Ethics Before Ontology?

Because Heidegger’s fundamental ontology left open the question of ethics (given his own allegiances in his lifetime) we have called into question the priority of ontology, the study of being. For Levinas and (late) Derrida, there is a return to the (ground?) of the ethical. Levinas’ thought has called into question the self-fashioning, active style of living existentialists such as Sartre. Sartre’s philosophy, influenced no doubt by his politics, argues for a philosophy of action and commitment, taking responsibility for one’s own actions as well as the facticity of one’s life. In What is Literature, Sartre argues for a ‘committed’ literature, focusing on the power of prose to alter the world rather than Heidegger’s turn toward poetry in order to think it.

John Caputo, taking his cue from Levinas and Derrida,  critiques phenomenology for its conception of the body as active, healthy, and in full possession of itself. While Maurice Merleau Ponty (early) argues for the primacy of perception, Caputo dares to riff on Derrida’s tears that may blind him to such easy access and movement through the world. He also dares to discuss the flesh as opposed to the body, the flesh of the wounded, the hurt, the sick. Not everyone is a prototypical phenomenological subject.

Levinas’ ethics and the thinkers that have followed in his line (such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida) emphasize the passive aspects of human existence; This is not merely in the mode of “facticity,” as our situation in the world, but on a bodily level—we are all flesh. This leads us to consider questions of suffering as much as understanding (and their relation). Furthermore, this leads away from the ontology of the human being (Dasein) although as many have pointed out, Levinas still remains a bit anthropocentric.  

In this sense, what I will call flesh-phenomenologists, is the inverse of Sartre because they consider the ethical relation of beings rather than trying to define that being in its essence (even if, as Sartre once said, existence precedes essence) or understand the “meaning of being.” Before meaning, before understanding the other, we have to act toward the other in a certain way, perhaps without fully understanding him or her as a “human being.”

For what is it to be a ‘human being’? Heidegger implied that language set us apart. We can inquire into the meaning of our own being (see Being and Time) such that it is at issue for us. Interestingly, the late Heidegger argues that language ‘speaks us’ rather than us speaking it but still, if language is the House of Being then we deny a certain way of being to many things in the world. Yet, there is a passivity in Heidegger’s later thought that we find less in the rhetoric of Sartre. Freedom is a less a matter of Dasein’s possibilities and re-framed as a “letting things be” what they are. Dasein’s task becomes a stewardship to the meaning of being, a protector of its potential. Heidegger writes in “Question Concerning Technology” “Everything, then, depends on this: that we ponder this rising and that, recollecting, we watch over it [. . .] so long as we represent technology as an instrument we remain transfixed in the will to master it” (339). For Heidegger is concerned with What is called for thinking? Thinking does not seem related to writing or action, but is a contemplative act of Dasein. If we ponder truth and safekeep it, what is there left to change?

We can contrast this kind of pondering and revealing mood of late Heidegger with Kenneth Burke’s work. Burke’s pragmatic conception of language and man’s relation to it is that we are the “symbol using, abusing, and making” animal. Language for Burke is a tool. To be sure, not necessarily a tool that we fully possess—our language contains implicit exhortations and attitudes. But, nevertheless, language never achieves that quasi-mystical tone that later Heidegger contains. Burke is concerned primarily with the realm of the human and seeks to lay out a working definition of what man is [enter link to previous post]. But, whether we consider Burke to be working from ontology or from the ethical is where we place our emphasis.

For me, Burke remains a moralist in the best possible sense, taking into account Nietzsche’s deconstruction (for lack of a better term) of traditional morality and his task of transvaluation of all values. While there have been some (me included) who have drawn together Burke and Heidegger based on their interest in language, I think that if we shift the focus from the verbal to the “more than verbal” we can find parallels between Burke and the flesh-phenomenologists.

Perhaps the most basic (and crude) distinction we can make between the existential phenomenologists (Heidegger, Sartre, Camus(?), De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) and the flesh-phenomenologists stems from looking at the religiosity of the latter. Levinas and Derrida draw from the Judeo-Christian religion as does Jean-Luc Nancy. For Levinas, the ethical imperative of a person’s “face” is the presence of the infinite within the finite and commands us not to kill. “Face” is not what one would expect. D. Diane Davis writes (citing Levinas):

Neither visible nor conceivable nor perceivable, face ‘is what cannot become content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond.’ What one encounters in the face to face is the other’s finitude, the other’s exposedness—that is to say, both his or her mortality (susceptibility to wounding, to ravaging illness, to ‘the cold and the heat of the seasons’) and, simultaneously, his or her transcendence as sheer ungraspableness. (11-12)

Burke, in his dialectical and more pragmatic manner sees the ethical imperative of Thou Shalt Not Kill as the negative, which is an “idea” in the sense that it cannot be properly pictured. The realm of the Thou Shalt Not is that of action rather than ‘motion’. But Burke’s action is rarely a passive action. Obviously influenced by Kant, Burke writes: “And action is possible only insofar as the rational agent transcends the realm of sheer motion—sensory image [. . .] he can act rather than merely being moved or ‘affected’ (430-31). Thus, we see that for Burke, commands are not related to our passivity, which is rather in the realm of the sensory—we are affected by those things that ‘move’ us rather than allow us to act.

However, we have to be careful here because, again, Burke’s dialectical thinking provides a caveat: “Hence, though the injunction, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is in essence an idea, in its role as imagery it can but strike the resonant gong: kill!” (431). To me, this is the Hegel coming out in Burke—the negation of something is that something plus something else.


