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. 

Barry's Visual Intelligence Meets Complexity Theory and other forms of Music

A couple weeks ago, John suggested that the strength of How Images Think is that it introduces a lot of issues to be explored more in depth, but leaves us this task. In a way, I think Barry's Visual Intelligence does the same thing and, for me, more than the Burnett. Its still not a masterpiece of writing and the book contains some inconsistencies and essentialist rhetoric, but, as we discussed in class, it engages some of the work done in psychology, neurology, and other sciences.

Our conversation this week seemed to center around the interaction between the sciences and the humanities, with John offering an important insight that each has its distinct methodology, but that the objects of study are not how the disciplines are defined. Barry's methodology is kind of a mix of methodology, but her framing discipline is probably gestalt psychology. A gestalt "implies a configuration that is so inherently unified that its properties cannot be derived from the individual properties of its parts" (42). This holism that Barry derives from the gestalt school provides support for Sid's observation that "visual rhetoric" may be a misnomer. If rhetoric breaks things into parts, then the gestalt considers their total effect as well as their production and formation of wholes.

Perhaps Barry's biggest strength is the physiological and neurological evidence that supports the gestalt hypothesis. Rather than looking at the eye as functioning like a camera, she considers how the eye actually interacts with the environment. The eyes is unlike a camera because the image on our retina is in constant motion and our 'mental image' (which, I take, must a be a metaphor) is created through what stays constant within that motion. Thus, movement is essential to vision because our eyes function by noticing and recording 
change (Barry 29-32). Furthermore, while the images in a camera are "bounded" what we see is "unbounded" (33). Barry convincingly argues that the retinal image is only part of the mechanism of seeing and not its product (Barry 33).

And yet, although she has shown that even the images on our eye our involved in a complex process of production and interpretation of our world, she still seems to hold onto an idea of some sort of "reality" or "direct experience" that we can see with our eyes, but that becomes mediated when some sort of technology is introduced. As Sid suggested last week, we may need to think about the eye itself as an incredibly complex technology. Indeed, Barry claims that "human vision is still the most powerful means of sifting out irrelevent information and detecting significant patterns" (34). Why is this? Perhaps because significance can only come through emotions as well as personal and cultural memory. Neurological research suggests that we frequently are affected by the visual before we can evaluate it critically. The amygdala in our brain is what detects emotional significance (see Barry 17-18). As V.S. Ramachandran has shown, however, some of the information we receive may correspond to our physical/topographical map, but does not reach the amygdala, such as the case where a man looking at his mother said "this looks like my mother but it is not her." However, once his mother began to talk he recognized her as his mother.

Why is this? Because the verbal and visual parts of our brains, although intimately connected, are also independent systems. Neurologist VanDerkolk has shown that traumatic experiences are stored in different parts of the brain. Routine thoughts tend to stimulate the 'Broca' area, which controls verbal language, but traumatic experiences do not. This is why people have difficulty putting traumatic experiences into words (Barry 40). This neurological explanation suggests to me the usefulness of certain psychoanalytic techniques to get the patient to verbalize their experience. As Slavoj Zizek has said, the first time something happens it is an intrusion of the Real but the second time is when it enters the symbolic order (the order of language).

Barry's research is drawn frequently from holistic theories such as J.J. Gibson's "ecological optics theory." For Gibson, it is the change that signals visual and the relationship that carries meaning (Barry 41). We would do well to critique Barry's language here of "carrying" meaning, but the ecological model is useful in understanding how she moves from the visual process itself, to gestalt psychology, to her musical metaphors and investigations into the creative mind.

On that note--Music is a prominent metaphorical resource for Barry--particularly when related to gestalt theory. Using Christin Von Ehrenfels argument that 'melody is relationship since it is still recognized in another key, Barry plays out this idea of melody" (see Barry 43). She continues this metaphor: "It is as if we begin by learning to put together different notes into meaningful melodies, gradually building a musical repertoire on which we come eventually to rely for all performances" (Barry 65). I find this a useful metaphor, but I also question Barry's harmonious holistic approach. While Barry, cognitive science, neurology, and optics theorists may be correct that our process of vision tends to look for patterns and creating a whole (see for instance the discussion of the 'blind spot' and filling in on pg 26), I think that we need to consider the inharmonious aspects of vision--those things that we can't quite put into a pattern--what Michel Serres has called "noise," which is as essential to communication as information (according to Mark C. Taylor).

