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Reframe
. Dorothea' hesitates. One game is oriented before her: another cuts
across. Perhaps she is unable to
determine the implications of a move in one might have in the other. Perhaps movement in one game is not a move in
the other: perhaps movement in one precludes the other altogether. Wittgenstein explains language games to develop a
previous distinction between meaning and usage.
Meanings, he argues, are metaphysical constructs. A meaning is a manifold which encompasses all
possible instances of a given category: images of all possible hammers, all
possible games of chess; a dictionary,
an encyclopedia, lists of lists referring to other lists. He argues that if communicative interactions
unfolded with reference to meanings, they would be mediated by an image of the
manifold. Communication would consist in
the delimitation of relevant zones, a reconciliation of the maximum and the
minimum. Situationally, one does not
take meanings into account. Rather usage
is central: what is required is read off the actions of an interlocutor. Communication
is performative, it's situations are like games. One must know the rules, but the rules themselves
are like meanings. Situationally, one
dilates. At a remove from the game, it is obvious that chess
is shaped by rules which distinguish pieces one from another and which
determine permissible moves. It is also
obvious that when you are playing the game and no longer thinking about the
game, the rules as such disappear, are transposed as constraints which shape
the basic parameters of play. If all you
know are the rules, every state of affairs is like every other: each piece
remains discrete, locked into it's particular patterns of movement. If all you know are the rules, there are no
situations. The reader stands next to Wittgenstein. Both of you watch others playing chess. As they play, Wittgenstein tells you stories
about language. Dorothea hesitates, her arm hovering, held in place
by the surface tension created by the arrangement of arms into a zero horizontally
oriented with reference to the dark frame. A photograph of a game collapses
acts onto objects. Every object is a collapsed act.[1] Once
again at the beginning. The central
argument in part I of Corenlius Castoriadis's "Marxism and Revolutionary
Theory" concerns the status of theory.
In retrospect, this is the pivot text.
It's appearance in Socialisme ou Barbarie coincides with the group's
dissolution. Republished as the first
half of The Imaginary Institution of Society, it is positioned as the
trajectory out of the Marxist Imaginary and into a different type of
politico-philosophical project, in the context of which the theory of praxis is
radicalized and made general as an ontology of the social-historical and the
revolutionary project gives way to the project of autonomy. The critique of theory is straightforward:
there is no pensée du survol, no position from which the Gaze of Theory can
establish itself as separated from the world, on the basis of which it can
survey the world as from a remove. The
world is not spectacle. Theory is itself
a practice, not a space of observation from which one watches praxis unfolding
amongst others. Theoretical or critical
writing itself unfolds time. It does not
describe the unfolding of temporalities elsewhere. Each sentence which constitutes a theoretical
object is a collapsed act. In
the second part of "Marxism and Revolutionary Theory," Castoriadis
pursues the implications of this critique of theory through a recursive
movement which unpacks something of the position of the narrator in his
texts. In a remarkable section, he
outlines his commitments to and desires for an alternate political
arrangement. Through this movement,
Castoriadis dismantles aspects of the social-imaginary signification(s) that
shape theoretical work, that constrain or condition the relations to phenomena
which is performed as relations between them are generated or created. This
dimension of figuring/patterning is and
is not condensed onto the surface of the text. The
critique of the theoretical viewpoint is a critique of form and voice: of a
form of writing that integrates everything into the smooth unfolding of an
analytic machinery and which, in the process, establishes narrator and reader
as spectators. The critique of theory is
that of the written voice of anonymous authority. The critique of theory undercuts the temporal
relation which is built into theoretical texts: time is what one watches
unfold.
The
critique of theory is a critique of the illusion of transparency of textual
surface. Analytic texts superimpose the
time-scale of demonstration over the time-scale of what is demonstrated: if a
conceptual machinery is being analyzed, it unfolds within a space that is
staged and explained to you, the reader.