 Levinas, however, is interested in how the realm of the ‘senses’, the flesh, the face of the other, its irreducible difference can command us to ethical being. We have no choice in the matter because there is not properly speaking an “I” before the confrontation with the other. As Gerald Burns recently puts it,

It is rather than I am a subjectivity without a subject—until I become subject to another’s claim, redeemed (so to speak) by the accusative voice that summons me out of my clandestine self to exist for another. I am not I (whoever I may be) until another interrogates me. (Bruns 23)

If we think about this from Bruns perspective, then it is not incompatible with Burke’s insistence on the limitations of man’s biological central nervous system. Diane Davis sums up Burke’s position:

Prior to language acquisition, psychosexual development, and class consciousness, burke proposes, there is biological estrangement, ontology’s insurance premium for securing his entire rhetoric of relationality [. . .] For him, the division between self and other is the ‘state of nature’ that is identifications motivating force: identification’s job is to transcend this natural state of division, and rhetoric’s job is identification. (Davis 22)

I think that biological separation (which, surely, Levinas would not deny!) is not the same as ontological separation. However, I agree with Davis that Burke does locates a separate ontological individual. But I wouldn’t go about showing the tenuousness of Burke’s claim through appealing to mirror neurons. Davis argues,

The ‘centrality’ of each individual nervous system can hardly be characterized as ‘divisive’ when it doesn’t manage consistently to distinguish between self and other; indeed, at the level of the organism, a rather astonishing condition of indistinction announces itself. (Davis 24)

I will look at Burke’s claim in terms of individuation with respect to the body and what we would call ‘soul” or “mind,” looking at how Burke conceives our bodies. Davis rightly identifies Burke’s conception of the biological necessity of private property: “What the body eats and drinks becomes its special private proprety; the body’s pleasures and pains are exclusively its own pleasure and pains” (Burke qtd. in Davis 22). For Burke, the concept of private property is not only important to our “egoistic impulses” but also to morals. In Permanence and Change, Burke writes,

Property and propriety are not etymologically so close by mere accident [. . .] Morals and property are integrally related. They are obverse and reverse of the same coin. They both equip us for living. There is an integral relationship between these two kinds of weapons, tools, or capital.” (212)

But what if we take away not the fact that we are separate biological organisms, but rather question our relationship to our bodies themselves? This is what not only the flesh-phenomenologists have done, but also, to a certain extent, Stanley Cavell. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell writes, “A better relation to the body is expressed by saying that I am the body’s possession. I am of it, it has claims upon me” (383). Yet, like Burke, Cavell ultimately affirms a separateness among us. This is the problem he sees with skepticism: “the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle,” a “metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” (Cavell 493). Although, Cavell is not quite sure what separates us (and what causes our finitude)—it does not seem to be merely the central nervous system. He writes,

The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated by something; that we, each us, bodies i.e. embodied; each is this one and not that, each her and not there, each now and not then. If something separates us, comes between us, that can only be a particular aspect or stance of the mind itself, a particular way in which we relate, or are related to one another. (Cavell 369)

But, I see a major difference in Cavell and Levinas’ thought. For Levinas there is no “I” or “we” prior to the other to acknowledge others. Cavell analyzes are condition in similar ways, but comes to the conclusion that we should self-fashion ourselves—take responsibility for creating ourselves. But for Levinas, we do not create ourselves. Paul Standish argues that this difference stems from the fact that Cavell does not accept Levinas’ emphasis on ethics before ontology: “From a Levinasian point of view, Cavell’s concern with “claims of the existence of the other” comes too late” (Standish 7-8).

Standish asks: does ethics before ontology “make sense,” which, to a Levinasian, is probably considered a silly question. The critique Standish offers of Levinas is his Western/Occidental focus, which I think is easy to pick on. To be fair, Standish is looking at these two thinkers from the point of view of education. I have already discussed Levinas’ idea of education according to D. Diane Davis as a trauma, a “shattering of self and world.” Cavell and Levinas are both skeptical about the possibility of “knowing” the other (in the sense of “grasping” and appropriating). But although Cavell also believes that learning takes place as a disruption of one’s identity, it is not so that it stays shattered. In fact, it becomes a way to know oneself:

It is the ability to make oneself an other to oneself, to learn of oneself something one did not already know. Hence this is the focus at which knowledge of onself and of others meet. I should think a sensible axiom of the knowledge of persons would be this: that one can see others only to the extent that one can take oneself as another. (459)

To make oneself another is a bit different than “identifying” with a specific other, but rather involves (it seems to me) a shattering of the self, but then, somehow, we are also supposed to learn something else about ourselves through this process? Do we create ourselves based on this process? There is no “self” prior to the confrontation? I am not sure. Although, it is interesting that Cavell takes us from the ethical relation of “acknowledgment” back to the realm of knowledge of oneself. Is this the same kind of knowledge Davis argues from Levinas’ work: we can only “undergo it; suffer it as an interruption, a rhetorical rupture” (207). But then—is it the other that makes us an “other” or is it ourselves through our own devices that can make of ourselves an “other.” If it is the latter, maybe this is why Cavell does not derive from his reflections a fundamental responsibility toward the other, but responsibility toward ourselves (which is definitely related to his study of Emerson). We have a choice as to our attitude on the world (this is the kind of ‘moral’ Cavell derives from his texts): “that we are tragic in what we take to be tragic; that one must take one’s imperfections with a ‘gay and sociable wisdom’ not with a somber and isolating eloquence. It is advice to accept one’s humanity” (494).

            Let us look at how Cavell frames responsibility to the other:

I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. This descent, or ascent, of the problem of the other is the key way I can grasp the alternative process of secularization called romanticism. And it may explain why the process of humanization can become a monstrous undertaking, placing infinite demands upon finite resources. It is an image of what living our skepticism comes to. (470)

For Cavell, the problem of the other stems from the ‘trace’ or ‘scar’ of the departure of God—following Nietzsche in his proclamation that God is Dead (and we have killed him). Rather than claiming a “departure” for God, Levinas asks what possible meaning “God” can have if he is otherwise than being. Furthermore, Levinas frequently appeals to Descartes’ claim that there is an “idea” of infinity placed into the other; However, Levinas does not want this to translate into the claim that we have a “part” of God in us so that ‘God’ is distributed among people; remember, God is not essence/being. And yet, contra Cavell, I do not think that Levinas would think there has been a trace of a departure; instead, there is a ‘trace’ of God within the other.

If this is true, then Cavell’s use of the term “monstrous” to describe the process of “humanization” does not have to hold. True, the other does place an infinite demand upon finite resources in the sense that we must consider the third man in order to look toward Justice. We cannot let the infinite demand of the other make us forget about all other others (yes I know this is a strange way of putting it). But if Levinas is right that there remains the “idea” of the infinite, an idea and a trace that allows for some kind of transcendence, then perhaps it should not be framed as “monstrous[1]
”

Cavell claims that being human is “the power to grant being human” (Cavell qtd. in Bruns 41). In Levinas’ theory it seems that each ‘other’ human has the power to grant being human simply because they are other. So, in that sense, Cavell and Levinas would agree. However, Bruns frames Cavell as offering a theory of candidacy of the ‘human’ rather than the human as a category with set criteria. Humanness for Levinas seems already there—Levinas has frequently been critiqued for his anthropocentrism.