On one hand, Barry's science seems to support many of theoretical humanities' assumptions. We create meaning by our ability to see patterns in essentially disparate elements, but not so much by what we sense, but by what we believe (Barry 27). And again, Barry denies that scientific analysis can ever get to the heart of things alone. She argues that the 'phi phenomenon' shows that scientific dissection could never yield adequate answers because the principles of perception lie in spaces between the elements rather than within them (Barry 44). However, this holism turns slowly into a sort of  idealism where resistance to these processes can only be combated by "deliberate thought and active higher reasoning" (Barry 68). This sounds suspiciously to me like a reasoned criticism rather than using the "perceptual logic" found in most visuals and images itself to complicate its own assumptions and (ab)uses. Perhaps rather than hardening our experience into significant patterns we need to pay attention to what we exclude (the visual and audible noise) just as much as what we include.

This leads me to Barry's discussions of the creative temperament. I was reading this section through the recent lecture I heard by V.S. Ramachandran at UF a couple days ago. Ramachandran talks about how a neurological explanation of synethesia can help explain the metaphorical process. Barry recognizes this connection and argues that the creative mind works in metaphors (Barry 72). Indeed, I would argue (and this in no way is a unique claim) that the humanities' "methodology" to return to John's distinction between the humanities and science. Our methodology is metaphorical, creative, and inventive. However, I am not sure I can support this distinction since it is clear that such models of the atom as the "plum pudding" model or even our current model are in reality "images"/metaphors of what *really* is there. Perhaps the humanities are just a bit more honest about the metaphorical and contingent relationship between the Real and our description of it and the necessity for metaphor (see Derrida's "White Mythology" for a brilliant analysis of philosophical metaphor and catechresis).

To return to Barry's work proper: Why does she want to make such a clear distinction between the "abstract" system of language and the "visual" or the "image". In the section "Mental Images," Barry argues that we have this ability to abstract from the world to form--a concept, by the way, that has been around since Aristotle, and indeed someone who Barry relies on extensively. Strangely, its when she gets into the territory of literary works, theories, and authors that her argument becomes a bit messy and problematic for students of English. While it appeals to our literary sensibility, I sense a very conservative program here--as we have discussed in class today.

In the section metaphors of the mind, she turns to neurological researcher Zeki and agrees with him that the task of the brain is one of extracting invariant features from the continually changing information from the environment to provide a unified image, but that each area is synchronous and that there is no master area of the brain controlling the other ones (Barry 93). Drawing on the theories of Crick, we see that from a neurological perspective "the conscious mind receives information from the brain rather than directs it" and thus our sense of "unity and mental control" is an imperfect illusion (Barry 94). What I like about this insight is that we get away from this notion of the "subject" as some sort of transcendental I or some sort of "soul" that resides within us. Consciousness, a subject speculated on by many philosophers (and, I may add, which still needs to be considered philosophically) is materialized, but not in a deterministic way but through material interactions. Zeki argues that "it is no longer possible. . .to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding nor is it possible to separate the acquisition of visual knowledge from consciousness" (Barry 44).

However, I want to repeat--this does not mean that there is no consciousness or "mind" separate from the brain. For Barry and many of the works she draws on, our "mind" is less a director of the brain than an Interpreter. This reminds me of the theory of the "Focalizer," which is not a narrator nor a character but basically a 'voice' that filters and offers a certain perspective on the narrative. A friend of mind used this concept to look at the "Cyclops" chapter in Joyce's Ulysses.

But perhaps a better metaphor would be a "screen" or "filter" because the mind can only pay attention to so much of what the brain is currently doing. Barry argues that if we were to become aware (conscious) of the inner workings of our brain, we would be paralyzed by the overwhelming activity and noise or driven to madness--we may become autistic (Barry 98).

Barry briefly touches on chaos theory in her work, drawing from it the idea of "spontaneous emergence of self-organization" (Barry 96). I think that we should look at Barry and the visual intelligence through Mark C. Taylor's discussion of complexity theory and see where we end up. I will try and also pit Mark Taylor's metaphor of the musical fugue as an alternative to Barry's focus on the symphony, which I think may open up her insights into greater complexity rather than assuming our writing must be as holistic and "experiential" as our being-in-the-world or, to echo phenomenology once again, the lebenswelt (Life-World). Its this sort of generalized universalism that existential phenomenology is frequently accused of that we must get rid of in order to deploy some of Barry's insights. I think Taylor's discussion of complexity theory, particularly the concept of "between order and chaos," needs to be put into conversation with Barry.

