Thinking/writing with 12/29/84, starting with “Big Railroad
Blues,” of course, because I’m writing this early morning on the NJT to Penn
Station.
I want to pick up this
morning where I left off last night at the Drew University library, my usual
stomping grounds on Wednesdays when the semester is underway. Yesterday may have been my last Wednesday at
Drew, if indeed I enroll in the ancient Greek class, as I have promised my
Classics colleagues I will. Regardless
of what happens next week, it’s last night that I’m interested in, specifically
what I discovered when I ventured into the Cornell Room and found stacks upon
stacks of volumes of philosophy. There
were no fewer than 6 cases devoted to Kierkegaard. I wandered past the Pascal, the Sartre, and
slowed when I was confronted by the largesse of Kierkegaard material. Kierkegaard’s influence on this project is
more subtle than any other writer I take up.
One would rightly recognize Heidegger as having the most significant and
recurring influence, followed by Nietzsche, Arendt, and, of course, Heraclitus
and the figure of Socrates. Paul, who is
never taken up in Being and Learning,
has been a prominent persona in the pages of this commemorative blog. But Kierkegaard, like Socrates, is an
exemplar, and like Socrates he demonstrates a way of proceeding, offering an
example of how one might take up thinking and do philosophy. And this, in the end, is what the project of
originary thinking is attempting: experiments in how we do philosophy. Call it
poetic writing, call it experimental thinking, call it whatever, the project
rests on the premise that the form of philosophy remains as unsettled a matter
as the content, and, anyway, how are we distinguish form and content without
already moving within a form. Aphorism,
dialogue, theses, sentences, essays, lectures (transcribed but not overly
edited), and now blogs, tweets, etc., all co-exist together. And it is Kierkegaard who has for at least
the past 9 years more, indeed, almost immediately after the completion of the original project ten years ago, who is
constantly reminding me that to push the envelope with my writing.
And this reminder came
again, powerfully, last night when I found myself alone in the Cornell Room and picked up a volume
on Kierkegaard by Joseph Westfall, which is focused on the question of
authorship in Kierkegaard, or what I describe as the authority of the author in
Kierkegaard. Westfall pivots on Roland
Barthes famous thesis regarding reading and the death of the author, and
writes, and turns to Kierkegaard’s dramatic criticism in order to identify the
the ‘author’ as performer:
“the
performer described in the Kierkegaardian dramatic criticism, unlike the author
described in the Kierkegaardian literary criticism, is concealed entirely in
his or her performance. This concealment
is total when the performance is successful, and it results in the temporary
overcoming of the factual actuality of the performer by the poetical actuality
of the character being performed.
Performance, then, unlike authorship, is a brand of masking – but a
masking that somehow does not reveal,
but only implies, the performer masked.
Like a Barthesian author, the performer is entirely absent from the
performance – dead – and thus, as with the author according to Barthes, the
identity of the performer plays no role for the spectator in interpretation. The performer is radically distinct from the
author, both as authorship is theorized in the Kierkegaardian literary
criticism and as it is practiced by the Kierkegaardian authors. The Kierkegaardian authors do not perform as
authors, in the Kierkegaardian sense of performance.” The Kierkegaardian author: authorship and performance in Kierkegaard's
literary and dramatic criticism / Joseph Westfall. (DeGruyter: 2007)
Reading Kierkegaard’s
writing as performance, and, what’s
more, as a performance that conceals the identity of the author is revelatory;
reminding me that it is not just Foucault but also Kierkegaard who is guiding
me in the Masked Philosophers Ball I have organized. (cf. 12/19/14, and also the PES2015 blog for context http://pes2015memphis.blogspot.com/) Can my colleagues and I think this
distinction between ‘author’ and ‘performer’?
