Thinking/writing
in the stream of
[--this is a show from Soulive
from this first night of Bowlive 5, from the Brooklyn Bowl, 3/13/14 which is
exactly one year before the opening day of PES Memphis 2015. Kelly and I were streaming this last night
when we were working on cross-checking the final list for PES Memphis. And it turns out that March 13th
is also the anniversary of Soulive’s first ever day in the recording studio. “So Live”!!!--]
Without commentary I want to start
this day’s session of commemorative commentary writing by sharing two
quotations from Bian Eno that Rocha sent to me yesterday, which really can
stand on their own:
From my buddy who is a songwriter in LA:
“…eventually with nothing at all.
I would just start working with that thing, “the studio,” as the
instrument."
"There is nothing outside of
this process. This process called recording is the creative process. We don’t
have the canvas standing in front of any landscape, you are going to make the
landscape here and now."
- brian eno
Blizzard happening outside my
second story perch, my studio. It’s
late January in Maine!
I’m really enjoying the distilling
of Sentences from the original mediations, and that form seems to be the most
compelling to me at the moment. During
my meeting yesterday at the Black Cat Café with my dear friend, colleague and
collaborator, Stacy Smith, she mentioned to me that her daily writing process,
which always happens with pen and notebook,
begins with the selection of a quotation, or what I would call a
Sentence. This is an excellent process,
and I intend to use it in this upcoming semester of teaching.
I looked back on yesterday’s
commentary and not only the form but, of course, the content of the Sentences
grabbed my attention. [It just struck
me that distilling Sentence is the way to go when I return to B&L 2.0. I’ve already identified the month of April as
the time when I will collect all the material in a single file and print
it. Working title: The Sentences
of Being & Learning 2.0. I’m
already envisioning a Preface that will talk of the modality of writing
sentences, of being sentenced to a
year of daily writing, of the hard labor of revisiting the original mediations
each day. Perhaps 366 sentences? tbd] Two Sentences were written yesterday
around what I have come to identify as the First Sentence:
The
simple act of bringing back Logos is
the one and only act of teaching.
Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being. [First
Sentence; original sentence in the sense of the starting point, or the place
where the project of originary thinking begins;
for me this is what is
entailed when ‘we’ say in phenomenology ‘reduction’, and in this sense it is a
crude Americano form and formulation,
and thus a proud expression of the degeneration of all neo-Scholastic and
Baroque forms of Continental methodology.
Here I am reminded of the intonation of Axel Honneth’s voice after I’d
completed my introductory statements at my doctoral dissertation defense, which
included the playing of that moment from the Howlin’ Wolf London Sessions, when Wolf is teaching
“Little Red Rooster” to the gathered apprentices (Eric Clapton, Keith Richards,
Steve Winwood, et al). Wolf
demonstrated the pedagogy of the blues and thereby expressed the conclusion I
had reached in my philosophical genealogy of disruptive yet community building
dialogic praxis. While Richard Bernstein and Agnes Heller
seemed puzzled, Honneth tried to play it cool, wondering how I could use that
as my example when, after all, “wasn’t the blues just about having a good
time?” Hardly!!! So began the spirited defense of my work!]
Teaching
is recollection of becoming.
And here are three of the twelve
sentences I distilled from 1/26/05 that can be paired with the three from 2015:
1. “Learning
(re)presents the becoming of Being, and teaching is the attunement toward and
reception of this process.” (BL 360)
2. “Teaching
is thus the letter be of freedom, the be-ing of human that… (re)presents the
becoming of Being as the letting be of difference…”(BL 360)
3. “Teaching
(re)collects the originary dispensation of Being’s becoming that always remains
concealed and hidden in the gap, the Open…”(BL
360)
And here is the final one that
demands further elaboration.
12. “This truth ‘sets itself to
work’ with learning…”(BL 360)
The ‘truth’ denoted in no. 12 is
the disclosure of Being via becoming,
and hence (following the Kierkegaardian formula) is the hidden or concealed
‘actor’ performing through the learner’s work.