Despite Barry's use of chaos theory, she does not take chaos theory seriously throughout her entire work. She makes reference to it, but when distinguishing between the visual and the verbal, she argues that "verbal language is essentially a linear system imposed on a non-linear experience" and that language is a static system. This is patently false and seems to only serve her interest in maintaining a distinction between the visual and the verbal based on human "experience" (which she never really defines in any systematic way). As we have said in class, this essentialist rhetoric without any sort of theoretical justification seems to continue through the work. For instance, in the section "Image Affordance," she argues that "essential characteristics that define the essence of things become meaningful through what they off use as useful within our everyday experience" (Barry 79). This is almost pragmatist in the Deweyian sense, but there is no mention of this theorization, preferring to claim an essence without qualification. Strangely, though we could read Barry as entrenched in a kind of Husserlian life-world approach, she does tend to separate appearance and "reality" without realizing the implications of doing so. For instance, "In Western art we pay attention to appearance rather than the meaning images take on through experience" (Barry 81). This metaphysical opposition is more apparent in her reference to the medieval philosopher, Maimonides: idolatry is "missing the whole concept of the image" and to mistake "surface appearance for essence" (Barry 126). And so we arrive at a different kind of interpretation of gestalt  psychology than say, Merleau-Ponty: Barry still seems to maintain this distinction between appearance and reality that doesn't take the phenomenological critique of this metaphysics seriously. She is speaking of the life-world, but ignoring an entire tradition and making the mistake of creating these useless oppositions.

Everything has an agenda and I in no way meant to critique Barry merely for having an agenda (although I think the arguments she makes are conservative in the worst possible way), but its interesting to me that Barry discusses repetition only from a neurological and psychological side. While this may seem an obvious insight, it is nonetheless important for her engagement with the humanities: more repetitive thinking patterns, the more these patterns become entrenched neurologically (Barry 63). While she is insistent that patterns are how we make meaning, she is aware that these patterns can become habits and create stereotypes. Thus, she argues that the more "open and flexible a person's abstract thinking remains, the more open the person is to new learning and change" (Barry 64). Repetition seems to be at once confirmed by the making of "patterns" but also vilified as something that creates stasis. Repetition of something, however, is always repeating within a different context or moment in time and so it is never truly repetition (i'm sure I could cite some theorist on this insight). Barry doesn't seem to outright reject repetition because patterns are in some ways based upon it, but there does seem to be a focus on this concept of "creative thinking" that, while I am not against it in principle, is once again not explored in depth.

But the meat of my question comes down to how her musical metaphor, with its emphasis on melody contains a certain commitment to consistent and holistic narrative without taking into account other disruptions of our productive and interpretive moment outside of critical reflection and interpretation. For Taylor, following Heidegger, distinguishes scholarship from thinking: "Writing is thinking, but scholarship is not writing" (Taylor 807--JAC 24.4). Although he at first denies that he can make the distinction, he seems to say that not-writing is writing that is accepted in scholarly journals while "writing" is creative: "Writing, by contrast, is transgressive. It violates accepted codes and crosses boundaries guarded. Creativity and invention occur, if at all, in the gaps between disciplines" (Taylor 808). Taylor actually agrees with Barry in her focus on the importance of visual, but the visual in Taylor is meant to be disruptive and transgressive, not a holistic integration: "We can no longer write merely with words but now must learn how to think and write with images and sound. Design--visual as well as graphic--becomes integral to writing" (808). But is this really an accurate distinction? Barry does seem to worry about the ways that images are used to stabilize meaning and stereotypes, but she is so reliant on gestalt theory and holism that she doesn't think about how her musical metaphor may not recognize the potential of writing (in Taylor's broad sense) to disrupt this stabilization without a sort of "active higher reasoning" that she attributes to Spinoza (once again, without a detailed consideration of Spinoza's philosophy).

