Back
in the hometown Black Cat Café, Stevens Ave, Portland, Maine, where they named
a drink after me: El Dominicano (a single shot of espresso alongside a hot
chocolate; so, technically, two drinks under a single name; a coincidence of
opposites achieving a dynamic equilibrium?).
I start by way of offering context, because at this moment I am not
writing on a hard charging east or west bound train with headphones on, nor
sitting on a platform waiting for an aforementioned train, but, rather, in the
back area of this modest place of drink, food, and warmth, such warmth on a day
when the rain is coming in every direction.
Dry, warm, settled, and welcomed, as well as anticipating the reunion
with one of my closest friends and colleagues, Stacy Smith, who this semester
has been teaching a course at Bates College (where my younger daughter Sofia is
a first semester student) on the roots of non-violence. Stacy and I met regularly in this café last
winter and spring and together made a close reading of the Gita, which has been a foundation text for her course this semester
(cf. PPM61 April 14). Since my trip to
Memphis I’ve been anxious to meet up with Stacy and hear about her course and
to share with her what I now recognize to be the epiphanic experience I had at
the Lorraine Motel, and, in the wake of that experience, the thinking/writing I
did on what I’ve been calling the Heraclitus war fragments. Dry,
warm, settled, welcomed, and anticipation sharing the love of friendship.
There
it is, the set-up for the commentary on the meditation that happened on
11/24/04, the one that begins “The learning community arises as the festival of
friendship,” and concludes “The first teaching of the first gift is the
recognition of this essential volatility of the force of philia.” (BL 284 &
285) It might be enough to explore how
the first and last sentences are related and stand together. And I suspect that such an exploration today
would focus mostly on the counter-hegemonic gathering of the learning
community. It is disruptive, for
sure. But today I would describe this
disruption today as felt mostly from the outside, felt by the
neighborhood. Inside the learning
community, or within this gathering, which Agamben reminded this morning (when
I was reading his book on the Franciscans The
Highest Poverty) is an attempt to make the highest form of life, the
prevailing forces of koinōnia,
agapē, philia are experienced as a “rare dynamic equilibrium.” (BL 284)
Within the working group that is described as the learning community
there is no felt disruption; what is felt and embodied is a volatility (learning
as the occasion to experience change
rapidly and unpredictably; what my students in this semester of Heraclitus
would describe as ‘entering the flow’; dialogue).
‘Festival’
as a working metaphor no longer works as figure for thinking the learning
community. Under the logic of
Schumacher’s economy of sustainability (‘small is beautiful’) the ‘festival’ is
far too large a metaphor for the symbolic representation of the learning
community. Even the phonetically
related ‘feast’, which, in light of the extended definition of agapē I am prompted to consider as an
alternative, is too much. The more
modest ‘gathering of friends’ is enough, especially to hold all aspects of the
learning community as a working group that is brought together and continues to
be inspired by an energeia that is
before and beyond the people who are congregated. ‘Gathering’ is quite effective because it
denotes first and foremost a meeting or assembly of individuals for a specific
purpose, and second, because set of printed signatures of a book, collected for
binding, which is a subordinate and somewhat archaic definition, but not
entirely foreign a project of writing/thinking
that is generating so many fragmented promissory notes (as I have been calling
these commentaries…//after all a promissory note is a ‘signed document containing a written
promise….’ – here then is an occasion to make such a promise to take up in more
detail, perhaps as part of a prefatory and contextualizing statement, Arendt’s
writing on ‘promising’ in The Human
Condition).
The
learning community is the gathering of friendship, a congregation that arises
via the dynamic equilibrium between agapē and philia.
Koinōnia
arises from this dynamic equilibrium.
Why ‘dynamic equlibrium’? The
prompt as I vaguely recall it arrived from something I heard on the radio, a
statement by a writer – I suspect it was on Leonard Lopate’s daily WNYC show –
that “chaos breeds life, order breeds conformity.” [I might have read it in The New York Review of Books…but I’m sure the prompt came from one
of those two venues.] The assertion
struck a nerve, struck a chord, and there was a musical sound made in the
striking of that tension. “The ‘dynamic
equilibrium’ is sought by the
community with its seeking, its building, the learning that is called poetic
dialogue. This is why we say the
community as a [constant] learning gathering is always under construction. The ‘constant’ we identify here is the
dynamic stamped upon each learner… ‘constant’…its nature as a force…emerges in the work involved with
the establishment of the dialogic. We
identify this as a constant struggle
inherent to the [gathering] of friendship, that essential ‘tension’…that gives
rise to the new.”(BL 285) ‘Chaos breeds life’ grants the thinking of
the work of the learning community as moved (enforced) by kind of dialectical force, a dynamic equilibrium; the granted thinking recalls Ewert Cousins’
work on Bonaventure and then leaps to the Franciscan Nicholas Cusa and
describes the dynamic equilibrium that moves the learning community “as a form
of the ‘coincidence of opposites’ identified by N. Cusa.”(BL 285)
Before
and after Cusa (who passes through almost like a shadow) is Arendt with
Aristotle on friendship. This duo is a
recurring source for my thinking/writing on the learning community and on
11/24/04 there is attention given to the force that brings equality into the
world (perhaps a way to think the way principles inspire, cf. OPM 272(273), November 15th). “This force is the ‘gravitational’ pull of
the gathering, that simultaneously enjoins and distinguishes….that constitutes
the community, through the equalization that, as Arendt, following Aristotle,
identifies as coming into being through isanthenai,
equalizing.”(BL 285) Cusa’s ‘coincidence of opposites’ appears in
the gathering of friends that form community; together each displays uniqueness and remains distinct. Friends, especially when we are thinking
this relationship between a gathering (group), appear opposite one another in
the prepositional sense of facing one another, and complementing one
another. But the coincidence of their
opposition also generates the necessary creative tension that we find when we
understand the character of polemos
in opposition as rooted in oppenere,
to be ‘set against.’ If ‘chaos breeds life’ then from tension and
opposition we identify the source of the force that propels creative work. This is dialectical force that moves
dialogue, that gathers the community while keeping separate those who are
gathered into it. The citation of Arendt that happens in the middle of 11/24/04
is illuminating on this matter being described: “The equalization in friendship
does not of course mean that the friends become the same or equal to each
other, but rather that they become equal partners in a common world – that they
together constitute a community.