Bruns’ own argument in On Ceasing to Be Human concerns the question of the animal. According to Bruns, Derrida advocates ridding ourselves of the word ‘animal’ and to stop thinking about the line between animal and human as one binary line. Bruns interprets this as a shift from the “what” (let us say, “cat”—or even the “I”)  to the who: “In contrast to the ‘givenness’ of the ‘I’ [. . .] the mode of existence of the who is just that of being in doubt or in question, being addressed, accused, or called to account (Bruns 95). Questions we may ask are, “Who am I to attribute abilities to myself that I refuse to the animal-other? Indeed, by what right, that is, on what basis to I attribute to myself this or that capacity at all, whether I deny it to other or not?” (Bruns 94).


Thus, we turn to a who question: Who(ever?) has the power to “grant being human”? For Levinas, any human other with a ‘face’, a trace of the infinite. For Cavell, it seems that we ultimately are the ones that have to decide to what extent we want to grant human status, but that there are no set, universal criteria on which to base this decision. Cavell recommends that we make ourselves another to ourselves. So far as I understand it from Bruns, Derrida claims that this is not something we have to actively do: “To the question ‘Who am I?’ there is no answer, for the simple reason that I am as much an other to myself as I am to my neighbor or to my host or, for that matter, to my cat” (Bruns 96). Perhaps we can draw on Levinas here and argue that it is the other others (human and non) who make of us others to ourselves because it calls us to responsibility for the other in his place. But can we take the place of the animal other? Is substitution possible?

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[1] Query: If the human is the ‘face’ of the other (and thus the trace of the infinite) then is not Levinas’ own thought based primarily on ontology? True, God may be conceived of a relation but surely we would have  to make clearer distinctions between human and non-human others. D. Diane Davis in her “P.S.” to Inessential Solidarity shows Levinas wavering on this point—he cannot say for sure if snakes, for instance, “have a face” in his sense. 

Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Sociology: A Commentary on Deleuze and Guattari, Randall Collins, and John Muckelbauer

Drawing on theories Deleuze and Guattari and Jacques Derrida, John Muckelbauer attempts to map out a new orientation toward rhetoric. While not explicitly citing much of their work, Muckelbauer is clearly working within the frames set out by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy. While What is Philosophy focuses on laying out how philosophy as a creation of concepts differs from the tasks of science, logic, and art, Muckelbauer’s book seems to be oriented toward a theoretical pedagogy; we may look at Muckelbauer’s book as an attempt to create a “pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments” (D&G 10). Rather than use the loaded term ‘concept,’ Muckelbauer creates the term “singular rhythm” to designate a certain way of inhabiting a text or an idea. Furthermore, following Derrida, Muckelbauer is more attentive to texts and their particular contents rather than describing the concept as such.

Muckelbauer seeks an “affirmative” rhetoric rather than one based on dialectical negation; at the same time, he realizes this is strictly impossible to describe, but can only be attempted as performance or demonstration. Thus, he splits his book into two parts: a description and a demonstration. As with D. Diane Davis, Muckelbauer wants to pay attention to the asignifying functions of language (what Davis calls, citing Levinas, the “saying”) rather than the content communicated. While D&G avoid a confrontation with rhetoric as such, they argue that philosophy primarily concerns the concept, which is always “a force or a form,” but never a function (D&G 144). Muckelbauer reads the term “force” in terms of rhetoric’s dealings with persuasion rather than communication: “persuasive rhetoric attempts to make the proposition compelling, to give it a certain force [. . .] its ability to evoke particular responses in specific audiences” (Muckelbauer 17). In other words, the act of persuasion is not concerned with “what the proposition is” but what “the proposition does,” even though we cannot escape that the asignifying function implies the signifying, we focus on its movement (Muckelbauer 18). Muckelbauer moves on to argue that if we focus on the movement of both humanism and anti-humanism, we can see that both do the same thing: appropriation rather than creation.  However, this is only true so far as we think of these ‘movements’ (and inhabit them) as definitive positions. Muckelbauer writes,

That is why all anti-foundationalisms are necessarily already            foundationalisms. Because they advance themselves as a position, as a    content that locates itself in relation to some             other position, they cannot     help but partake of the logic of identity and the dialectical movement of   appropriation it enables. (32)

Thus, even though we must repeat, everything hinges on how we repeat—what variations are used. Muckelbauer can only go so far as to explain what he means and he attempts it many times. For instance, in discussing Deleuze’s impatience with “critique,” Muckelbauer argues that critique is an “external orientation toward the extraction of constants” and that in order to attend to the singular rhythms “requires a kind of performance, an immersive responsiveness” (42). Muckelbauer will demonstrate this as a type of orientation in the following chapters, where he argues that “what the ideal student will learn through imitation is not only a style or an ethical rule; he will require the capacity to respond itself” (76). Echoing Diane Davis[1] and many thinkers we may call “postmodern” this capacity to respond can be reinforced by cultivating permeability of identity so that we may be affected by others (see Muckelbauer pgs 98, 122)

I realize that most of my comments will be in the mode of critique, but I am not so sure that we can just take D&G’s word that criticism cannot be creative. D&G baldly state that “those who criticize without creating [. . .] are the plague of philosophy” (28). Criticism is a mode of judgment different from what D&G will call “taste” (which I will have to return to) as it is based on communication, which is caught in mere “opinion.” In parts of this text, communication and conversation are dirty words to D&G: “nor does philosophy find any final refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’ and not ‘concepts’” (6). And again: “when it comes to creating, conversation is superfluous” (28). This kind of polemic against communication, as I pointed out in my last post on WIP, from D&G’s understanding of communication as having only one goal: universal liberal consensus. However, we may understand D&G’s frustration with communication if we look at yet another bold remark: “We do not lack communication. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (108). This sentiment stems from the most explicit political chapter in the book: geophilosophy. I have already critiqued (yes, I know, I’m not getting anywhere with critique) them on this point (see previous blog post). However, because philosophy inevitably must be communicated and distributed, they try and relegate all three not-philosophy to “figures” or “functions”: “contemplation, reflection, and communication” (92-93).

