Thinking/writing in the
stream of
and
then JGB from 1983 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNFui0UMi0
Viva
GARCIA!!!
[--back
down in Crema Café in the Old Port, second week of the winter/spring semester
but the big snow dump we got yesterday cancelled my flight this morning, which
worked out because Hofstra was on a delayed opening. Writing through the blues of having the mail
order for Chicago returned to me yesterday sans
ticket. Feeling the full effect of
Aesop’s sour grapes, which is less figurate and allegorical and actually quite
literal and even analogical. The wine
from that which was once vintage – e.g., what I’m streaming at this moment –
has, alas, turned sour, and is more suited for making a vinaigrette. If truth be told, my GD ceased to be in July 1990 with the passing of Brent
Myland. Yes, I attended many shows
between 1990-95, from the very first of the last configuration at MSG in
September 1990 thru Vegas in the final years, catching shows in Atlanta,
Oakland, and LA along the way. But it
was never the same after Brent died. JGB
shows, absolutely, and those Jerry band shows at Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in
April 1993 were amongst the most energetic I’ve ever seen. But when Jerry passed in 1995, that as they
say was finally that. I’ve seen Weir’s Ratdog, and Furthur a few
times, and I was there in October in State College, in the Bryce Jordan Arena
when the surviving quartet reunited for an Obama fundraiser. And it was at that show that my heart really
sank, as it became all to real that the Spirit had left the scene, in the
manner of those gods that Heidegger proclaimed had flown away. The absence of Garcia is just too much. He was
the master, the sage, el maestro!
I
haven’t yet told Pepe, who will think it’s a gag and I really have the
tix. But when he realizes we’re holding
nada, it will be decision time. To get
tix otherwise and/or go old school and drive out to the shows just to be
there…that’s to be decided. Sour
grapes!]
First
I want to share my latest and probably last response to Tyson before we meet up
in Memphis. He offered me a solid
response to my critique of what I take to be his straw man caricature of
learning. Indeed, he clarified that his
critique is of
political/cultural/sociological ideology of the ‘learning society,’ which has little or
nothing to do with what I am describing as learning. Moreover, he clarified that like me, he is
interested in interrupting what I am calling the metaphysics of education, and
what he calls the hegemonic logic, the monolithic. He wrote:
This whole project on
study is really interested in something larger: the need to give specificity to
multiple educational logics so that we can recognize how education is not one,
monolithic thing. I am not trying to privilege study, or to replace
anything with study. Rather, I have a much more modest goal: to carve out
a small space and time for study within the hegemonic construction of learning.
Instead of proposing a philosophy of education (writ large), I am simply
trying to propose a philosophy of study. And to do so, I have found
Agamben's notion of potentiality helpful because it allows for an adequate
description of what it feels like to study. This is why I am not
concerned so much with the accuracy of his reading of Aristotle on a
philosophical level--what I am concerned with is the utility of this reading
for expressing a certain kind of educational moment called study where
impotentiality is not sacrificed (thus potentiality "I can" and
impotentiality "I cannot" are rendered indistinct "I
can/cannot" which is im-potentiality). This, fore me, is the essence
of study: it is a moment when we feel that we can and cannot do something
simultaneously.
The
preceding is perhaps the most succinct statement I have read from Tyson, and
I’m grateful for his taking the time to respond. I’m somewhat disappointed that he doesn’t
want to take up the critique, which I have been making now for the past 4
years, of the wholesale embrace of Agamben’s reading of Aristotle. But there it is: our project’s are arriving
from distinct places, traditions, which, as Bernstein reminded me at my
dissertation defense, can never be diminished.
[The authority and force of the past is part of the Zeitgeist of the New
School, and is one of the few places where Bernstein and Schürmann overlap, and
this by way of Arendt, of course!] My
training, my tradition (as it were) in philosophy (both from the New School,
Fordham, and before that…) demands that I return to the sources, and beyond
that to the source, Being. We arrive to
the originary, Being, through the original (fundmental categories), that
originate in ancient philosophy but continued to be articulated and in that way
we can identify a history of first philosophy.
And, as I read him, Agamben is one of our most important living
exemplars of the school that I am coming from.
There are others, such as Irigaray.
But I mention and single out Agamben as a way of noting why I feel some
disappointment that Tyson had admitted he is “not concerned so much with the accuracy
of his reading of Aristotle on a philosophical level.” For me, his reading of Aristotle, of Paul, of
Heidegger, etc., etc., is what prompts me to take the work with and against
him. This is the agonistic force that
moves the aforementioned history of first philosophy, and it is precisely the
methodology of exegesis we share with the ancients (Plato and Aristotle in
particular), that continues in full force through Paul, Augustine, and, like it
or not, is the basis of the Scholastic disputation. When the weight of exegesis became too much,
we experienced a desire to return to the originary, which begins with
Descartes’ meditations on first philosophy.
