,
The Eternal
Body of Man
is The
Imagination, that is
God himself,
The Divine Body
It manifests
itself in his
Works of Art
(In Eternity
All is Vision).” (BL 320)
Today, I
would complement Blake by writing:
In Eternity
All is Sound [Music]
3.0 (Sunday, Portland, ME). Wow, there's a lot going on in the 2.0 commentary . First Kat returning from Bocconi this day! Big day! She was the first of two students to study in a newly created program between Cornell and Bocconi.
ReplyDeleteSecond, digesting sentences from the OPM! That is one of the most significant structural resonances. Specifically, chapter 2 of "LEARN" - Writing, is organized around the collection of "whatever essentials" break through the noise of schooling and call out to the student during the solitude of study, when they are alone with the book/text. These essentials are sentences, and are collected as a précis of the book. Here is a description from "LEARN," a fragment that also folds with the 2.0 and OPM's writing/thinking on the dialectic: "Writing like Reading is also dialectical and dialogic. What’s more, Reading and Writing are related dialectically. They are opposites and happen in distinct moments of Study, which happens in Solitude, when the student is alone with the text they are receiving and responding to. Writing is a response to the text and happens after Reading. But this writing is not the composition of an interpretation of the text, but a collection of fragments that are highlighted from the text and what is produced is a précis. This is writing as a minimalist glossing of the text. When students are invited to study a text, they are asked to return to the seminar where the learning community is gathered with a small set of fragments (quotations) from the text. The transition from reading as listening and the reception of whatever essentials call out to the student, to the collection of those essentials in a précis prepares the way for the open-ended and improvisational interpretation that happens when students gather for discussion. The précis emerges dialectically in the sense that the digested text is a negation of the “total” work that was produced by the author. Negation is the first moment of the dialectic and happens with the appearance of opposition or contradiction. As Jean-Paul Sartre describes it in Being and Nothingness, negation is the moment within the dialectic when we are turned around toward Being in the form of Nothingness, which we experience as the negation or suspension of what we have taken for granted. This negation of the work is also a negation of the author as the sole authority of what the text is saying. By selecting a small set of fragments, the students are deconstructing the text and thereby allowing it to say something new, something that perhaps even the author did not or could not anticipate."
3.0b - There is also a significant echo in "LEARN" with the following from the OPM this day: "At this point on 12/22/04 there is an important transition toward a description of learning as making “the work of art”. (BL 320)." In "LEARN" there is continuity with this description of learning as a performance, but only in the third moment of discussion. In the first two moments of reading and writing, the book/text is the object of study, the work of art, and in those moments study is an aesthetic experience, the reception of whatever essentials are calling out to the student. In B&L the two moments of the solitude of study and the third moment of discussion are not disaggregated. In "LEARN" that disaggregation is offered in the following way: " But phenomenological reading is not yet thinking, because the relation between the book and the student is not a dialogue or the kind of improvisation discussion that will happen when the student gathers with others in the learning community. Rather than a dialogue, the encounter with the text and the reception of its “voice” is a monological situation, with the student remaining silent and attuned to arrival of meaning that is overflowing from the text as if for the first time." However, in B&L I do distinguish different "moments" of learning. Here from above: "The dialectic is described as 'aesthetic' and this is meant to capture the ontology of the art work, the artistic performance. What distinguishes the dialectic of learning is its third moment, which has to be thought via what I am calling the huacaslogical (cartographical phenomenology, originary place thinking): “the third moment of the aesthetic dialectic” is an “‘ending/beginning’” that is located in the ex-cess of the work, and this ‘excess’ is called the improvisational: “The ‘ending/beginning’ of the work – its excess – is conveyed in the de-construction of the work, its ‘splitting’ or ‘shattering’ under the weight of the beyond that co-arrives with the appearance of the work as a public performance, an embodied en-actment. The improvisational appears with this ex-cess that always exceeds the performance.” (BL 320). Here is the echo of that fragment from "LEARN," which is heard in chap 3 - Discussion: " Much of that thinking/writing resonates in "LEARN." For example: " And like the person who first wrote it, as well as those first walking/talking/singing/dancing books, the fate of autonomy protects and conserves the excess of meaning and thereby prevents there ever being a final or definitive reading. Singularity is the ontological status of the book’s incessant fecundity, its interminable standing apart and beyond the beginning and end of the writing that constitutes its existence." AND: "The Flaubert effect points to the excessive quality of written word, the text, which is felt most acutely by the author when they encounter their work as existing beyond them. While the author is dealt an existential mortal blow when their writing appears in print, the new, independent and ostensibly immortal life of the book only grows in strength each time it is picked up and read. In this sense the book has an uncanny freedom beyond the author."
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