Now we must get into D&G’s distinctions between figures, functions, and concepts. On the one hand, figures are vertical, paradigmatic, transcendent, projective, hierarchal, and referential concepts, on the other hand, are “syntagmatic, connective, linking, consistent, and not referential” (88-89). Concepts are the more complex entities that we must seek to understand, or to dismiss (as I want to do) as a word standing in for an ideal being that because we cannot have access to it, is a useless formulation. D&G claim that the concept cannot be evaluated externally by any criteria other than the criteria it sets up for itself: “a possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence,” its evaluated by the “tenor of existence” or “intensification of life.” Thus, it seems as though we can only ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ whether a concept is worthwhile. This is D&G’s appropriation of Kant’s ‘tatse’ through Nietzsche: “Nietzsche sensed this relationship of the creation of concepts with a specifically philosophical taste, and if the philosopher is he who creates concepts, it is thanks to a faculty of taste [. . .] that gives each philosopher the right of access to certain problems” (79). Concepts are evaluated based on their addressing of problems, but problems that are on the plane of immanence: “if the concept is a solution, the conditions of the philosophical problem are found on the plane of immanence presupposed by the concept” (80-81). For D&G this is how Philosophy is inspired: “categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure” (82). However, the criteria for this seem to be readers: “they [many books of philosophy] lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought or beget a persona worth the effort” (83). However, the interest of a particular concept (text?) is a subjective feeling—how can this be the basis on which texts, ideas, and positions are transferred to the next generation?

Figures and concepts, although different, are also related:  “figures tend toward concepts to the point of drawing infinitely near to them” (92). The ‘functions’ that D&G describe are ‘referential’ in the sense that they pin down the infinity of thought into “states of affairs.” Even logic (and by extension mathematics) must be referential because its truth claim in itself is “empty,” so it has to be attached to the states of affairs. Ironically, in their quest to rid philosophy of transcendent impulses, they may mis-characterize the origin of science in their obscure jargon, and thus assign it as starting from a transcendent point: “Science passes from chaotic virtuality to the states of affairs and bodies that actualize it” (D&G 156). This does not take into account that science goes from the states of affairs to a ‘virtual’ realm—or a realm of positions that are networked together in struggle and sympathy at various times. Science as well is an intellectual discipline that abstracts from the concrete events and particulars to what D&G want to call the ‘non-referential’, but really they are just moving to another level of abstraction.

D&G’s positive philosophy of creation, to me, seems to leave out major concrete and material practices that cause philosophy to bloom. I think that Randall Collins’ Sociology of Philosophies can help us demystify some of D&G’s terminology and, I hope, to eliminate some of the “real beings” posited by them—which just leads us into either a realist metaphysics or another metaphor for describing existence (another Ur-doxa to use their terminology).

For all of the scholarship that has used D&G to radically destabilize our conception of self and other, we find at the end of the day that What is Philosophy formulates thinking as an infinite movement of the brain (the individual) rather than a social process: “It is still necessary to discover, beneath the noise of actions, those internal creative sensations or those silent contemplations that bear witness to a brain” (213). Also, they posit real mental beings: “ideas can only be associated as images and can only be ordered as abstractions; to arrive at the concept we must go beyond both of these and arrive as quickly as possible at mental objects determinable as real being” 207). One more quotation: “Will the turning point not be elsewhere, in the place where the brain is “subject,” where it becomes subject? It is the brain that thinks and not man—the latter being only a cerebreal crystallization” (210).  De-emphasizing communication and circulation, D&G forget that creation is motivated by “opinion” just as much as the virtual realm of concepts (if that even exists).

D&G talk a lot about the ‘plane of immanence’. The plane of immanence is referred to in many ways throughout the text, including the instituting of philosophy: “the plane is clearly not a program, design, end, or means: it is a plane of immanence that constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy [. . .] the foundation on which it creates its concepts” (41). Now, the ‘plane of immanence’ in this formulation recalls to my mind two other ideas from other philosophers: Heidegger’s fore-understanding and Plato/Derrida’s “chora.” I find the “chora” to be a more useful and poetic concept, because it is not a foundation on which all concepts are layed out, but, according to Greg Ulmer, implies a sacredness and, furthermore, a personal locale. The plane of immanence seems a bit more grandiose and, to me, idealist. Heidegger’s “pre-understanding” is our experience of the world. It seems as though D&G here mean something different, but cannot quite specify what it is: is it the less formulated, fractured and ‘abstract’ Hegelian sense experience? Or is this happening in some ideal land—Plato like?

Another way of explaining the “plane of immanence” is to demystify it, as I believe Randall Collins does in The Sociology of Philosophies. For Collins, thinking is a social act involving the engagement of intellectuals. While keeping philosophy a separate and distinct realm from science, mathematics, and art (though the last is not really discussed), he tries to put it in terms of networks. Collins begins with describing, very accurately, the “interaction rituals” of intellectuals. Contra Deleuze and Guattari, Collins argues that communication, discourse, and face to face rituals are the grounding of intellectual activity. Rather than making bald ontological claims, as Heidegger and others have done (mit-sein), Collins describes intellectual activity in terms of sacredness and energy, drawing heavily on the theories of Durkheim and Pierre Bordieu. As I pointed out in a previous post, intellectuals get Emotional Energy from engaging with other intellectuals face-to-face, which moves them to create. Intellectuals gain Cultural Capital when they produce work that opens new spaces: “Great intellectual work is that which creates a large space on which followers can work. This implies that the imperfections of major doctrines are the source of their appeal” (32).  This, I believe, is part of what D&G try and describe the ‘plane of immanence’. However, the plane of immanence is not only related to the conceptual realm, since it is the “instituting” of philosophy. Collins believes that intellectual work always must be supported by a material base: “This outermost level of macro-causality does not so much directly determine the kinds of ideas created as given an impetus for stability or change in the organizations which support intellectual careers and this molds in turn the networks within them” (51). Rather than going from the inside-out, Collins works from the outside in, claiming that what we call individual thinking is “fantasy play of membership inside one’s own mind” because as we think we are engaging with others. Furthermore, Collins offers a psychological description of ‘intensity’ of concepts: “symbols are charged up with intensity” and this can fuel creativity (Collins 49). I doubt many intellectuals can deny that coming back from a lecture, or reading an inspiring book, charges one up emotionally so that we can engage once again through writing and thinking.

