Thinking/writing
in the stream of
[this is somewhat of a surprise to
find a show from ’87 – one from my
generation – popping up in late January.
No doubt it was part of the Chinese New Years run of shows. This is one that I’ll stream top to bottom,
although I don’t anticipate this writing session will run 164 mins and
39secs. That would be a bit
excessive. But I do have this whole day
wide open, now that I’ve spent most of the morning outside shoveling the fluffy
stuff and playing with my son. As of the
date of this show, I’ve noted before in the pages of this blog that I’m not
much for numerology, but I do appreciate the coincide between this ’87 show
popping up on page 187 of this last of the 2.0 files. I’ve collected the writing in sets of 50
commentaries, and it looks like this last one will conclude at 356. Anyway, I’m not much for numerology, but I’ve
clearly made more than a few accounting errors along the way. How else can I explain that the last
commentary will be coded OPM 356, when I’ll have made a commentary on 367
consecutive days?! Well, that’s the
least of the matters to be taken up when I turn to sort through this
material! But it’s precisely the kind
of mundane matter that lightens the load.]
Automatic writing.
Sentences are the primary form,
but in this sense they are what are distilled from the mediations. Sentences
are the result of a reduction of the meditations that are made via automatic
writing. Reduction, as Rocha once
described to me (and something tells me its documented in one of our Musings
sessions), is best understood through the culinary lexicon, as in the making of
a sauce via boiling. I concur with that
move as a way of illustrating what is happening with the process of reduction,
so long as we also think reduction as distillation, so that we emphasize the
extraction of what is essential, not to mention potent.
I’m recalling automatic writing as
a way of reminding myself, as I move to the conclusion of 2.0, of the
non-negotiable rule that has organize this experiment. But insofar as this writing is a
phenomenological account of the dialogic event happening with the learning
community, ‘automatic’ is only ever an enactment of the improvisational and
spontaneous movement of thinking occurring in learning; it is a replication.
And it is a replication in the sense of a replaying and recording; in this
sense the phenomenology happening here is weakly analogous to the
post-production work of the sound engineer.
All that to say that automatic writing is an enactment of the same flow
of thinking that is moving the event of learning, so that I’m tempted to use
‘automatic’ as the generic category to describe the spontaneity and
improvisation happening with the appearance of thinking. Here I recall what I wrote on 1/25/15:
If first philosophy places a demand
on us, it is the demand that we relinquish the will to power as the will to
control the movement of thinking, and thus to relinquish the will to determine
the production of meaning. All writing
must in this sense be ‘automatic’. And
here is where the risk-taking Leap arises, which shows us that the Leap is not
a ‘forward jump’ but a turn, a conversion to a faith in the power of thinking
untethered from the will. Here Arendt
was brilliant in reminding us that the faculty (power) of thinking was distinct
from the faculty (power) of willing. It
strikes me that thinking more often than not exerted much of its energy
attempting to free itself from the faculty of the will.
The identified ‘force of writing’
is thus the actualization of the untethered force of free thinking, which is
identified as that poetical realization of Being. Writing that displays free thinking is
automatic, spontaneous, and improvisational.
All
writing must in this sense be ‘automatic’.
Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being.
Today I distill the Sentence,
which sounds all too Arendtian (so be it!):
All thinking is automatic.
The Sentence is Arendtian insofar
as it expresses the link she made between thinking and acting, both marked by
spontaneity, both saturated with natality, both demonstrations of our
singularity, and both expressions of human plurality, that fact that ‘men’ and not ‘Man’ inhabit the earth, as she famously
put it again and again.
The straightforward dictionary
definition of automatic is not unhelpful, and actually elucidates the sense in
which automatic is marks learning (the enactment of thinking) as both a technē
and a praxis. Automatic: “done or
occurring spontaneously, with conscious thought or intention.” Of course, there is an important paradox that
is forcing the matter. We discover this
paradox with when identify the roots of automatic in automatos (‘acting of itself’).