I suppose that depends on whether or not I am able to communicate and
deliver the message to those who gather in Memphis. But the experiment itself pushes back
against the didactic, and any explanation
would seem to transgress the very rules of the experiment. There is of course the precedent of the
Chorus in Greek tragedy. I suppose
I’ll take the wait and see approach, which is to say, wait until someone asks
(with the spirit of generosity or not) about the Masked Philosophers Ball. And then I’ll push them to think about the
Studio Sessions, where the experiments in new forms will be demonstrated, and
where we will retrieve that moment before mythos
and logos were divorced, and so too
the performative dimension of philosophy, the source of the educational force
of philosophy, and so too the roots of what we call ‘philosophy of
education.’ The retrieval of
performative is a re-collection in every sense that it has been described in
the pages of this blog and originally in Being
and Learning, and it is meant to break open the degenerative trajectory of
PES, which has been propelled by the toxic yet powerful will to status, the
drive for academic recognition. If
‘academia’ is a teleologically driven enterprise, then philosophy can (re)turn
it back to thinking by stealing a moment – five days, the annual conference
gathering. But I have been publicly candid about my
intent to increase the ‘P’ in PES -- [I almost wrote ‘inflate the P in PES…but
that just didn’t sound right, although, of course, it is…]. There was never any
secrecy, deceit or masquerade with respect to my agenda, and this because I
could never have hidden an agenda that is propelled by the force of a project
that has been moving my work in philosophy since, well, it got underway 44
years ago with the epiphanic revelation of eternity that sent my four year old
soul into a Kiergaardian tailspin of dread.
From that moment I have been moved to understand the source of that
revelation, to trace back through the
examples offered by others, mostly but not exclusively ancient figures. And this is a story I’ve told before,
specifically in 2013 at PES when we
convened a session to discuss the recently published Being and Learning (here’s the video of that session http://youtu.be/q7UGCeUUSvM). So no masquerade, no veil, no hidden
agenda. It’s all been out there for some
time, and it should not come as a
surprise that a kairological moment is about to unfold at PES Memphis. The stage has been set, the performers have
been identified, let’s get on with the show!
“This
concealment is total when the performance is successful, and it results in the
temporary overcoming of the factual actuality of the performer by the poetical
actuality of the character being performed.
Performance, then, unlike authorship, is a brand of masking…”
On the death of the
author and, now, the resurrection of the performer, that too was announced, dare
I say prophetically, in that same PES 2013, when I responded to Rocha’s paper
with my “Writing, Teaching: Making an Offering”:
A Beginning: Making more poetry,
less prose
To
begin with, form. The form of my
response to Sam Rocha’s “Incarnate Reading: A Cerebralist, Cows, Cannibals and
Back Again.” The writing is in-formed by the project of originary
thinking, which finds its credo in an elegant axiom offered by Jean-Francois
Lyotard: “Poiein, c’est faire,” poiein means to make. More poetry, less prose. Affirmation of complexity, difference,
plurality. We celebrate, we feast, we
write, we read. Note: this beginning, already a fragment. Such is the form of my response to Rocha’s
paper.
***
Second
side dish: inference on the force, movement, of the book.
Rocha cites Foucault, who, despite his post-structuralist street cred,
claims himself an author. The author is
dead, declares Roland-Barthes. Long live
the author, declares Foucault. “I write a book only because I still don’t know
what to think about this thing I want to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I
think.” Here we see what Foucault
elsewhere calls the ‘rebound effect’ (effect
retour), or the way the truth transforms us as we prepare for an encounter with
it. Preparation, here, is writing. Preparation is also the state of learning as
a motion. But there is another
dimension to the rebound effect, which we can call the Flaubert corollary. Here the writer encounters his work
transformed by its publication, by the literalness of printing, the type-set. Martine Reid tells us: “Curiously, when
faced with the book as a object, the author no longer recognizes his own work.
‘The sight of my work [Madame Bovary]
in print deadened my mind completely,’ noted Flaubert. ‘It seemed so flat. Everything looks so black. I mean
that textually. That was a great
disappointment -- And it would take a quite dazzling success to
drown out the voice of my conscience crying out to me: ‘It’s a failure!’” The
Flaubert corollary suggests the force of writing accelerates when the writing
is transformed into a publication. And
the encounter with this greater force is overwhelming to the author who is now
shifted into the role of reader, his thoughts coming back to him in the form of
an object. Here we encounter the force
of emancipated thinking, or thinking freed from the confines of the thinker.
Publication, publicity: Flaubert’s mind is deadened by the encounter of his
book as not his book, but as an
object of public consumption.
No surprise, the
meditation on 1/22/05 begins with a description of authority. Not the authority of the author per se but the authority of the teacher.