Ultimately, Collins points toward the main problem I have with D&G’s distinctions: reference. D&G seem to think that philosophy exists in a special realm that is not ‘referential’ or referring to the ‘states of affairs’ in any way, as if the realm of concepts could transcend the discourse, discussion, and communication about them. Philosophy for Collins is a separate realm, but not because it is not referential.  Collins offers a very quick sociological interpretation for the distinction between sense and reference: “The reference of words is their pointing to something outside that segment of conversation; the sense of words [. . .] is their symbolic connection to social solidarity, that is, to their past histories and present usage in interaction ritual chains” (Collins 47). Philosophy usually does both of these, as it refers to its own tradition and it connects us socially to a group.

For Collins, philosophy is characterized by abstraction and reflexivity. In this sense, Collins is able to put philosophy, science, and mathematics on a continuum rather than completely separate disciplines; to use Bergson’s terminology Deleuze is so fond of, he makes it a difference in degree more than a difference in kind: “[philosophy], as the purest form of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, philosophy is constantly re-digging its foundations, moving not (789). It’s not that science does not abstract and reflect, but that they stay on a “fixed level of abstraction” (789).  Thus, science still abstracts, but scientists agree on a common level of abstraction—a fixed plane of immanence, if we wish to use D&G’s terminology.

If we take the plane of immanence to be roughly equivalent to the external material base that ‘institutes’ philosophy, we can better understand why D&G bring politics into the middle of their work. D&G argue that what we lack “resistance to the present,” and that this can be heralded by philosophical concepts. Furthermore, they speak of revolution as the absolute deterritorialization:

As concept and as event, revolution is self-referential or enjoys a self-positing that enables it to be apprehended in an immanent enthusiasm without anything in states of affairs or lived experience being able to tone it down, not even the disappointments of reason. Revolution is the absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people. (101)

. . .Or, according to Collins, revolution (or any major shock to the material base) is what produces the conditions for new concepts: “Continuous movement in the abstraction-reflexivity sequence depends on repeated shocks to the external base” (793). Indeed, this seems to me to be a better explanation, as it does not rule out the creative possibilities of commentaries, which Collins argues do not make philosophers necessarily unoriginal. For instance, the Scholastics, as much as D&G may disagree with their religion or politics “constituted one of the most intensely creative periods in the history of world philosophy, exemplary of the abstraction sequence at its most dynamic” (794). Furthermore, novelty and creation does not just arise out of nowhere. Collins makes the rather easy observation that weak positions are synthesized and strong positions fracture and compete (Collins 116). In fact, we can see that Deleuze is another instance of a grand synthesizer. While he does not tackle the entirety of philosophy, he creates a canon of philosophers who he interprets in his own language; Heidegger did the same thing (particularly with Nietzsche).

It’s not that D&G are completely at odds with Collins. Indeed, Collins makes similar claims (with different jargon) about individual thinkers: “If the process [of thinking] is often accompanied by a feeling of exultation, it is because these are not merely any ideas but ideas that feel successful” (52). However, the test for Collins is a social reference.

And so we return to the problem of reference once again. Collins also has a bit of a problem when it comes to ‘reference’, and he tries to argue his way from a position he calls ‘sociological realism’: “Social constructivism is sociological realism; and sociological realism carries with it a wide range of realist consequences” (858). This implies that social networks “exist,” and whether or not we buy the following arguments concerning mathematics and science is based on whether we think these networks are “real.” This is a bit problematic as the networks involve some interpretation, in order to categorize them into positions. However, I think that Collins’ concrete descriptions of mathematics and science are more likely and avoid needless metaphysical assumptions.

As I pointed out above, I think Deleuze and Guattari mistakenly attribute science a top down approach, from the ‘virtual of chaos’ to ‘actualized’ bodies, as if scientists were drawing something out from a realm of Ideas. In order to avoid the problem I see in D&G, Collins makes a distinction between the network of intellectuals that make up the scientific community and the lineage of research equipment that mediate experimentation. He describes their relationship:  “The genealogy of equipment is carried along by a network of scientific intellectuals who cultivate and cross-breed their technological crops in order to produce empirical results, which can be grafted onto an ongoing lineage of intellectual argument” (871). Abstractions and phenomena in our everyday language come when “standardized equipment, or some offspring of it, is shipped out of the laboratory” (872). More importantly, “the obdurate reality acquired by some entities of science comes more from their material grounding in equipment than from their theoretical conceptualization (872).

Ultimately, Collins understands the difference between science and philosophy not by positing the ‘virtual’ or ‘chaos’, but by arguing from the process of abstraction:

Since their level of abstraction stays fairly constant, scientists are unconcerned with problems of reflexivity, especially the deep troubles of  high degrees of self-consciousness which have been reached in philosophy since 1900. (878)

Of course, I am not content with letting Collins have the final say. As a philosopher (theorist? Whatever the hell I am) I must question the assumptions of even Collins’ very strong and, most importantly, careful arguments. Collins himself points to one the weaknesses of his overarching text: “The weak resolution of the telescope makes it easy to slip back into reifying personalities, the personal names treated as noun substances who are the normal topics of intellectual historiography” (53). Indeed, although Collins emphasizes the networks on both the vertical (intergenerational) and horizontal chains, and though he may not “reify personalities” he does reify thinkers into positions and schools.

