Thinking/writing in the stream of
[These two early shows
from this date in history, 1/23/68 from Seattle, and 1/23/70 from Honolulu,
have both been featured on the Dead Zone.
In fact, parts of the Seattle show are featured in this upcoming
Sunday’s DZ. These are two of my
favorite early shows. The performances
are inspired, and the recordings are crisp.
I’ll begin with 1/23/70 and then make my way back to the ’68 show,
reminding myself at the end that I have to play “Born Cross Eyed” on my
birthday, which is around the corner!]
Here is the fragment
that I suspect might be the final reduction of B&L
2.0:
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
I was closing up all the
left open files from yesterday and one not yet named and saved file had the
above as the only bit of writing. I
might challenge myself to make a seminar out of this one fragment, which
doesn’t strike me as an aphorism, but more of a thesis, a prompt to get
thinking underway. There are plans,
very preliminary at this point, to make a post-Memphis PES debrief tour, which
would include a seminar on B&L 2.0. A week’s visit to, say, the University of
British Columbia (Vancouver), might include an afternoon seminar on B&L 2.0, and another on PES
Memphis. The two together would allow me
talk about the larger project of originary thinking, about working on the
aphorism “More Poetry, Less Prose” [that is definitely
an aphorism!] and the shift toward what I have been calling the ‘formalist’
problem, or the question concerning the form of philosophy of education, or how we make philosophy of education.
This is the question I have been wrestling with in the pages of this
blog, especially since September, via the question of learning as technē and praxis. This is how I
arrived to the reduction
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
For sure: a set of
seminars on Originary Thinking, with the aim of examining the thesis learning is the poetical actuality of Being;
beginning with a presentation of two distinct demonstrations (tests,
experiments) of the thesis: B&L 2.0,
PES Memphis.
So much for the work
post B&L 2.0, PES Memphis. Now, before turning to the writing from
1/23/05, or perhaps while turning to the writing from 1/23/05, a return to the
Cornell Room at the Drew Library, and to a line I’m sure I read when I was into
drawn into Westfall’s book on Kierkegaard.
And given Barthes’ death of the author thesis, which seems to place the
entire force of the text in the hands of an eisegetical reader, the accuracy of
memory is almost besides the point.
Indeed, let’s take Barthes all the way to what seems to be the following
absurd conclusion: the non-existence of the text. That is, the ‘text’ appears with the reader, arising with the
eisegetical reading, and this appearance of the text continues in our memory,
in our (re)collection of our reading. In
essence, the text is what we make
when we are reading. There are any
number of problems with this conclusion, the least of which is the problem for
the so-called phenomenologist. The
answer to Heidegger’s question, Why is
there something rather than nothing? couldn’t possibly be, Because we make things. Or could it?
Here, again, we need to return to Heidegger’s the origin of the work of art;
and we need to think the disclosure of the work of art in the Open via technē.
What is important is that we don’t get distracted by the description v.
interpretation debate, because the it is the origin of the work of art that is under examination, and not
‘understanding’ of the work of art. Origin demands that we think the existence
of the work of art, and this demand is almost pre phenomenological and
hermeneutical, which is to say, it is the demand of originary thinking.
What does all that have
to do with my recollection of reading Westfall in the Cornell Room in Drew University? It offers context for the line I recall
reading, a line that I recall saying: “For Derrida we are placed under
writing.” This was the line that was
dancing around in my memory when I woke up this morning back home in Portland,
after a 20 hour day that included two hours of writing, the recording of a Dead
Zone for March, and a three and half hour grad seminar organized around the
assertion ‘Making demands breaking.’ [if
I’m doing the memoiresque thing I suppose I should also note a lax oriented
cardio work-out, the reading of Martin Marty’s book on Luther, as well as a
dinner of gnocchi and pancetta, are among other highlights from
yesterday.]
We are placed under
writing.
We are placed under writing.
We are placed under writing.
However you write it,
the fragment insists that the death of the writer doesn’t happen by way of the
reader; there is no murder happening here, but a capture, a seizure. The presumed authority of the author does
not rest in the presumed author. The
author is placed under writing, which
is to say: the ‘subject’ (self) is re-placed by the ‘author’. This is another way of describing
self-overcoming, the turning of the artist into the artwork: the self is placed
under writing; the self becomes the
subject of writing; the self is subjected to the force of writing. Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being.
The meditation on
1/23/05 begins with a citation of the aforementioned Heidegger lecture “The
Origin of the Work of Art” [nb: that lecture was originally given by
Heidegger on 11/13/35, and then was given a second time in January 1936 in
Zürich at the invitation of the student body of the university. Origin is Ursprung,
which is closely related to Urgrund
(cf. 7/26/04). The lecture begins:
“Origin here means that from and by which something is what it is and as it
is.”] 1/23/05 begins: “If Being, ‘by way
of its own nature, lets the place of
openness (the lighting-clearing of the There) happen, and introduces it as a
place of the sort in which each being emerges or arises on its own way,’ then
teaching, which unfolds from the attunement to this process, is the calling,
the beckoning, that calls forth into this place, [into] this abode of the Open
where learning happens. In this way,
learning, as artwork…results in the making, production, creation ‘in which each
being emerges or arises in its own way.’