After Descartes, who audaciously cleared a space, I read the
aforementioned tradition as evolving into a syncretic methodology that combines
exegesis, eisegesis, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, which keeps us close to
the originary. My own methodology is an
attempt to work out this syncretic methodology, by, on the one hand,
recognizing the authority of the past as handed down to us in writing that must
be read and read and wrestled with, and, on the other hand, moving through that
authority to what is still more originary, and what confronts and compels first
philosophy: Being. The project of
originary thinking is my attempt to take up that two-sided approach, attempting
as it does to retrieve and recover the forms of writing that are bequeathed
from the past, but also to wrestle with the categories that have been handed
down to us, not to mention with the readings of those categories that have
arrived with the original categories.
While
somewhat disappointed that he doesn’t share my burden, as it were, I am most
grateful for having a colleague like Tyson who appears to be working out a
project that is, in its own way, originary.
In turn, I replied:
thanks for this.
it's very helpful. I appreciate the category of 'philosophy of
study'.
for me, philosophy of education is first and foremost the education offered by
philosophy, and by philosophy I only ever mean first philosophy or fundamental
ontology (although I recognize that category has a spectrum of denotations,
hence I prefer the anachronistic 'first philosophy' and have focused much
attention the past month on describing that category)
anyway, the education offered by first philosophy is what I read
Heidegger pursuing in What is Called
Thinking?, and I take it that his use of 'learning', which I want to trace
by to something the Latin educere ('coming forth of human
existence' via art) or even its Greek predecessor. Like you I'm trying to
work out a description of a particular topos withe larger hegemonic
arrangement of things in 'education' (broadly conceived within our current
political and cultural epoch).
So, philosophy of learning would only be a redundant category for
me, because to take up philosophy is to learn (in the way I am describing it,
and the way I understand Heidegger to be using the term, which, I would
contend, is intended as an intervention in the hegemonic scientism of his
time).
The
meditation on 2/3/05 is one of the most extensive of the entire year’s
experiment in daily writing. The note on
the top of p. 592 of the original manuscript (where 2/3/05 begins) reads “an
exemplary page.”
I
remember well this meditation, which was inspired in part by a reading of
Heidegger’s lecture from the 1919 War Emergency Semester, “The Idea of
Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” published in the volume Towards A Definition of Philosophy. I’ll have to confirm when I return to my
Hofstra office that the edition I was using ten years ago is the Continuum red
and white volume. I’m sure it wasn't the
volume with the ferocious fanged skull on it. (see above) At any rate, I recall using material from
this lecture in the first two weeks of the winter/spring semester of 2005, as a
way to get the work underway. And the
very same material that was getting a new course in philosophy of education underway
was helping to bring the year long project to a conclusion, by helping me to
make some final categorical and methodological clarifications. First and foremost is the clarification of my
use of ‘phenomenology,’ which lead to the technē
and praxis of poetic phenomenology. Recalling yesterday’s commentary on
beholding and being held, then, one should be capable of reading in its proper
context the Sentence that shows the apprehension of poetic phenomenology by the
ceaseless nativity of Being. Note, too, the appearance of the Heraclitean
flux in the contemporary neologism ‘streaming,’ which I have been using in
these commentaries for the past three months as a way of mapping the musical
context from when I am being moved, and from whence comes the force of the
improvisational and spontaneous writing/thinking happening in these pages, that
is, when that force is indeed arriving through the streaming of live
performance from the past! And the show
from 2/3/68 from the other Portland is most definitely offering that force to
me this morning.
On
to the Sentences, distilled from 2/3/05:
1.
“When
Heidegger declares, ‘Phenomenology is the philosophy without standpoints!’ he
offers us a motto [maxim] of the philosophy of education that we have attempted
to sketch.”(BL 370)
2.
“A
‘philosophy without standpoints,’ indicates the ground or starting point of the
philosophical of education…identified as the poetic phenomenology that finds
itself at the heart of learning…”(BL
370)
3.
“Poetic
phenomenology…bursts forth with the attunement of learning as the realization
of the be-ing of human embodied in the work of art.” (BL 370)
4.
“Philosophy
of education, as poetic phenomenology, takes up the truth of learning (the
phenomenon that remains the target of all philosophy of education) in the
‘letting be’ that remains without a standpoint.” (BL 370)
5.
“Poetic
phenomenology, a radical hermeneutics of close listening, ‘remains’ attuned to
this movement that is propelled by the propulsing releasement of the originary dispensation.”
(BL 370)
6.
