Thinking/writing in the stream of
[beginning with the 25
mins 39 secs “Cryptical Envelopment>Drums>Other One”. This is a true audience recording, which
captures the voices of the mostly college crowd attending the UC Davis
show. The voices are revealing the
students around the recording mic are ‘up to’ something; probably monitoring
levels. Indeed, when Lesh begins the
transition with his classic thundering bass line, the one student says to the
other “too loud” and her friend responds by lowering the levels. (Sandy Troy is
credited with taping the show, so it’s probably her voice). It’s a
fascinating listen, and certainly one that inspires as I do this
phenomenological description of the learning community working out music-making
philosophy]
On the work of the
learning community and music-making philosophy, a quick note of reflection on
last night’s seminar. I was pushed hard
on the distinction between product and process, or rather, on how I was
attempting to enunciate process as
product. There was a resolution, of
sorts, to the question that arose out of our discussion of the Third Space,
what Bhabha through Fanon describes as the space of “occult instability.” The question was posed: can we ever truly
‘arrive’ to the Third Space? Wouldn’t
our arrival, in other words, denote our having established ourselves in a
location? My response was to push the
students to think the location as something other than a fixed place, which is
to say, a place of movement (like the labyrinth depicted in the image I shared
in yesterday’s commentary). We never
‘arrive’ to a place in the sense of becoming ‘settled’. The Third Space resists being settled. Rather, if and when we arrive there we are compelled to move, and, for
me, this movement is one that is best described a work, or working-out,
making. And this is how process and
product collapse, and where the logic of outcomes turns back on itself:
becoming, presencing, arriving, coming forth, coming into, coming out. ‘Outcomes’ based education remains tied to
the teleological, whereas learning as process is organized around the
phenomenological.
Disclose: (verb) make –
secret or new information – known; allow [something] be seen, esp. by
uncovering it.
The collapsing of
product and process via the phenomenological relies on the turning back
(bending, return) of the teleology of ‘outcomes’ at the boundary of thinking,
the limit of the kairological. Here I am
relying on something I read last night in Agamben’s book on Paul:
“What do we
have when we have kairos? The most
beautiful definition of kairos I know
of occurs in the Corpus Hippocraticum,
which characterizes it in relation to chromos. It reads: chronos
esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en hō ou pollos chronos, “chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there it little chronos.” Look at the
extraordinary interlacing of these two concepts, they are literally placed
within each other. Kairos…does not have another time at its disposal; in other words,
what we take hold of when we seize kairos
is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos. The Hippocratic text continues with these words: “healing
happens at times through chronos, other
times through kairos.” That messianic ‘healing’ happens in kairos is evident, but this kairos is nothing more than seized chronos.” (The Time That Remains, 68-69)
If kairos is ‘nothing more’ than seized chronos then it is indeed captured by force, a force that is alone capable
of breaking the teleological unfolding of the chronological. However ‘long’ this break occurs (thinking
from within the chronological, or through chronos) it must be framed by a beginning
and an end (alpha and omega).
The turning back of the
teleological ‘outcomes’ happens in the seizure of chronos.
The kairological is an
opening that is disclosed in the
seizure of chronos. And learning, as a dynamic event, occurs in the place (time/space) opened
by that seizure. As a disclosure it is
properly revelatory (revelare, lay
bare); what is revealed is the ‘bare life’, which I want to reduce to homo sacer (sacred life). Sacred life is disclosed in the kairological
(thought through the huacaslogical -
phenomenology of sacred place).
All of that is presumed
by the meditation from 1/21/05, which is organized around disclosure; denoted also as ‘unveiling.’ “The artwork is unveiled in the learning of
learning, with the appearance of the new, the releasement of freedom. Such is
teaching as the ‘unveiling’ of the artwork of learning…”(BL 354)
The seizure of chronos is mediated by the teacher,
whose denouncement of the juridical seat of power marks the turning point
(crisis) that breaks the teleological. The disclosure of learning is
coincidental with the denouncement of the juridical: “the removal of the veil
of authority…the know-it-all didactic instructor.”(BL 354) Denouncement and
disclosure co-arise within the same dialectic where destruktion and (de)connstruccion co-exist: “the destructive denouncement that
displays…the performance space of freedom…herein emerges the ‘positive’
negation of the destructive denouncement….”(BL
354)
‘Positive’ negation is
revelatory of the place that allows for the arrival or appearance of the new;
the denouncement of the juridical is an announcement that calls forth the
production of art. “Heidegger indicates
this with a reading of Parmenides…‘At the outset, ‘dis-closure’ could only say
as much as ‘un-veiling,’ the removal of the veiling and the concealment. But disclosure or dis-concealment does not
mean the mere removal and elimination of con-cealment. We must think dis-closure exactly the way we
think of dis-charging (igniting) or dis-playing (unfolding). Discharging meant to release the charge;
displaying means to let play out the folds of the manifold in their
multiplicity.’”(BL 354) The discharging (igniting) force that
displays plurality is released in the positive negation happening via the
denouncement of juridical power, the empowering no that refuses the
teleological organization of education.
Final
comment, also related to last night’s seminar, is more of a promissory note to
myself to return to a citation of Heidegger that made on 1/21/05; a citation
that enables the description of the ‘positive’ act happening in the negation of
the teleological. “And what are these
‘folds’ if not the plurality if not the plurality of liberating en-closures
offered by the teachings that remain attuned to the ceaseless arrival of the
plentitude in/with the learners’ learning.
Such is the ‘feeling of plentitude’ Nietzsche identifies with aesthetic
rapture, what Heidegger describes as ‘an attunement which is so disposed that
nothing is foreign to it, nothing too
much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything –
the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk [endured] by one another.’”(BL 354)
The ‘positive’ act returns the teacher to the originary phenomenological
location, to the Open and the position of radical openeness; the modality of
listening. In last night’s seminar we
explored this position as the modality of the teacher who guides the students
into the Third Space.
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