In Sid Dobrin's soon to be released book Postcomposition, he argues that writing is violence and not just disruption:

Postcomposition works to create tremors in composition studies’ ground,
with the intent of violence. It works within what Victor J. Vitanza would call
the “terrorism of theory” specifically against the “will of the field” (143). It
is a work of disruption and discomfort; it is a work against the discipline’s
pedagogical imperative toward the contingency of writing. (Dobrin 2)

I don’t mean violence as
a negative, destructive act; rather, violence operates to change the object
upon which it is enacted. That is, violence does not work toward destruction
in the negative but instead creates possibilities through disruption or,
at minimum, through Foucault’s notion of thinking “differently.” (Dobrin 113)



In a way this is a bit of a digression, but I do want to consider the sort of "violence" done to music by the likes of John Cage, Webern, and Schoenberg. Indeed, I think that this kind of hyper-order (in particular of Schoenberg) that approaches mathematical theorems is an important metaphor for complexity theory. I'd like to explore this further in another post or in a paper. But for now, I want to look at Taylor's choice of musical metaphor in comparison with Barry's: Fugue as opposed to Symphony.

For Barry, symphony and melody is the primary metaphor. True, she does argue that symphony is actually created by silences which in turn creates rhythm (Barry 125). And indeed, Oliver Sacks has argued in a podcast lecture on one of his books that rhythm is something humans are predisposed to, but the experiments by Schoenberg, et. al. show that music does not necessarily have to contain a consistent rhythm (We might also look at what Muckelbauer has said in his recent book about "singular rhythms" and see if this offers a way out of 'rhythm' in the sense Barry is getting at). As Dobrin argues in Postcomposition, we might want to look at writing in terms of its viscosity, which I think complicates our traditional notions of rhythm. I'm not sure how yet, but I think that we might be able to look at Dobrin's concept of saturation and viscosity of writing in terms of the irregular "rhythms" and "rules" (that are somewhere between order and chaos) of these composers I'm suggesting.

As I mentioned above, Barry seems to think that repetition implies a solidity of thinking patterns, which is indeed supported by neurological research. However, repetition (with a difference) is a key aspect of Fugue, particularly a Bach Fugue. The Fugue, like the rigor (and apparent chaos that is actually regulative) in Schoenberg, was considered at the time "too austerely intellectual for the common ear" (Taylor 158). I quote Taylor at length on what Bach's fugue "Musical Offering":

In a canon, the same melody is repeated by one or more voices overlapping in time, "in order for a theme to work as a canon theme, each of it snotes must be able to serve in a dual (or triple, or quadruple) role: it must first be part of a melody, and secondly, it must be part of harmonization of the same melody. When there are three canonical voices, for instance, each note of the theme must act in two distinct harmonic ways, as well as melodically. Thus, each note in a canon has more than one musical meaning; the listener's ear and brain automatically figure out the appropriate meaning, by referring to context." the complexity of the canon increases as the pitch of different voices or 'copies' is staggered, their speed varied, or the theme inverted by making the melody jump down wherever the original jumps up. The most complex canonical structure results from the inclusion of "retrograde copies" in which "the theme is played backward." Named after the creature that moves backward in space, this type of composition is known as a 'crab canon." What Hofstadter finds so fascinating about Bach's Musical Offering is the way in which the different parts fo the score work together as a whole. He alerts listeners: "Notice that every type of 'copy' preserves all information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called as isomorphism (Taylor 157-158, all italics mine except the final one)

Thus, the "melody" is indeterminate--no "original" melody can really be discerned unless one appeals to the first "melody" played. Everything cannot be integrated in the same way, but the music only provides a set or a potential combination of ways to formulate the piece rather than foregrounding one particular pattern and creating a figure/ground, gestalt relationship.  Or perhaps this is misleading. The gestalt is created by the subject (like the 'melody' created by the listener). This is another issue I'd like to explore further.