“Poetic
phenomenology is the philosophy of streaming,
the philosophy that is taken up by/with the ceaseless nativity of Being that is
unveiled in the event of learning, the movement of the learning community.” (BL 370)
7.
“To
take up this project ‘without standpoints!’ is to be taken up by this movement,
this flux…the be-ing of human, freedom.” (BL
370)
The meditation shifts at
this point making a turn through a determinate negation of the aforementioned
contemporary political/cultural/sociological ideology of the ‘learning
society,’ which has little or nothing to do with what I am describing as
learning. On 2/3/05 the shift happens
with a deployment of the maxim of ‘philosophy without standpoints!’, understanding
it disclosing the enactment of becoming,
the dynamic movement of thinking appearing in meditative phenomenological
writing and dialogic praxis. In this sense, to be without standpoints is
to be ceaselessly moving, that is, enacting the ceaseless nativity of Being’s
becoming. The determinate negation
happens by way of describing thinking as getting underway via the releasement
(emancipation) of the teacher (first learner) from the place of the juridical
assessment: “to be taken up by this movement [becoming] is to be released or
liberated from the sentinel’s watchtower, that panoptican from which the
teacher as the authoritative posture of the know it all is compelled to make
‘known’ and ‘familiar’ all that arrives as new and strange. Poetic
phenomenology releases the teacher who has been subjected to that standpoint of
administrator, bureaucrat, the fixed point of local authority, hegemon, who is charged with regulating,
normalizing, and assimilating.” (BL
371)
The determinate negation
of the place of the hegemon, the panopticon, reveals the Open as the place of Pan
(an original figure of music-making philosophy; akin and a kin to that misty
figure who apprehended Thoreau during his epiphanic experience after reaching
the summit of Katahdin and asking, “Where are we? Who are we?”). The determinate negation is a
deconstruction in the original sense of destruktion,
an implosion of a place that compels us towards a “rebuilding…making again…[by]
(re)collecting…the originary dispensation, [and] (re)turning to the
primordial, the starting point.” (BL
371)
From
the determinate negation that destroys the panopticon we are moved to the place
of Pan, the Open:
1.
“The
original Pan moved in the forest
primeval, playing music upon the flute, that same instrument Plato banned
because it has ‘largest compass,’ that is, the greatest possibility.” (BL 371)
2.
“Pan moved freely as the god of the
woods, the mysterious one who hidden presence encompassed the work of the
shephards.” (BL 371)
3.
“Thus
the name of this god, this musician who played freely upon the freest of
instruments, is thought to be linked to the Greek word patane and akin to the Latin patere
‘to be open.’” (BL 371)
4.
“Pan denotes the freedom of openness
rendered by the music that enjoins, welcomes, and guides those who take care.” (BL 371)
5.
“…in
following the path of Pan we are lead
beyond the open of patere to faethm, ‘embracing or outstretched arms;
this Old English version of ‘fathom’…speaks to the profundity of the depth of
the silence and emptiness…conveyed in the steadfast openness of the teacher…”(BL 371)
6.
“The
primordial Pan appears as the
openness (patere) of the embracing
arms (faethm).” (BL 371)
7.
“Such
is the openness (patere) of pandere that ‘spreads and unfolds’ the
welcoming that releases, the groove from where the improvisational is
spontaneously appearing.”(BL 372)
In
addition to prompting further thinking on the outstretched arms happening in
the transfigural moment of the Eucharistic Celebration, when the bread,
spiritual pan (bread, but also patere, and pandere) is raised aloft alongside the cup, this seventh Sentence
prompts me to wonder about these outstretched arms described that convey the
openness via the making of a groove. Are
not these the arms of the rhythm maker, and is this not what was disclosed on
12/25/14 in the commentary that described this phenomenological writing as
rhythmic writing?
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,
rhuthmos [rhythm: origin mid 16th
cent. – also originally in the sense of ‘rhyme’):
from French rhythme, or via Latin from
Greek rhuthmos (related to rhein ‘to flow’).
n
[nb: Flow thinking,
rhythmic thinking; writing via drumming (typing); rhythmic typing?] –
[12/25/14]
And
perhaps this is what the dancing bodhisattva is depicting, the flow of dance,
yes, but also with the movement of arms, the expression of rhythm, that is, the
making of the groove? [nb: the note atop p. 595 (where 2/3/05
concludes) reads: “teaching as dance.”] Consider the meaning of Bodhi (wise, wisdom)
sattva (being) – as the spontaneously generative compassion – in relation to
the final line from 2/3/05: “Caught up yet ‘borne along by {the} bouyancy’ of
the rapture of the aesthetic state, the teacher is seized by the sway of
ceaseless nativity, unbounded by ‘supreme’ risk taking hospitality that is
radically inclusive, ‘open to everything and ready tackle anything,’…” (BL 372)
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