I
was writing to a colleague yesterday about the studio sessions that I am
organizing for PES Memphis. Those
sessions, as I said to another colleague today [Sam Rocha] are not going to be
pomo playful ‘alternative’ sessions, but demonstrations
of what is not only possible but what
is actually happening in the field of
philosophy of education; that is, work that is being made via forms that are
not yet recognized by the dominant purveyors of the field. [nb:
despite being given the helm of the PES ship for 2015, I don’t at all perceive
myself as a member of that group of guardians who are purveying the field.] Indeed,
the installation of studio sessions where the emphasis will be on techne τέχνη
is one way I am positioning myself as part of that long tradition of ‘outsider’
thinkers/writers/artists; the studio sessions aren’t simply avant-garde but
counter-cultural and counter-hegemonic; and the installation qualifies for
those designations because of its being organized around τέχνη.
τέχνη" was not concerned with the necessity and eternal a priori truths of the cosmos, nor with the a posteriori contingencies and exigencies of ethics and politics. [...] Moreover, this was a kind of
knowledge associated with people who were bound to necessity. That is, techne
was chiefly operative in the domestic sphere, in farming and slavery, and not
in the free realm of the Greek polis[2]
Aristotle saw it as representative of the
imperfection of human imitation of nature. For the ancient Greeks, it signified all the mechanic arts, including medicine and music.
The English aphorism, "gentlemen don’t work with
their hands", is said to have originated in ancient Greece in relation to
their cynical view
on the arts. Due to this view, it was only fitted for the lower class while the
upper class practiced the liberal arts of
'free' men (Dorter 1973).
I
appreciate the generic definition of technē
offered by Wikipedia, because it not only emphasizes the
radicality of the practical demonstration happening with the studio sessions at
PES Memphis, but also offers context for the kind of phenomenology that I
undertook in the original 2004 daily writing experiment, and have continued
with the originary thinking project, and again with Being and Learning
2.0. Indeed, while the preceding may
appear counter-intuitive given that it seems I am doing a kind of metaphysics,
or first philosophy, especially because of the tone of the writing, not to
mention my consistent reference to the originary, and use of the term ‘Being’,
the fact is that I am in earnest beginning each day [as in the writing
happening at this very moment] with no pre-conceived plan, intention, or line
of argument that I am following. Of
course, there is continuity, and I return again and again and again to
questions, concepts, and examples, but always, first and foremost, I begin with
some kind of prompt (a person, place or thing), such as the draft of the email
about the studio sessions I wrote yesterday and did not send!
Starting
with τέχνη
is not only about making a meta-analytic statement about the ‘method’ behind
the madness that is creating the beautiful mess that is being made in this
commemorative blog. Rather, I started with this because I also wanted to return
to the concept of work that I use
often when I describe what the learning community is up to. And, again, the generic definition is helpful
because it talks of those who are bound by ‘necessity’ and also of the ‘common
people’ or what we might call ‘the folk’ as in DuBois use of ‘folk’ or Rocha’s
‘folk phenomenology,’ and many other examples, even the notorious ‘volk’ deployed by Heidegger! I want to think/write further about about
the link between the koinon (common)
and koinonia (spirit of fellowship)
and the folk; and I want to also write/think about this in terms of the work (τέχνη)
of those ‘bound by necessity’ and thereby link it to servitude and total
subjectification (i.e., the enslavement of the spirit by the Spirit). There’s something compelling and disturbing
about those links. And I also want to
note here the connection to be made between τέχνη as work, and the
work of the learning community that is outside the law; the ‘good works’ or
‘work of faith’. Agamben has much to say
about this in his book on Paul, and I’m only mentioning this here as a note to
myself to return to him as a primary resource.
The
τέχνη
of the learning community is a work of faith in the sense that it involves risk
on multiple levels. Risk can be taken
when there is a faith in the undertaking, in the project. Yet that’s not what the work of faith amounts
to. It is not about having faith in the project.
Rather, it is about the project itself as the work of
faith. The phenomenological reduction
of the communal learning to the τέχνη of faith takes us
to compassion, to the heart, and to the rhythm of the heart beat. The force of koinonia is disclosed, offered and received via the heart; through
the power generated by agape. Put differently, without compassion no
listening, no reception, no poetic dialogue, no community, no learning.
