Thinking/writing in the stream of
First Dead Zone of 2015, streaming live now as I write this on WRHU. DZ opens with music from those early January
shows at the Garden in 1979. I just
returned from dropping Kat at Cornell, where I visited Barton Hall to pay
homage to that venerable site.
After helping Kat move into her apartment in College Town, I went to Troy and Sofia’s, where I spent the night. We drank coffee and talked until midnight, and then this morning we picked it up where we left off. Troy’s current project has him working through the archives of William and Mary, with a particular attention to its founding. This work has lead him to take up, among others, Locke and Plato. I shared with him my ongoing debate with Plato that has taken up much of my focus for the past week or more in these pages.
That debate with Plato concerning
the ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ modulation of art continues on 1/11/05, and I
continue to describe my own project indirectly through the negation of Plato’s
Pythagoreanism. His is not simply a
critique of a music that lacks the proper harmony to organize the soul. It is a far reaching dismissal of the
integrity of representational art, which is to say, a dismissal of the
integrity of art work. It is a technē
and thus is actvitity that is mean to serve a higher
authority. Art work can not stand on
its own. It finds its purpose in
training the soul and preparing it for what today is called ‘higher order’
analysis. “For Plato, artwork remains a reproduction of
representation, twice removed from ‘truth.’
‘The art of representation, then, is a long way from reality.’(Rep., 598b)”(BL 342)
Plato’s critique resembles the
charge of idolatry, or the misunderstanding of iconography. And I have stake in the debate concerning the
representation of prophets, saints, etc.
Rather, my description of learning as re-presentational art work is
based on a play on the fundamental ontological claim regarding Being. And here
are the most recent iterations of that claim:
- 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. (12/22/15)
Being’s Becoming appears with the present. (12/24/15)
[Repeat] Being’s Becoming appears with the present. The present discloses this excess, which is
the offering made to learning, for learning, in learning. (12/24/15)
A place of
learning has ‘boundless’ energy; the art work of learning takes up the excess;
the dynamic movement is propelled by the reception of Being’s Becoming. ‘Boundless’ must be thought as force, the
force of learning. Power. (12/27
The force of
Being’s Becoming received as an
offering puts into motion art making, specifically, the performance of
music-making philosophy. 12/27
“The
response of the learner, her ‘answer’ to the call of Being is the creative
act.” (BL 327) Would that I could
leave it at that! But this description demands to be paired with any and all
thinking of ceaseless nativity, the
principal description of Being’s ontological disclosure (presencing, Becoming). 12/28
“For Heraclitus the coupling of
the same with difference discloses the dynamism of Being aka the Becoming of being. This does not reduce Being to Becoming
or render Becoming a quality of
Being. The challenge
is to thinking Being and Becoming
together. (7/28/14)
That everything recurs is the closest
approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of
meditation.” Schürmann adds: “In the discovery of the eternal
recurrence, described here as the convergence between becoming and being,
between flux and form, “meditation” – not theoria but thinking –
culminates.” (pp. 48-49 RS: 1987) (7/28/14)
“Attunement
as elevation to the high point of meditation, the nexus where Being and Becoming converge: self is invaded;
self is deconstructed; self is dispersed; “carried away by the encounter with
Being’s presencing…called upon to create, spontaneously, and bear the novel…”(BL 329) (12/29/14)
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).
Through
thinking we enter the flow of Becoming,
and when we enter that flow we don’t know where we will be taken. (1/4/15)
The one who
enters into that place, i.e., the learner, is subjected to the force of
actualization; the power of the ceaseless Becoming of Being that one can say
has almost little or no regard for human welfare. (1/4/15)
Again, I
emphasized in yesterday’s commentary,
thinking begins with questioning, with originary questioning; originary
because it takes us to the originary source, Being, and also because it
initiates and propels us into the proper relation of our becoming, which is now
understood as the generic category for learning. (1/4/15)
I
try to write with an inclusive ‘we’ by referring to ‘beginnings’ rather than
‘beginning’; but, nevertheless, I use
the ‘we’ to insist, with Irigaray who writes of the ‘becoming of humanity,
that thinking happens in a place, the Open, where all are already called. All
are already called. “This story, in
which we all partake in”.--] >
‘In
which’ and ‘partake in’.
Can this ‘turning’ be separated from
the ‘on’?....
The ‘in’ and the ‘on’
disclose Being, which is always said, heard and though with becoming. Becoming
is the ‘and’ of Being ‘and’ learning, the force that gathers learning with
Being, the excess.
Presencing understood (thought)
as orignary, as pure coming-about, demands a thinking of becoming, that is, of
actualization, realization.(1/7/15)
To remember that there are multiple beginnings is to
remember that there is a history of philosophy, a history of experiments that
continues because it remains what it has always been: a call into becoming. On 1/7/04 the response to this call,
learning, is described as “the poetic (re)presentation of Being through the concrete expressionism of
improvisational artwork.”(1/7/15)
Learning is thus a mimetic
re-presentation of Being’s becoming,
a technē that meditates presencing. And this happens by way of attunement, so
that what is happening with learning is a disclosure or showing of
attunement. This is why it is described
as a meditation, which can also be thought in the jurisprudential sense of
making an intervention in order to resolve a contradiction. Here the contradiction would be the double
inability to hear and respond to the call, and the overcoming of what Heidegger
describes as the existential crisis of ‘forgetfulness.’ Mediation is recovery of a memory, when we
are “(re)collected with the originary dispensation, the dispersal of becoming,
the offering of Being as the gift of life itself.”(BL 342)
On
1/11/05 the work of art is described as the technē
that forges the learning community. On 1/11/05 the distinction between ‘friend’
and ‘fellow,’ one that was disclosed in the writing on koinōnia that
happened in October and November, such as the following on 10/9/14:
Education is the process of learning who we are; and this learning is a making, a technē and a poiesis. Ours is practical philosophy of learning to become who we are, and, for me, this is what this community, this fellowship, this communidad, this koinonia signifies: the coming together of a ourselves, the gathering of a community unlike any other in academia.