The main challenge I have with this book (and why I probably won’t read all 900 something pages of it) is the lack of citation of primary texts[2], because I believe, as Derrida does of the Marxist text, that the text of philosophies are multiple and not unitary. Collins insistence to turn the history of philosophy into a network of positions is admirable, but does not seem to be attentive to the “creation” of novelty that he wants to describe. There is no attention to the ‘styles’ of these philosophers, which one could argue has as much to do with their possibilities for thought than the ‘position’ they advocate within their contemporaries and the surrounding tradition. D&G I believe make this mistake as well, perhaps even more so, generalizing in the chapter on “Geophilosophy” about national characteristics limiting the possibilities for thinking[3]. This is my problem with Collins’ assumption that he can reduce post-structuralism to a branch of sociology: “The widespread poststructuralist notion that the world is made up of arbitrary oppositions has its roots in classical sociology” (11). I am not denying that this is not true—clearly Derrida is greatly indebted to Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, but I think Collins assumes that post-structuralist’s like Derrida think they have created something ex nihilio. The strength of post-structuralism is its pushing the boundaries of language and thought, not its position on language.

Of course, this leads me all the way back to Muckelbauer’s critique of the appropriative movement that comes from making something a position. I think that Muckelbauer tries to show the difference between an orientation toward identification in opinion (doxa) and how one can be oriented toward the “singular rhythm” (which we may call event or concept). Perhaps this will help us understand why Deleuze and Guattari do not see opinion as philosophical movement. They write,

opinion triumphs when the quality chosen cases to be the condition of the    groups constitution but is now only the ‘image’ or ‘badge’ of the                        constituted group that itself determines the perceptive and affective model,   the quality of affection, that each must acquire (Muckelbauer 146).

Thus, one is oriented toward identification with the group as an entity rather than what motivated the group to form? But if we take Collins seriously and agree that intellectuals do want to ‘belong’ to the group, then are we not back to a kind of question of ‘authentic’ modes of existence (a la the existentialists?)? In other words, are we oriented toward the group correctly when it does not concern ourselves, but rather to serve the purpose (goal?) of the group—to foster innovation and novelty? Can we do this?

This orientation seems to be Muckelbauer’s position, as one of the most concrete examples in his book illustrates. Muckelbauer uses the concrete fact that everyone can have the same opinion as an “indication of the singular rhythms within opinion, a kind of movement that actually enables the identifying logic of possessions itself (that allows us to ‘have’ an opinion)” (162). In a way, this seems like a mystification/abstraction of the ‘liberal consensus’ that Deleuze and Guattari criticized so harshly. However, Muckelbauer uses the example of the IDEO corporation to show how certain practices may foster a different orientation: “a group’s key feature concerns the dynamics within it, the group’s inclination, for example, to waste and discard and experiment with their ideas rather than attempt to own them” (163). Because  “the problem with individuals, in other words, is that their relation to their inventions tends to be one of identification” the IDEO corporation forms and then dissolves groups (163). By keeping individuals circulating in different groups for different (purposes? Innovative problems? I don’t know) IDEO creates many new ideas.

The danger in all of this may be that this too falls prey to what D&G call the “market” version of the concept, because it relies on collaboration and communication. Collins, even moreso than Muckelbauer, relies on ‘market’ and economic metaphors to describe his theories. He argues that there is a “law of small numbers” that makes it possible for only 3-6 major positions circulating at a time. This seems like it could be true, but within an increasingly stratified and interdisciplinary academic market, these 3-6 major positions would depend on the specificity of one’s own research, reading, and discipline. Furthermore, Collins argues that the energizing force of an intellectual career is the “motivation to make oneself a sacred object” (36). On one level, even I as an intellectual cannot deny this aspect of intellectual work. This very blog is an instance of what Collins so bluntly puts as my tacit desire for people to listen to me, and thus make my way into intellectual attention space.

But what if we could make the move toward an orientation of the ‘extraction of the common’? Muckelbauer’s discussion of the IDEO corporation reminded me of a common technical writing/corporate writing practice of forming collaborative groups to produce a document. As one writer points out, the writer’s have to merge all their ideas into the document, sacrificing their individual voices in order to become the ‘voice of the company’. This sounds terrifying, but perhaps the difference between the technical documents creation and the innovation of IDEO is that there is no distinct already planned purpose or goal to the formation of the group and that the purpose/goal emerges as the group discusses ideas—it’s like a collaborative Kantian “purposive without purpose,” but this is another discussion.

Perhaps given D&G’s assumption that Kant got it right, I should read in its entirety Critique of Judgment—perhaps I will find there a sweeter philosophical taste.

Works Cited

Collins, Randall. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual

            Change. Cambridge: Belknap, 1998.

            Davis, D. Diane. “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and The                                                    Nonappropriative  Relation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 38.3 (2005) pgs 191-212.

                        Web.
 

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

            Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Muckelbauer, John. The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem

            Of Change. New York: SUNY, 2008. 

---

[1] Learning is a “trauma, a shattering of self and world” (Davis 199).

[2] I am also shocked that Collins did not cite letter exchanges between intellectuals (such as the ones between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre). Forgive me if he does cite those in the later chapters (which I intend to read), but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that that would have made his book a million times longer. Perhaps the better way to view this absence is that Collins book is a ‘great intellectual work’ that opens up the space for considering how a network of intellectuals helped form their ideas, which we have sometimes done with literary figures (ex: Bloomsbury).

[3] This is quite ironic to me since it seems that many of the particular cultural studies theorists have jumped on D&G as a proponent of deterritorializing identity and disturbing boundaries. Its remarkable how conservative What is Philosophy make them out to be! 

Responding to D. Diane Davis and John Muckelbauer's conversation on Levinas, Ethics, and Hermeneutics

This is an old post from a prior blog I wrote last year. I have begun to revisit this conversation as I work my way through Davis' new book Inessential Solidarity. 

    In “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation,” Diane Davis discusses the limits of rhetorical hermeneutics. Rhetorical hermeneutics, or, a hermeneutic rhetoric leaves out the “non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning making” (Davis 192). In order to investigate this dimension, she adds to Stephen Mallioux interpretation of communication in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mallioux believes there is no way to encounter the other without subjecting him or her to one’s own cultural assumptions because a completely other would be unintelligible (Davis 198). Far from refuting this claim, Davis (citing Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time of the pre-understanding) believes that this is the only way to understand a subject. Davis disagrees with Mailloux, who argues that it is impossible to encounter the other as completely other. To do this, she draws on the work of Emmanual Levinas.