The actuality (the reality of Being) is poetical, which is to say is acting through the learner. This is precisely what is entailed in being
under writing, to be inscribed, as it were. I read something this morning in Martin
Marty’s breezy biography of Luther that underlined the centrality of faith in
Luther’s writing, describing the hidden or concealed work of the Holy Spirit at
work in grace. I was reminded of
Kierkegaard (not surprising), but also, strangely, now of Hegel, because it
strikes me that the Hegelian formula for phenomenology follows Luther’s logic
insofar as grace is only something that we perceive belatedly, so that our account of grace is only ever happening
after the fact, or, to use Hegel’s phenomenological formula, happening at
dusk. This is why, as I was telling
Stacy yesterday, I distinguish the two moments of thinking as meditative and
dialogic, with the former denoting the time when the phenomenological
meditations are written after the
dialogic experience in the learning community. [nb: I
just glanced down at the floor of my study, and saw the marginal note written
on top of original manuscript p. 587:
“Freedom for what?” That question
is recurring throughout Being and
Learning, and today it has jumped off the floor as Paul’s question that
arrives to me through Luther. “Freedom
for what?” is the paradoxical question raised by the one who is now freed into
the service of Spirit, which is to say, whose new subjectivity is that of one
subjected to the community, the gathered congregation.]
The mediation on 1/27/05 continues
the work on the renunciation and “the diminishment from the modality of the
‘know-it-all’ with all its subordinating gestures.”(BL 361) Renunciation of
the will to power is a disruption that “announces the irruption of the
enclosing systems that incarcerate.”
The didactic and the teleological is expressed in the question, “What is
the educational outcome of such thinking?”
Such questioning is always intent to withhold and restrain the flow of
thinking that offers and demonstrates experiments in learning in response to
the question, “Freedom for what?”, the question that arises from the effacement
with the originary. The ‘for what’ also
implies learning as a poetic praxis,
which is itself already offered as a ‘response’ before the teleological
question is raised. In this sense the
question is always too late, and has no bearing on the impulse that drives the
phenomenological account. Put
differently, the gaze of the teleological question is directed to presumed
‘end’ or ‘aim’ or ‘outcome’ of a process that is ceaseless. The ‘beginning’ of the originary can not be
thought within the chronological. In
turn, the teleological question, “What is the educational outcome of such
thinking?” or “What is educational in such thinking?” is caught within a
metaphysics that can not account for becoming
as the realization of Being. Such
questioning is neither ontological nor phenomenological but teleological, and
thus stands ‘outside’ of the thinking that is working under the force of
poetics, being worked out poetically.
Such questioning is akin to the gallery visitor who asks of the now
reified ‘work’ of art, far removed from
the studio from when it came into being, What is the point of such art?
The teleological question is thus
an expression of “the confining grip of the authoritative didact [who]
immobilizes the create encounter with possibility. Offended by the unexpected and chaotic
dispersal, the didact established encumbrances, high barriers that seek to
repress and hold back the excessive in order to direct and control the dynamic
movement of the be-ing of the human.”(BL
361)
Here then are the Sentences from
1/27/05:
1. “With
[the] diminishment of the authorial is the letting be of artwork, ‘the truth of
being setting itself to work.’”(BL
361)
2. “Truth
is now a matter of the becoming of be-ing, specifically, the liberation of the
creative.”(BL 361)
3. “Here
is the ‘truth’ of be-ing setting itself to work as art, or artwork as the
‘true’…”(BL 361)
4. “To
appear as the work of art, as
learning, is to appear or arrive from the unforeseeable and ineffable, as that
which has ‘not yet’ been seen or heard, and will never be seen or heard
again.”(BL 361)
5. “The
‘irruptive character’ signifies the improvisational and spontaneous appearance
of the work.” (BL 361)
6. “The
irruptive signifies the nominalist happening of artwork.”(BL 361)
7. “The
happening of learning as artwork unfolds irruptively, ‘appearing without
warning.’”(BL 361)
8. “Learning
as an irruption is the happening of the truth of the spontaneous work of art,
the improvisational performance that reveals the bearing of novelty, the
incessant nativity of be-ing that is bourne upon each being as an original
dispensation.” (BL 361)
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