In
turn, on 1/11/05 the art work of the learning community is the working of
forging friendship. Further work is
required to understand how ‘friendship’ re-presents becoming? This further work
would happen, in part, with a return to Irigaray’s writing on becoming. Whether or not we use ‘friendship’ or
‘fellowship’ (a terms I am inclined to use today), it is certain that the work
of forging the learning community happens by way of moving into the Open where technē is
happening. To move into the Open is to
move into becoming, and to move into becoming “the learning ‘imitates’ Being’s
dispersal, its giving of its self to the other.”(BL 343) The work of
learning, existentially speaking, is the work of self-overcoming; which is a
counter-cultural kind of work insofar as what is normative today is work on the
self, something, ironically, that was ushered in my the later Foucault and his
hermeneutics of the self, and care of the self (cura sui).
Self-overcoming happens by way of
gelassenheit, “and in this ‘willing
of non-willing’ [the learning community] takes care of the Open…”(BL 343)
Care for self is re-placed by care for the place of learning; an intentional
attention to what Arendt calls repair and renewal of the world, with the added
understanding that this communal work is veneration. Veneration is derived from the Latin veneration, which emerges from the Greek
δουλεία, which is denotes the highest form of servitude. Veneration of the
world proceeds from the perception of the world as sacred. This is the thinking the proceeds from the huacaslogical. But the recollection of δουλεία here also
recalls the commentaries from early November that were working out the
friendship/fellowship distinction mentioned above:
Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this
kind of talking about something that friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it
becomes ever more common to them.”(cited 11/8/04 BL 266) (11/8/14)
That citation of Arendt coupled with Heraclitus brings
us to the learning community as the totalizing experience of friendship, where
we become, as Paul puts it, slaves to one another. The uncompromising bonds of friendship is a
bondage of love. What is between is what
is common, and dialogue makes it ever more common. And what is common is learning because the
art work that is made is a performance, which may or may not be recorded
(documented for posterity) because it is first and foremost “an event, a cultural happening. Learning is the performance that happens in the dialogic event.”(11/8/04
BL 267) (11/8/14)
Totalization, totality and totalizing are all forms of koinos (the common) in the sense of koinonia (community qua
fellowship). Dialogic learning as a
“performance is a totality of voices,
a ‘chorus.’ This totality…is the
re-collection of the originary dispensation [the rhythm of the heart] the
re-membering of the many into a one…”(11/8/04 BL 267) Friendship is
total, a complete releasement of the self into the other by way of agape (self-less love). “…then do we hear the hidden harmony that
appears with freedom…”(11/8/04 BL
267) (11/8/14)
Two weeks ago I returned to Agamben’s book on Paul The Time That Remains as a way of
enlarging the context of study for my sections of HUHC when we read the “Letter
to the Galatians.” Among the lines of
analysis that caught my attention was Agamben’s riff on κλῆσις klésis
(‘calling’), largely because ‘calling’ (vocare)
was one of the central leitmotifs of Being
and Learning. Indeed, for me the
relationship between Being and learning is one that always initiated by a
‘calling’, whether this is happening at the primary/ontological level, or at
the secondary political/existential level (intersubjectively). The essential sway, that fundamental rhythm
that rocks us and that sets the groove for the
movement of our freedom, liberation and emancipation, is received first
and foremost as a calling, and offering to move. And the beckoning of the sage is a calling,
an invocation, an evocative invocation.
Also the song of the singer, the music-making philosophy of the learner
who is saying something. His song is an
offering made to the learning community that calls them to compassionate
listening. The same Paul that has been
very much at the center of things in this blog that past two weeks uses κλῆσις klésis (‘calling’)
in several of his letters, e.g., “irrevocable are the gifts an the calling of God,” Romans 11:29; “consider the calling of you, brothers, that not many
wise according to flesh [were], not many powerful, not many of noble birth,” Corinthians 1:26; “Each in the calling in which he has been called, in
this let him abide.” Corinthians
7:20; “being enlightened the eyes of the heart of you, in order to know you,
what is the hope of the calling,” Ephesians 1:18; “exhort therefore you, I
the prisoner* in [the] Lord, worthily to
walk, of the calling to which you
were called,” Ephesians 1:4; “[There is] one body and one Spirit, just as also
you were called into one hope, of the
calling of you,” Ephesians 4:4.
*δέσμιος
désmios (prisoner, captive, detainee)
is distinct from δοῦλος
doûlos (slave), the two work in
tandem to deliver the same message: those who are called into the one body and
spirit and hope, that it, those who do works of faith, are, like Paul, total
subjects, or totally subjected.
(11/10/14)
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