Endurance and the Profession – Lyotard
(replete with approximations of my own markings and highlights – N Filbert)
On Teaching: or, “going there, without knowing where,” with Jean-Francois Lyotard
Tag: philosophy
Ah, vitality
“Nietzsche is the most sarcastic son of a bitch ever to set foot on this
earth. Just say that; then write whatever else you want, like he would.” —
— So my friend Werner Timmermann tells me, with a gleam in his eye.
He helped with my translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a four-year-long
labor of love, so he knows what he is talking about. Zarathustra (1885)
was Nietzsche’s magnum opus; everything before it was preparation,
everything after it expatiation and elucidation.
But, for some, the question remains: Why Nietzsche? Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was quite simply one of the most original and
influential philosophers who ever lived; in addition, his writing style was
brilliant, epigrammatic, idiosyncratic [“It is my ambition to say in ten
sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does
not say in a book.”] The language dances, prances, whirls and twirls; it
ranges from ghetto-verbalizations and vulgarizations to high art, from
lyricism to sardonicism, from satyr-play to passion play. No one really
writes like Nietzsche, though the number of his stylistic apes and
imitators is legion (especially in the ranks of academe).
-from the introduction 2004 translation of Ecce Homo & The Antichrist
Ecce Homo & The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche (2004)
sympatico-ally discovered via Time’s Flow Stemmed (take a look!)
Grenzsituationen II
Please read previous post with this in mind:
I would love for any/all to share what those “Limit Texts/Artifacts” are for you?
Please share via comment what encounters or engagements with works of art, science, philosophy, writing, music, and any other cultural artifactual form has altered from then on how you select, evaluate, engage other related artifacts from then on?
Thank you!
Reggie Watts
language. but brilliant. necessary? applause.
The Human in Humans (accd’g to Edgar Morin)
“Man fulfills himself as a thoroughly human being only in and by culture. There is no culture in the human brain (biological apparatus able to act, perceive, know, learn), but there is no mind, no spirit, no capacity for consciousness and thought, without culture. The human mind is an emergence, created and affirmed in the brain/culture relationship. Once the mind has emerged it intervenes in cerebral function and retroacts with it. This gives us interdependent and indispensable triads:
brain – mind – culture loop
reason – emotion – impulse loop
individual – society – species loop”
–Edgar Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future–
Thinking about Origins
Along the networks of transductive reading, the following productive co-constitutive readings…
“The beginning is not the same as the origin. When the beginning emerges, the origin recedes, leaving in its wake a past that becomes our future to form a circle that never closes…It is important not to convuse beginning with origin. Origins are always obscure even when beginnings are not.”
–Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere-
“What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience? Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense, is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making. This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them. Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts…”
–Erin Manning, Always More than One–
bear with me – this is extended, but so merits reflection (I think)…
“What if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward. Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world. This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual. A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world…”
“…In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body. Body-worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope. It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus. It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milius that fold in, on, and through one another. For the associated milieu is never ‘between’ constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders. Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self – always toward continued individuation. ‘To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity’ (Gilbert Simondon). Self is a modality – a singularity on the plane of individuation – always on the way toward new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already-contained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of immanent expressibility.”
one more paragraph worth considering?….
“senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces composed of interweaving strata. ‘Once formed, each sense of self remains fully functioning and active throughout life. All continue to grow and coexist’ (Daniel Stern). No stratum is ever completely disarticulated from another in the creation of emergent senses of self. Rather, strata veer through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive fielding. As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of being a coherent, willful, physical entity – foregrounding strata phasing toward organization – may intermesh with the frustration of not being able to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the tending toward coherence – foregrounding the strata phasing toward the virtual or immanence. Every becoming is tinted with this double articulation. There is no stable pre- and postverbal state. There is no stable identity that emerges once and for all. Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration. This is not a containment toward a stable self. It is a momentary cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweaving of forces that both direct and destabilize the ‘self’s’ proto-unification into an ‘I.’ With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment. For double articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutterable, the ineffable – the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility – within language. There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively oriented toward individuation.”
–Erin Manning, Always More than One–
“That from which I emerge approaches by withdrawing”
-Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere–
reflections….?
“Transductive Reading”
Warning: an unfortunate side-effect of immersion in summer, family and graduate studies is the near-impossibility of crafting fragments of writing into art. For the time being, then, if you choose to read this blog, it will consist primarily of recommendations, snippets, quotations and reflections with hopefully a weekly creative venture of flash fiction or a poem or two. The following will fall under the “Reflections” category.
I mentioned “transductive” a few posts ago. As defined by Gilbert Simondon, a transductive relationship is “a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituants: e.g. humanity and technics are indissociable” (from Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time, vol 2: Disorientation).