On the one hand, if we want to preserve the force of Arendt’s
description of thinking and acting, then there is nothing problematic in
automatic as automatos, because the
force, or what Arendt calls the ‘sheer activity of thinking’ (most complete
experience of life), is a the actualization (full realization) of natality and
singularity, of our capacity to begin because we are beginners (to cite her
adoption of Augustine). And here is
exactly where I locate the ‘originary’ of originary thinking: we can begin
because we are beginners; yet we are not the beginning, and our beginning
occurs in media res. In the wake of
my Heraclitus lecture in October I wrote about this, and here I would reiterate
a distinction I would want to make between beginning at the beginning and
beginning again. If this distinction is
sustained then the beginning that occurs in
media res is the work (learning, thinking) happening in becoming, or through the beginning, or
through the beginning that is always beginning again: ceaseless nativity. It may be that we can say he that learning is
happening de novo in the sense that
the enactment of becoming is a proper ‘beginning again’ or ‘beginning
anew.’ Ab novo seems stronger case of the originary that denotes Being,
but here I find myself slipping back into Aristotle’s teleological arrangement
of things. [--on cue, Garcia starts
plucking the first notes of “Bird Song” and then says to the rest of the band,
“Let’s get out of here” aka let’s unwind and jam and see where we go. Automatic!--]
I find myself slipping back into
Aristotle insofar as this meditation has found its way ‘back’ to the Unmoved
Mover, the force that remains concealed in the unconcealment that is happening
with becoming. In the play of aletheia, what remains absent ‘behind’
presencing can be identified using Aristotle’s First Cause: the Unmoved
Mover. But it does not seem to me at
this moment that this concealed, hidden original force is (logically) necessary
in order to sustain the first Sentence
Learning
is the poetical actuality of becoming
This Sentence does not depend on a
primary or first cause, an Unmoved Mover; it is after all an expression that
happens through a retrieval of Heraclitus’ Logos,
and perhaps what Rocha would insist is my retrieval of John (the gospelist),
but that remains to be worked out.
Becoming does not refer back to nor depend on an a priori set of
conditions. There is nothing (no thing)
a priori becoming. There is only for us the recognition of a more fundamental
ontological situation, that remains beyond our singularity. The category ceaseless nativity denotes the
originary, and also insists that we recognize learning as unfolding in media res (in the midst of things; panta rhei: in the midst of the flow of
things)
All this returning me to the paradox
that appears to arise with automatos
insofar as we remain faithful to Arendt’s linking of action and thinking. Arendt, it must be remembered, appropriates
from Augustine and then distills from his an existential phenomenology that can
only arise in the postmodern conditions of Modernism, in the epoch of broken hegemeonies, or what
in the Preface to the collection of essays Between
Past and Future she describes via René Char as the time bequeathed without
testament. The epoch may be described
as the epoch of crisis insofar as the presumptive links to the past have been
broken and we live in an era when we must begin again. And it from that point of departure that
Arendt deploys a distilled secularized Augustine. However, my project audaciously, and perhaps
naïvely, operates under the presumption that beginning anew demands that we
make the move that Arendt herself describes when she calls upon us in volume 1
of Life of the Mind to take up the
work of the pearl diver and recovering the work (the pearls) from the deep
waters of the past. This is what I call
the retrospective gaze of the project.
Diving into the depths of the past, however, demands that we move into
that place where this thinking abides, namely the deepest depth, or, perhaps,
the highest heights. Whatever the case,
thinking arising ontologically from the same
place (same time and place), which is why we experience it as
‘automatic’. But that is not to say
that the thinker is responsible for thinking, that, in the sense of automatos the thinker is ‘thinking of
itself’ (this is precisely the Cartesian breakthrough that establishes the line
of demarcation between modern and premodern philosophy). Descartes retrieval of and reliance upon
Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence God helps us me to make the point
regarding the paradox of automatic thinking, a category that is intended to
denote the event of learning happening after
self-overcoming, after the
renunciation of the will to power, after
the displacement of ego cogito from the seat of power. Descarte relied on Anselm but reworked the
ontological proof and distilled from it a more potent proof (in this way he
increased the potency, if only for the modern subject); he distilled the ideological
from the ontological, the ideal from the real.
What remained was mind, independent, ego cogito: automatos (the thinker
thinking of itself).
“It’s like I told you,
it’s what I said,
I’ll steal your face right off your
head.”
Automatic, however, is to act without conscious thought or
intention. It is thus a thinker thought
by thinking; thinking itself moving the thinker. To be automatic in one’s writing is to be
spontaneous and improvisational because one is under the force of writing,
under the force of thinking. And this
is why learning is described as the poetical actuality of becoming: becoming is the hidden, concealed force
working through (performing) the learner.
This bring me to the distillation of
Sentences from 1/28/05, which arise by way of the via negativa; determinate
negation:
1. “Renunciation
is the relinquishment of the subjectivity that is subjected to the role of
reason as ultimate adjudication of ‘correctness.’(BL 362)
2. “
‘Correctness’ refers back to a prior (idealized) form to which the learner must
conform.”(BL 362)
3. “
‘Difference’ is understood as a variation from the norm.”(BL 362)
4. “Teaching,
under this logic [correctness], is a matter of correcting the variation, and
bringing the learner into compliance with the regulating system…”(BL 362)
5. “[Within]
this system the teacher acts as a regulatory agent, as the local representative
(en loco juridicus) of the general
authority whose dictates set ‘standards’ for learning.”(BL 362)
6. “The
authority of the juridical voice, of the teacher who is responsible for
enforcing standards by regulating the irregularities of the manifold, follows
from a metaphysical project of truth that seeks to confine the movement of the
be-ing of learning, directing it in the manner of a gutter that captures and
directs the excessive run-off.”(BL
362)
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