       The distinction between a Levinasian conception of the other and Mailloux hermeneutical one is framed by the way they describe learning. Whereas Mailloux argues that learning is an appropriative relation that forces us to deal with the other on our own terms, Levinas’ conception of learning involves the other’s intrusion into our own system of meaning. Levinas makes a distinction between the “said” and the “saying.” The “said” is the signifying and thus hermeneutical side of an “address.” The saying is the performative, asignifying aspect of the address. In Davis’ words, the address is “both the exposedness of the other and the obligation to respond” (194). Thus, the other calls us to respond, in a sense, by interrupting our hermeneutic desire for meaning. Learning does not take place by appropriating or colonizing the other on one’s own terms, but rather true learning, for Levinas is a “trauma, a shattering of ‘self’ and ‘world’” (Davis 199). We cannot “know” the other because we are in no position to ‘know. That is, we have no position outside our relationship with the other. Indeed, as Davis writes, we cannot “know” radical alterity, we can only “undergo it, suffer it as an interruption, a rhetorical rupture” (207).

       Just as Davis makes clear that she is not merely refuting Mailloux’s position, so John Muckelbauer is at pains to make sure that he is not offering “a critique or defense of either Davis’s or Levinas’s discourse” because he does not believe that the “risks” he will identify stem from any failure on their part. Instead, he argues that their discourses “expose” risks and impossibilities (Muckelbauer 241). Just before jumping into the four risks he reminds the reader again that he does not want to either take sides in an intellectual debate nor offer a ‘third’ alternative. Such a desire for a different and yet not different style of engagement stems from discussions that occur in his then forthcoming, now out, book The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. He argues that even though humanism and modernism seem directly opposed to each other in content, they do the same thing: “Because they advance themselves as a position, as a content that locates itself in relation to some other position, they cannot help but partake of the logic of identity and the dialectical movement of appropriation that it enables” (Muckelbauer 32). In the spirit of not taking sides, Muckelbauer offers four “risks” that Davis and Levinas expose.

      The first risk involves the difficulty of “thematizing something that is irreducible to understanding or knowledge” (241). Even thematizing something as “unknowable” makes it knowable, is to “the make the other into a theme, a “said.” The second risk is that even if this is avoided, they risk saying that theencounter with the other can be “subjectively experienced,” so it is important to make sure that the “undergoing” Davis discusses are not experiences. Muckelbauer acknowledges that Davis seems to effectively understand this risk (Muckelbauer 242). The third risk is addressed to the use of “metaphorics of excess,” which Muckelbauer argues that the “discourse of excess is coterminous with the discourse of signification itself” (243). Again, Muckelbauer doesn’t charge that Davis has not thought of this, but rather explicitly points to Davis’ attempts to clarify her meaning. The fourth and final risk is the risk that even the discourses that call us to recognize the other “on its own terms” implies that the other possesses its own terms. I take Muckelbauer to mean here that it is as if the other is a unified subject that, should we be able to, we could “properly” respond to it.

This fourth risk seems to be what we might call Muckelbauer’s “critique” of Levinas and Davis. While it is true he uses an interesting style of engagement that points to the “risks” (the “effects” of Davis and Levinas discourse) while, at the same time, showing how Davis attends to these risks, the fourth risk seems to reveal Muckelbauer’s “position.” He writes,

 attending to the ethical encounter with the irreducible other can quickly become yet another moralism. . .it is not far from attentiveness to irreducible otherness to a discourse that wants to distinguish the right way of attending to this irreducible other (through such familiar terms as welcoming, generosity, and openness) from  the wrong way closing down, violence, appropriation). Through such a   movement, the irreducible other is reduced to the new terrain for judgment (244).

     I can understand Muckelbauer’s fear that this will become simply another “moralism” in the sense that Levinas is trying to get at an ethics that goes beyond the mundane, but Muckelbauer seems to have something against judgment. His strongest claim in the entire essay is that “one can never simply point to any of these discourses as being somehow ethically or politically superior because it is more attentive to difference or more concerned with the other” (246).  As Muckelbauer seems to slide back into this idea that we might be able to inhabit these discourses in an effective way, but, I think, Davis will argue that this doesn’t take the Levinasian challenge to ethics seriously enough. Davis identifies the “fifth risk” that “such discourses may invite the unfortunate conflation of an im-mediate encounter with alterity (over which “I” have no power) and the attempt to attend to the implications of that encounter” (248). I sense either a hidden polemical tone or a solidarity in the way she engages with his response. For example, when she says “and Muckelbauer understands all of this” and as she cites Muckelbauer saying “Davis’s project” (Davis 248). She clearly states that her project “if we must call it that” has nothing to do with agency or advocating a particular engagement with the other (249). She makes a very astute observation that Muckelbauer “conflates the im-mediate relation with alterity and the (scholarly) attempt to attend to it” (251). We cannot choose a particular response, but we can choose to attend to it or, instead, notattend to it to stay in the safe realm of knowledge and appropriative learning.

Davis then comments on Muckelbauer’s sense of “judgment.” She reads closely the very end of the essay where he first says that this “hope for the impossible encounter for the other” cannot tell us what to endorse but then says “perhaps it can.” Davis is flabbergasted why Muckelbauer won’t come down on either side or the other. Rather than explore that statement at length, she says that she would at the very least argue that one must take it up in one’s discourse. I think that Muckelbauer would say that is ok, but that he wouldn’t say it was the only discourse that could produce similar ethical “effects.” First, I’m not sure that I didn’t just create a straw man to knock down, but if I didn’t, then I’m not sure I (nor, I suspect) Davis would agree with that response.

      Rather than making that rather crude accusation of mine, Davis “assumes” that his reluctance to advocate has something to do with Levinas’s distinction between justice and judgment. But while Muckelbauer seems to distinguish between them as if he comes down in favor of justice when he says “[. . .] each of these discourses risks becoming a discourse of judgment (rather than justice)” (246). In contrast, Davis points out that justice “demands judgments” (253). I suspect that Davis may be subtly critiquing Muckelbauer’s reluctance to advocate. Though Davis admits that one would “miss the point” if Levinas was used to justify any determinate ethics and politics, using those ethical descriptions “to justify an avoidance of advocacy altogether is to make things too easy for oneself” (255). I would suspect that she would apply the same logic of non-advocacy to Muckelbauer’s deployment of Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari.