But today in the wake of the preceding it’s obvious that the figure of
the teacher that appears in Being and
Learning, the one disclosed by that apocryphal story of Heraclitus warming
his hands by the fire [nb: the
subject of Being and Learning
chapter ], is indeed that ‘author’ qua
performer, the one who appears with poetical
actuality. This is the context for the first line of the
meditation on 1/22/05: “The teacher’s authorizing of the artwork of learning,
her commission of the new with the silence of close listening, the evocative
invocation…[offered] with the empowering ‘no’ (the with-holding of judgment)…a
(re)presentation of Being’s concealment, the with-holding that authorizes the
appearance of presencing, the appearance of becoming.”(BL 355) Of course! Now the matter presents itself through the
revelatory concealment. That originary
force – the force that showed me eternity [how awful for a four year old
waiting patiently by himself in the car as his mother dashes into the deli to
pick up some bologna for his lunch!] --
remains concealed. This is performance
of aletheia: absencing/presencing; becoming
the poetic actuality of Being, which we mimetically represent with our thinking
(mediative, dialogic). Yet…echoing in my
ears, the words of the physicists I heard yesterday on Brian Lehrer’s radio
show on WNYC: “time is real.” Ok. Sure.
This is why ‘actuality’ – or actualization, or realization, etc. – is
together with ‘poetic’ or ‘poetical’.
The two, together, form category.ß
{--nb: now on campus, in the
studio, recording the first March DZ!
March has arrived, or so it seems!
And, per tradition, the first March show on the DZ is the Cleveland
Music Hall show from March 3, 1981 https://archive.org/details/gd1981-03-03.sbd.digitalrbb.miller.112777.flac16.
“Feel Like a Stranger”!--}
Poetical Actuality.
“Time is real.”
The actuality Being is
disclosed via becoming poetically for us, through us.
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
n
[Thanks
Westfall! I’m truly grateful for lending me the Kierkegaardian category] –
The authority of the
teacher – her power – emerges through authorization; she is ‘matron’ “of the
artwork of learning…Learning is thus the work of art commissioned by the
teaching that communicates the ‘feeling’ or ‘mood’ of the modality associated
[with] the attunement to Being.”(BL
355) Let’s stop and think this ‘authority’ as mediation in the way that it
happens when the soundboard operator is monitoring the sound coming from the
stage, and perhaps also on the stage too.
The soundboard operator isn’t ‘commissioning’ the music, but mediating
its occurrence, enabling its appearance.
This is a better analogy for teaching, especially if the teacher is in
some way also part of the music-making, but not really, nor entirely. Recall, the teacher lets learning be learned,
and is a learner only in the sense that he has to learn how to let the learners
learn. Soundboard operator. Concealed performer, and perhaps the only one
who is totally concealed. [I am sensing
a push back from at least one of my colleagues on this analogy. Good, good, let’s take it up!] And here’s a place to begin, with the later
part of 1/22/05: “The teacher does not, then, remain ‘outside’ the production
of artwork, but vitally engrossed, in the way the performance space (theater,
gallery, studio) remains an integral component of the performance, and in the
way the director, conductor and producer (patron) play an essential role, and
in the way the audience, the receiving public, is necessarily implied in
affirming the work as art.”(BL 356)
It’s a broad, too broad,
analogy, but the gesture is the right one.
[I’m reminded at this moment of something I saw yesterday when watching
a clip of Ben & Jerry talking about their involvement in Phish’s
environmental organization Waterwheel.
All sales from Ben & Jerry’s Phishfood
goes to Waterwheel. Anyway, they were
once asked to go on stage to sing, briefly, with the band, and it was a total
car wreck. Those guys are tone deaf! Too much sugar and cream, perhaps? Anyway, they laughed about it and claimed to
have fulfilled the Phish performance credo to go out Strong and Wrong if need
be. So the too broad analogy is a case
of that, I suppose]
The performance space is
entirely its own place, and of the
many questions I plan to return to after I complete this commemorate project is
the one that takes up the Open as the place of learning. Today the focus is on the teacher as
concealed performer, as the one remains ‘inside’ the event of learning yet at
the same time hidden insofar as her action is ‘outside’ the action of the
students: her ‘role’ demands that she
question and listen, listen and question; that she mediates, conducts, lets-be
the music-making of the students. Their learning
is where the unconcealment of Being
is occurring. The disclosure of Being via becoming:
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
Being is disclosed
(appears from concealment) via becoming.
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being via becoming.
Teaching is the concealed letting-be of learning.
“The teacher’s
renouncement clears the space for the un-veiling of the artwork, the
performance of learning as a (re)presentation of Being’s becoming, but also
beckons the creation, the improvisational saying, with the same renunciation
that commissions the work by delegating the authority of (re)presentation. With
this delegation she ‘dis-charges’ or releases the being of becoming.”(BL 355)
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