To complicate the music metaphor even further, we have to introduce Jean-Luc Nancy's work Listening into the mix, a work that I have already created a long, involved post on. However, I feel I am now prepared to engage Nancy's relationship to Taylor's reading of complexity. If timbre in psychoacoustics is "In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtæmbər/, like the "tambour" of "tambourine", and spelling pronunciation /ˈtɪmbər/; French: [tɛ̃bʁ]) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. In psychoacoustics, timbre is also called tone quality and tone color" (wikipedia)

First, this reference to color makes an interesting connection to synaesthesia, but also the attention to timbre adds a new layer of complexity to the strands of instruments. Now, when we consider the material instrument being played, we realize that the same melody with different instruments--though a repetition of the silences and the notes--are actually repetition with a difference. While I don't wish to appropriate Nancy's particular interpretation of this 'resonance' in terms of the subject and the self (even though he strives to separate this talk of the subject from the subject as a stable entity--see pgs 8-9 of Listening--Dobrin's Postcomposition suggests that we need to move away from this notion of the 'subject' and 'self' completely to focus on writing as such--I believe Raul Sanchez also moves in this direction) I do want to call attention to the relationship between noise and timbre, with an aim to extending this connection with Serres' (and Taylor's reading of him) conception of noise. Nancy writes,

Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing--except itself. At its weakest and least articulated degree, one would call it noise. (there is noise in the attack and extinction of sound, and there is always noise in sound itself.) But all noise also contains timbre. 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 (41).

Thus, by looking at these smaller *almost* silences at the beginning and at the end of a sound we come to realize that these "silences" between the notes are echoes of the past--perhaps in the same way that Mark Taylor engages with the ghosts of his own writing:

"Rewriting does not merely repeat but also transforms in a way that complicates the parasite/host relationship. As the work takes shape, it becomes the host for ghosts now appearing as parasites [. . .] My words remain ghostly because they are haunted by others who have gone before and will haunt other yet to come. Writing always involves the screening of this spectral interplay of parasites and hosts" (Taylor 196).


And so we arrive at Taylor's idea of the "screen." Like Barry's use of the "interpreter" to describe the mind and like the concept of "focalizer," the "screen" both "hides while showing and shows while hiding," a concept that can be traced back probably to ancient wisdom, but which recalls to me some of the late Heidegger when he discusses truth and error among other things. Taylor writes, "In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening" (Taylor 200). While this may seem like Taylor is saying "then, this was this, and NOW this is this" (a la Burnett) Taylor is aware of historical precedents, citing Augustine's Confessions and going all the way back to Plato's concept of ananamisis: "Augustine finally concludes that cogito (to think, reflect) is, in effect, cogo (to bring together, collect)" and a Heideggerian might add to gather (Taylor 201).

Barry supports this kind of thinking with cognitive psychological research--as cited above--with the idea that we cannot be aware of all the activity of our brain. For Taylor, this extends to the information society: "Though there are multiple sources of turbulence, one of the most important factors creating unrest in today's world is the unprecedented noise generated by proliferating networks whose reach extends from the local to the global" (Taylor 202). Dealing with noise in a way that recalls Nancy's analysis of timbre, and drawing on the work of Norretranders, Taylor distinguishes between information and "exformation."

Exformation is perpendicular to information. exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression. Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable. exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything all all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances as we actually come out with it" (Norretranders qtd. in Taylor 203)

Taylor reads this in a way that suggests Nancy's "communication" as such, which also recalls D. Diane Davis' attempts to get at the sayable rather than the said, which she gets from the thought of Levinas and, as she says in a recent interview, Nancy. Taylor writes,

"Exformation, in other words, is what is left out as information is formed from noise. As such, exformation is not simply absent but is something like a penumbral field from which information is formed. Since information is constituted by what it excludes, it inevitably harbors traces of noise" (203).

Are the traces of noise that Taylor discusses the inevitable echoes, reverberations, and resonances that result from any material embodiment of musical notes? In this sense, performed music never (or rarely) contains utter silence--there is always some sort of noise in between the notes that itches for acknowledgment. Of course, the question is--does writing echo? Does it reverberate? Or is it something particular to sound? Does writing contain a timbre--an attack and a fade such that the spaces between letters or words are really (here we have the I heart huckabees moment) echoes of the words and letters past and future?
Writing does seem to have this self-reflexive, echoing quality, with each echo simultaneously a repetition of the initial sound as well as a completely new element. Does writing contain reverb or delay?

Perhaps this noise within the notes is what John Cage tried to get at with his 4:33:

The point is not the silence of the written piece of music, but the experience and the minute noises that accompany the piece of music--the idea that the audience is not a passive consumer of the music and that the context (a concert) matters as much as the written piece of music itself. This mirrors writing because some pieces of writing are only validated in a certain context within a certain performance/material situation.

Returning to my example of Schoenberg:

Is this chaos or complexity? I leave this question for another post or another night.

"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?