I read books by piles. From time to time I post an updated “currently reading” list, usually comprised of 50 or more books that I keep lined about my desk as a privacy barrier and womb-like conversational enclosure. I dip in and out of these, ruled by something like mood or intuition – at times I sense exactly what voice or rhythm, style or subject I desire, crave, or need for some sort of equilibrium I lack, and slowly regain by engagement with these texts. In other words, for my own sense of sanity, well-being, provocation or anticipated growth, I need a collective of minds and voices, styles and subjects to wake me, challenge me, inform me, soothe me, spur me on. Here’s a smattering from each of the stacks surrounding me…
What I recognized today, is that the way I read is transductive – each voice, style, subject, mind I engage is co-constitutive of the others I take in.
For example, today I’ve been primarily soaking in Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere, and Roland Barthes‘ The Preparation of the Novel lectures. Barthes describes the urge to change, to purpose singly, “to invest / disinvest / reinvest” as an experience of the “middle-of-the-journey” – an impossible location, but “nothing other than the moment when one realizes that death is real” and time changes, everything is re-evaluated, re-purposed, the familiar is questioned and made strange. I think (transductively) what Taylor refers to as “Elsewhere“: “not so much a place as a condition that renders whatever had seemed familiar utterly strange…the axis of the world shifts, even if ever so slightly, and what passes for normal changes.”
These books are filled with insight, interest and intrigue (as are the whole swoop of titles in the slideshow), but today, today, I am revelling in the company and conversation these writings (surrounding me) construct and carry one, the opportunity I have to be in the midst of it, my mind like a circuit-operator, pushing buttons, pulling plugs, reconnecting, crossing wires, silencing…reading this way is kind of like the work of conducting a symphony – except the melding sounds occur only within the ampitheatrical shell of my own neuronally-linked brain…transductively.
These works co-constitute me, and come to co-constitute my transductive relationships with my loved ones, environment, world. Taylor writes provocatively of all the betwixt and betweens of reality – “I am never sure whether light makes the mountains appear or the mountains make light visible…Darkness in the midst of light and light in the midst of darkness…There is a texture to light that allows – no, requires – the tissue of vision to be constantly woven anew…”
“Paradoxes and contradictions form the very stuff of our lives…the challenge of teaching, writing, and, indeed, living is to join the abstract and the concrete in thinking about questions that truly matter” (Taylor).
At this stage in my own biolography…I feel this acutely and persuasively. The “before / after” of which Barthes writes so fluidly – that there is not enough time left to go on creating projects for the future, what lies behind has not achieved the “wanting-to-write” sufficiently…Elsewhere has been visited (or has visited)…and change, choice and directions must be purposed…
“To Want-to-Write‘ (Vouloir-Ecrire) = attitude, drive, desire, I don’t know what: insufficiently studied, defined, situated. This is clearly indicated by the fact that there’s no word for this ‘wanting to’ – or rather, one exists, a delightful exception, but in decadent, late Latin: scripturire, used just once (in the fifth century) by Sidoine Apollinaire, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand who defended Clermont against the Visigoths (major poetic work). What I mean to say is: since a word exists in one language, albeit only once, it is wanting in all the others…
Why? Probably because underrepresented, or perhaps, in a more complex manner, because here the relationship between the drive and the activity is autonymical: wanting-to-write is only a matter of the discourse of someone who has written – or is only received as discourse from someone who has managed to write. To say that you want to write – there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write – not scientific discourses…an order of knowledge where the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive (and, in that case, belongs to an erotics) – Or, put differently again: writing is not fully writing unless there’s a renunciation of metalanguage; Wanting-to-Write can only be articulated in the language of Writing: this is the autonymy I referred to…”
-Roland Barthes-
I’m there. Elsewhere. Wanting-to-Write…
Infinite Medium / Unlimited Meaning
“And the fact is that ordinary words don’t have just two or three but an unlimited number of meanings, which is quite a scary thought; however, the more positive side of this thought is that each concept has a limitless potential for variety. This is a rather pleasing thought, at least for people who are curious and who are stimulated by novelty.”
– Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander –
It’s complicated
“In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar substances with the same chemical structure can become quite different in their reality and form”
-Michael Gazzaniga-
“On the evolutionary tree, we humans are sitting at the tip of our lonely branch…We have the same roots as all living organisms. All those similarities are there. Our cellular processes depend upon the same biology, and we are subject to the same properties of physics and chemistry. We are all carbon-based creatures. Yet ever species is unique, and we are too. Every species has answered the problem of survival with a different solution, filling a different niche…Homo sapiens entered a cognitive niche…
…in one sentence Garrison Keillor captures humanness…such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity…
BE WELL. DO GOOD WORK. KEEP IN TOUCH.“
-Michael Gazzaniga-
Another strong recommendation from me for those interested in the what’s and how’s and some where’s and when’s of being a particular we.
All my Words are Silent 