The emergence and arising ‘in its own way’ identifies learning as be-ing
in/with the ‘truth’ of Being as becoming, as appearance and presencing.”(BL 356)
Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
The origin (Ursprung) of learning is the place of
openness (the Open) arising from the original ground (Urgrund); learning originates in the Open through the original that
originates: learning is the poetical actuality of Being. The ‘way of’ Being, as described by
Heidegger, happens a force of enabling disclosure: letting the place of
openness happen so that each being emerges or arises in on its own way. I want to describe teaching as the mimetic
(re)presentation of this letting be of the place of openness, and learning as
the emergence and arising of each student in his/her own way. But this presumes the teacher’s ongoing
‘preparation’ is the work of thinking the origin (Ursprung) of learning, which is another way of saying the ongoing
movement in the place of learning. As
Heidegger describes it, the teacher remains always ahead of the students in the sense of always running ahead to the
past, to the origin, to the place where “the originary dispensation” is occurring.
On 1/23/05 the return to
the originary is likened to the setting of a groove, and this recalls the
commentary from 12/24/14 and 1/3/05:
hence the
flow is rhythmic, and so when I describe music-making philosophy these
descriptions, this phenomenological work, this writing, is properly a rhythmic
thinking, or writing as drumming, typing as a form of percussion! Perhaps I should call the form of my work: ῥυθμός,
rhythmos [rhythm: origin mid 16th
cent. – also originally in the sense of ‘rhyme’):
from French rhythme, or via Lain from
Greek rhythmos (related to rhein ‘to flow’).
n
[nb: Flow thinking, rhythmic thinking;
writing via drumming (typing); rhythmic typing?] –
Writing via
drumming, think via rhythms, phenomenology via percussion, the keyboard as keyboard; Nietzschean hammers!
The teacher as drummer,
as the one who sets the groove, but also as the cultivator, or the one who, to
use Arendtian language, is the conservative educator, conservative in the sense
of conservation and preservation. The
teacher makes the groove in the Urgrund, and in this way lets be the
emergence of the origin of the work of art, learning as the poetical actuality
(becoming) of Being. “Such is the
letting go happening with the teacher’s emptying, with the renouncing that
(re)pulses, re-leases, and liberates the creative force of becoming. But as ‘replusion’ this renouncing is both a
with-holding, a holding-back that repels, drives or ‘beats’ back. The beating
back happens as the repelling of the juridical voice, and the beating or
sounding of the rhythm, the down beating of the groove that en-opens the ground
from whence the new makes its appearance.
These grooves are the furrows into which the seeds of learning are
planted with evocative questioning that seizes the learner into the abode of
learning. To be seized into this abode
of learning is to be thrown into the domain, the Open, into the performance
space of freedom. This space is the
realm of the clearing, where the old is ‘cleared away’ with the creative act of
improvisation that liberates the arrival of the news. This is the even of learning as the artwork
that unveils ‘the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and never
come to be again…Creation is such a bringing forth. As such a bringing, it is rather a receiving
and an incorporating of a relation to unconcealedness.’”(BL 357, Heidegger citation from “The Origin of the Work of Art”)
Teaching mediates the
aforementioned ‘seizure’ – the placing
under, the placing under. Here the two senses emphasized are described:
placing as the setting in place by
way of rhythmic groove; under as the
(re)turn to the originary (Urgrund). The artwork of learning, as performative, is
also ‘placed under’ the mask of poetical actuality; learning as self-overcoming
(seizure, throwness into the performance space, the studio, studium, the gathering place of fellows,
fellowship, colleagues, colegas, the
college). Breaking, beating conveys the
force of teaching as “the repulsion that re-collects the learner with the
originary dispensation…of existing (de)constuccion, of/from construction,
making, creation.”(BL 357) And thus teaching (within the very limited
context where the education via first philosophy is happening) is always a
re-collection [‘running’ as ‘grooving’ ahead to the past] of the origin as the way of Being; a re-collection (gathering
again) with becoming. Such is teaching
as the art of turning that was announced in the very first line of Being and Learning. It is, ultimately, the art of grooving, of
making the groove. The ‘teacher’s
silence’ identified on 1/25/05 is thus
something akin to the melodic ‘silence’ of the drummer. In music-making philosophy the teacher is
that melodically ‘silent’ drummer that is setting the groove, and “(re)collects
the iruption of the originary dispensation that en-opens the pathways along the
boundless boundary upon which learning takes place in its movement through the
enchanted domain, the Open.”(BL 357)
“This ground
on which the seeds of love are sown,
All
grace for instruments are known.”
New Potato Caboose,
1/23/68, Eagles Auditorium, Seattle, WA
No comments:
Post a Comment