On
11/12/04 the heart is described “as the question that reveals the call to
care.”(BL 270)
In the prior day’s writing/thinking the call (klēsis, calling
or vocation) was described as “the call to care…an implicit supplication
co-arising with the novelty of the freely performed, unbound improvisation.”(BL 269)
On 11/12/04 “the call to care” is
described as “the questioning reception,” and with this description the
supplication happening with the call to care is one that sounds like a demand
and a challenge. It expresses itself
with the force of the imperative, the kind we hear when we listen to the interrogating
voice of Socrates, or even Socrates’ muse commanding him to make music! And here I recall Foucault’s description of
Socrates as like an obedient and dutiful soldier who is following orders. Foucault tells us that he remains always
under command, and so it is natural that for one who functions within a chain
of command is assertive and uncompromising in their questioning. This is the work of faith. It moves mountains, yes, this work that
interrupts the stasis of the status quo.
The call to care is compassion with a purposeful edge. In the way it is a call to take up the
struggle (polemos) of justice. The “call appears as the question that
releases the excess that floods over in the ground swell caused by the
originary dispensation….The novelty that arrives with the spontaneity of the
improvisational performance is the vestige of that originary dispensation [the inspiration by the Holy Spirit], the
movement of the essential sway identified as the ground swell, ‘the heavy
slow-moving waves caused by a distant or recent storm or earthquake.’”(BL 271)
The call to care compels us to
listen with compassion. Paradoxically
the call is issued from and received by the heart. Put differently, through agape we experience self-overcoming and
self-actualization insofar as this love is at one and the same time and outward
expression of a self away from self (a self-less love), and inward reception
that confirms the singularity of the self.
Through agape we experience
the proverbial divided self, the self that is no self, or the existence of the
nonself (anatman), which has been
taken up in OPM 235, 178, 175, 173, 157,
154, 140, 138.
see this commentary connected to post from 2/17/15 here duartebeinglearningsentences.blogspot.com/2015/02/21715-another-beginning-techne-and.html
ReplyDelete3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME). The call to care! Re-collecting with the Memphis 2015 project as a demonstration of philosophy of education as a technē, a making, a poiesis. The fragments from this day 20 years ago: On 11/12/04 the heart is described “as the question that reveals the call to
ReplyDeletecare.”(BL 270) In the prior day’s writing/thinking the call (klēsis, calling or vocation) was described as “the call to care…an implicit supplication co-arising with the novelty of the freely performed, unbound improvisation.”(BL 269) Here are some fragments from "LEARN" that resonate with those fragments: "A précis is a phenomenological account of what Arendt describes as the reception of the world. And the book is a representation of the world, which Arendt describes as in need of renewal. Philosophical study, as that care and love of the world (amor mundi), offers an account of the dokei moi (the way the world appears or opens up to me). But each encounter with the text is an event, it cannot be repeated because the book is neither “finished or unfinished.”(SL, 22) Study, along with the discussion that follows, is an act of renewal, which is to say, a conservation both of the book’s enduring significance and it’s openness, and affirmation of the fata of the libelli, a recognition of the book’s freedom." AND: "In Being and Time Heidegger describes human existence (Dasein) as the temporality that is “ecstatic and horizontal.” (BT, 339) This essential characteristic is “practical,” and describes well how the location of learning is made (constructed) by the attention or care exercised with the attunement of phenomenological reading and its documentation in a précis of whatever has called out to the reader. The précis is “made” when the student responds to the “riddle” of ecstatic temporality by receiving and thus renewing the book. Philosophical study is a recurring return to the origin, the originary location where the text can be heard anew, as if new, and, as such, an ekstatic dwelling happening in a fissure of chronological time, in time of poetic thinking: the present Moment. The philosophical student is “‘absorbed in the matter’...which is founded in ‘making present’...the making present that brings something near from its wherefrom, making present loses itself in itself.” (BT, 369)". AND: "Amor fati is the letting-be that happens after the letting-go of the will. It is what Heidegger describes with the term Gelassenheit: a release of the self-certain subject’s will to know and will to judge. Amor fati offers us a way of negating the logic of “schooling” and thereby avoiding what Heidegger describes as falling “into the clutches of planning and calculation, of organization and automation,”(MA, 49). It is a modality, or comportment, a “releasement toward things” (Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen), a recollection that these “things” that make up the world have been crafted by human hands and endure. The modality of Gelassenheit is a recollection or memory that is a gathering again with the original crafting, making, and building of the world. That recollection puts us back in touch with the root of technology in technē, which denotes “making” and “doing” and is closely linked with poiesis, or the bringing into the world something that has not yet existed. In this sense, the writing of a précis is the technē of philosophical learning via Gelassenheit, the expression of amor fati in the reception of whatever essentials call out from the text."