Works Cited

Davis, D. Diane. “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and The Nonappropriative

      Relation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 38.3 (2005) pgs 191-212. Web.
 

Davis, D. Diane. “The Fifth Risk: A Response to John Muckelbauer’s Response.” Philosophy

      And Rhetoric. 40.2 (2007) pp. 248-256. Web.
 

Muckelbauer, John. “Rhetoric, Asignification, and the Other: A Response to Diane Davis.”

      Philosophy and Rhetoric. 40.2 (2007) pp. 238-247. Web.

"Listening" and Composition

Listening"

Is music writing? Is music signifying? If not, how can we teach students to 'interpret' it? How might we use the concepts of "production" and "composition" in the musical sense? Is this "aesthetic" dimension to writing--what we usually reduce to 'style'--an essential component to teach students?

While reading a recent interview with D. Diane Davis on her recent book "Inessential Solidarity" (a book, by the way, I am very excited about reading) I came across the name Jean-Luc Nancy: "I started reading everything I could get my hands on about this notion of a rapport sans rapport, an inoperative (Nancy) or unavowable (Blanchot) “community” that has nothing to do with identity or identification, with communion or contracts" (Davis)

This "community" reminded me of my recent reading of Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community and so I decided I would check out a book by Nancy (I had already encountered Blanchot). I chose the very short book (really just a couple short essays) called Listening.

Nancy has forced me to reconsider the non-signifying aspects of music and how they might be related to the teaching of or the theory of "composition."

If, as we have argued in class, "visual rhetoric" is a difficult terminology to keep for what we are doing in this class because rhetoric is about "breaking it into its parts" I would like to suggest that we consider the (im)possibility of musical rhetoric--all of this prompted by Nancy's poetic philosophizing as the relative inattention given to music (rather than reading lyrics like a poem, etc.) in the composition classroom and theory. (See a future post re-interpreting Do the Right Thing from the musical rather than visual perspective)

For now, I will content myself with commenting on a few key quotations from Nancy:

    "I would say that timbre is communication of the incommunicable: provided it is understood that the incommunicable is nothing other, in a perfectly logical way, than communication itself, that thing by which a subject makes an echo--of self, of the other, its all one--its all one in the plural.

     Communication is not transmission, but a sharing that becomes subject: sharing as subject of all 'subjects'. An unfolding, a dance, a resonance. Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense [. . .] In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds" (Nancy 41).

Thus, communication in sound (as well as in the visual) is not a transmission of content--a "vehicle" or "medium" for the transmission of signs or meaning. This is what D. Diane Davis attempts to get at when she uses the Levinasian distinction between the saying and the said. Davis attempts to describe the saying--which is a difficult, if not (im)possible task. The communication of communication--the intent to communicate--the desire to be-with (mitsein?). In a way, the performative dimension of language.

However, music, does seem to be divided into its parts more than the visual--music has its own time whereas painting (or the visual) is determined by the perceiving subject. This thought stems from Nancy's observation:

"Whereas visible or tactile presence occurs in a motionless 'at the same time', sonorous presence is an essentially mobile 'at the same time,' vibrating from the come-and-go between the source and the ear, through open space, the present of presence rather than pure presence. One might say: there is a simultaneity of the visible and a contemporaneity of the audible" (16).

Timbre and Arrangement

For both the visual and the audible, it seems that we can locate an "excess" outside of signification. For the visible, we have Barthes "obtuse meaning"--for the audible we have Nancy's concept of timbre.

 Timbre is defined as "the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices of musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as tone quality or tone color" (wikipedia)

In other words, timbre is the quality of an instrument that distinguishes it as that instrument even if instruments can only play a certain number of notes (in the Western scale) (see Nancy's note on the word 'instrument' with reference to Deleuze pg 78 in Listening). Indeed, the different 'voices' of instruments is what makes possible the compositional activity of "arrangement".

Arrangment asks the question: what instrument should play this note? how many of them? How many different parts should there be per instrument (this is tied up in the 'composing' process proper)? Where should the instruments be placed?

In other words, arrangement is in a way the invisible part of the composing process--it involves just as much selection (and perhaps more) as pointing a camera at a group of objects!

Anyone who has played in a symphony can tell you that giving a typical "clarinet" part to a bassoon has technical as well as aesthetic consequences. For example, listen to the bassoon at the beginning of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:

Look at homeboy's face! that is hard as all hell to play well on bassoon. The bassoon is typically a lower instrument, but the timbre of the bassoon in the higher register makes for a particularly unsettling experience. If a usual clarinet had made these sounds, a completely different effect would take place. These are arrangement issues. Imagine, for instance, if the 3 bassoons were playing that opening line? The same effect? the same musical piece? no.

Arrangement, incidentally, is one of the 5 rhetorical canons. In rhetoric, arrangement  "concerns how one orders speech or writing." In composition, this has meant that we pay attention to the order of sentences and the order of paragraphs. We have typical ways of organizing paragraphs--particularly in closed-form prose--the form we primarily teach our students is essential to academic writing.

But arrangement, if taken in its musical sense, is not merely providing a linear and temporal order to one's writing, but concerns the entire process of composition--you may write the melody, the harmony--the notes are there--now who's going to play them? How are they going to sound? How is performance possible. How will the music be (re)pre-sented?

We all know the cliche that no music performance is exactly like another one. Furthermore, we know that no "reading" of a text is the same one everytime. In the case of texts, we usually think of the multiple readings by a perceiving subject as the variable element.

However--in music we see that variation occurs on both sides. The listener of music will get 'new' things out of the piece as the piece is repeated--snatches of melody will stick in the head, key moments will become moments for interpretation--the composition and the performance will take on some sort of order and arrangement. BUT ALSO--besides the listener--we have to take into account that in a concert there are many "invisible" choices made about the performance of the music on the "production" side--on the "musician" side. How does each musician "attack" the note? How does each music phrase the notes? How does the conductor speed up or slow down--in short, how is the page performed?

Why not think about writing in this light? How are the pages of theory "performed" in composition studies? What invisible "arrangement" (in the musical sense) choices are being made when we (re)present a theory on the page. How do we musically perform Foucault or Derrida on the page? in our words?