Community is what friendship achieves, and it is obvious that this
equalization has its polemical point the ever-increasing differentiation of
citizens that is inherent in agonal life.”(cited on BL 285)
I
read ‘common world’ as koinōnia
in the sense that what is common is not the facticity of the congregating
bodies, but the particular spirit (espiritu)
that is generated by their working together.
What enjoins each together, and what bridges them is agapē,
and it is precisely this loves that grants them the power to endure as a
community (sustain common cause) through the tension of the agonal.
Perhaps the coincidence of opposites that is revealing itself is the one
between ἀγάπη
(agápē)
and ἀγών (agón), both of which can denote
‘gathering’. The gathering force of the
learning community (koinōnia)
is the dynamic equilibrium between ἀγάπη
(agápē)
and ἀγών (agón), the syncretic interaction between
the spirit of self-less love and the spirit of opposition (in the sense of a
contest or competition). If community is
what philia achieves, then the love
between friends is only ever the necessary prior condition of working and
struggling together/with others to make freedom and justice.
3.0 (Sunday, Portland, ME) - Resonance in "LEARN" of moments from the OPM & 2.0: First, on "promising" via Arendt: "Discussion, as an interruption of schooling, is “action, [which] seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes…looks like a miracle.”(HC, 246) Ironically the teacher might find himself during and then afterwards saying, “Well, it was a miracle that everyone truly showed up and showed out today.” This describes the fact that there really is no guarantee that a discussion will happen. And that is the uncertainty of discussion’s negation of schooling: a teacher cannot guarantee the “outcome,” but can only, through the conduct of close listening and letting learning be learned, arrange the conditions for the possibility of discussion. However, as Arendt reminds us, the teacher along with the students are not operating under blind faith, and their coming together can be described as gathered by "the force of mutual promise.” The learning community’s discussion is an example of what Arendt calls acting in concert, “which disappears the moment they depart.” (HC, 244). And when they are gathered “the force that keeps them together...is the force of mutual promise...an agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and binding.” (HC, 244-245). The promise is expressed with the amor fati that guides them in their listening, in their reception of what each has to say about the significance of the book, which each has received during the solitude of study. The promise that each makes to every member is the binding force that gathers the learning community. But this promise isn’t declared as a pledge, but enacted silently through listening, a reception of the arrival and birth to presence of thinking, the experience of being free with others experiencing the “presence of the ‘people’ in their limitless power which, in order not to limit itself, accepts doing nothing.”(UC, 32) And thus listening, as the principal gesture in the performance of discussion, is an affirmation of “the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted.”(HC, 247)
ReplyDelete3.0b - Second, “chaos breeds life, order breeds conformity" - khaos: "“Where does this strange way go?,” he asks in the voice of the Scholar who is one of the characters in the dialogue Country Path Conversations. He responds in the voice of the Guide, “Where else than in the open-region” (CPC, 77) that remains “nameless.” This nameless strange path, this crooked path of philosophical learning, leads to and circulates around this open region that I describe as the khaos (void) through which the fecundity of the book arrives." AND: "“Unpacking” is a euphemism for “liberating” the book, freeing it from the catalog regime. What’s more, when he admires his books in the state of being unpacked, Benjamin is describing the deconstructed “library” as a place of dis-order, and thereby a place of philosophical study. While this may appear counter-intuitive, “disorder” denotes the original meaning of khaos as “void.”"
ReplyDelete3.0c: Third, “transformative de-struktion (‘burning’) [that] brings light and heat,”(BL 285) as 'deconstruction': "This opening is the open-endedness of the discussion that resonates with the same possibility of disclosure each student encountered in the chaos of the deconstructed library and the open texts they studied therein. The aporetic and inclusive discussion circulates both around and through the póros or opening (threshold, gateway) of present (Moment) possibility." AND: "By selecting a small set of fragments, the students are deconstructing the text and thereby allowing it to say something new, something that perhaps even the author did not or could not anticipate." AND: "The confusion is the mark of the deconstructed library, when the catalog arrangement has been interrupted and is when the library is transformed into a place of philosophical study. The uncatalogued book is allowed to be autonomous. If we borrow a description from Foucault, we might suggest that deconstructing the library is part of the educator’s attempt to conserve the student’s revolutionary potential. In his essay “Fantasia of the Library,”(FL, 1977) Foucault describes the “hushed library” as the setting for imagination: “fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within the confines that also liberate impossible worlds.”(FL, 90) Deconstruction breaks the hush of the library. A book is removed from the shelf and released from the loneliness of order. Curiosity anticipates what the book will say. But this anticipation is a fantasy that emerges as a response to the ordered shelves and the catalog regime. The student in solitude of study conjures up a phantasm of possibility. The conjured phantasm of possibility, the specter of poetic potency, haunts the student as the spirit of learning like a muse who inspires attunement to the voice of the text, and thereby, like the one who visited Socrates, calls the student to study and thereby prepare to “make music” with others via the dialogic interpretation of fragments that call out to them. And those fragments, whatever essentials call out to students, are received when the book is freed by the disorder of the deconstructed library, freed for a phenomenological reading that affirms the reality of the book, that it is and endures as an open text."
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