There it is. See? You are less in a labyrinth than looking at a
map of one. The
critique of structuralist and functionalist anthropologies in the third part of
“Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” is elaborated from a version of theoretical
time-scale. It is as if the critique of theory required a single elaboration
and attention could now turn to refiguring the social-historical by beginning
the search for an adequate framing device to place over it. Theory
superimposes protocols of description and exegesis on what it analyses. Any taxonomy and system of procedures is an ontology:
regional ontologies lean on those of a more general character. Determinist ontology is linked to the
structure of sentences: allowed to unfold their implications across the
production and reproduction of pseudo-transparent textual surfaces, analytic
form imposes that ontology. Partial-determinist arguments processed through
conventional analytic and/or exegetical procedures are assimilated back into determinism
at the level of meta-frame The
production of exegetical texts is a dimension of phronesis, the capacity for
training and retraining how one sees (hears), a recursive mode that enables a
dismantling of illusory modes of givenness, the isolation of constraints and/or
norms, the exploration of possibilities and the ability to proceed. Theoretical work allows one to take a distance
from what is. La phronésis ni ne "fonde"
l'autonomie, ni ne se laisse "déduire." Mais sans phronésis, il n'y a pas d'autonomie
effective, et pas the praxis au sense que je donne au terme. Il n'y a du reste meme pas de pensée
théorique qui tienne vraiment. Sans
phronésis théorique, le délire est proche (voir Hegel). L'autonomie n'est pas désinsertion à
l'égard de l'effectivité (comme l'autonomie kantienne), mais transformation
lucide de l'effectivité (de soi-même et les autres) à partir de cette meme effectivité. A partir ne signife pas que l'effectivité
fournit des causes ou des norms. Ici
encore, nous avons une relation originale, modèle d'elle-même, impensable dans
les categories héritées. L'autonomie est
autoposition d'une norm, à partir d'une contenu de vie effectif, et en relation
avec ce contenu.[2] Not
distances are equivalent. Castoriadis' writing typically works through an
aggressive form of exegesis, its positive reverse in philosophy which is
directed toward breaking up what is analyzed rather than toward repeating it's
movement. At the register of voice,
however, what is elucidated appears as simultaneously integrated into existing
modes of thinking and visualizing the world as it traces their outer limits. But when one moves from rehearsal of the
descriptions (in the sense of trajectories, of movements-through) in
Castoriadis' texts to an operational level, real problems emerge. For example, if you read enough Castoriadis,
you develop a sense of what a social-imaginary signification is, but when you
move from that frame to using the device, you encounter a requirement of a
frame-shift, which is also a temporal shift, from the space of the instituted
to that of the dynamic which links the instituted and instituting. This entails problems of method and voice,
particularly for those shaped by academic protocols which valorize repetition
at the level of style. Castoriadis' work
forces one out of these modes if one moves beyond his writing and the secondary
circuits which constitute their repetition at the level of commentary. But he did not himself move in the direction
of exploding existing forms and exploring alternatives. To do that, you are on your own. Dorothea hesistates. Perhaps she is thinking of Jules Renard: The
true artist will write in, as it were, small leaps, on a hundred subjects that
surge unawares into his mind. In this way, nothing is forced. Everything has an
unwilled, natural charm. One does not provoke: one waits. A scrupulous
inexactness.[3] The
critique of theory requires that one complicate the textual surface: make it
immersive by exploring alternate forms of writing. If we analyze a partial-determinist ontology analysis
should be symmetrical with it. If
partial-determinacy entails incompleteness, texts should have gaps or holes,
like a Klein bottle.[4] To the greatest extent possible, sentences
should be performative. Interpretation remains fundamental: only its conventions
are problematic. The
delimitation of the ensidique within the more capacious, open-ended frame of
partial determinacy does not eliminate the ensidque, nor does situating of the
dimension of linguistic code within a broader poeitic frame destroy the
code. What changes are relations to
them. Hybrid
texts which integrate or juxtapose interpretive and performance aspects open space
for the self-conscious play of the instituted and the instituting. Partial
determinacy enables radical documentary.
It enables reconsideration of information organization, the definition
of variables and procedures for inference.
It enables one to recognize the underlying arbitrariness of dominant
modes of information organization and plunder their advantages. It does not require the invention of
problems. It simply allows one to
address them differently. Take for
example this basic relationship, which cuts to the question of what is a
representation of the world: Even though we daily navigate through a
perceptual world of three dimensions and reason occasionally about higher
dimensions with mathematical ease, the world portrayed in our information
displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of
paper and video screens. All
communication between the reader and image and the maker of an image must now
take place on a two-dimensional surface.
Escaping that flatland is the essential task of envisioning
information—for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary,
human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in
nature. Not flatlands.[5] If
writing and visual representations of information involves translation from a
multi-dimensional social-historical world into the 2-dimensional space of paper
or a screen, it follows that there is little need to adhere to scale relations
that obtain in the social-historical when staging information about it in
2-space. Relations to the world which document, which
generate representations, tend to naturalize the effects of scale and the
social-imaginary significations which constrain relations to the world within
that scale. The conceptual staging of
zones of social being as comprised of objects repeats the properties of naming. It
effaces the instituting behind the instituted.
Edward
Tufte deals with this by insisting on the separateness of representation and
what is represented (the map is not the territory) as a way to force a break
with the sense that it is desirable or coherent to replicate in 2-space the way
the perceptual world appears. One can
nonetheless produce information that is about the world. Tufte's is an intermedia project which integrates
a vast and lovely array of visual and textual materials. The project is guided by the aesthetic and
ethical imperatives of clarity and precision of design.[6] Information design does not document the
world so much fashion effective maps of information which are constructed with
reference to relations within and with respect to fields of data. This blurs the relation between information
design and art. This blur is echoed
within Tufte's writings through the dialogue with Paul Klee that runs through
them. The quotation above is a
commentary on this passage from Klee: It is not easy to arrive at a conception of
a whole which is constructed from parts belonging to different dimensions. And not only in nature, but also art, her
transformed image, is such a whole. It is difficult enough, oneself, to survey
this whole, whether nature or art, but still more difficult to help another to
such a comprehensive view. This is due to the consecutive nature of
the only methods available to us for conveying a clear three-dimensional
concept of an image in space, and results from deficiencies of a temporal
nature in the spoken word. For, with such a medium of expression, we
lack the means of discussing in its constituent parts, an image which posses
simultaneously a number of dimensions.[7] What
distinguishes the work of someone like Klee from that of Tufte is the operative
tense of what is produced. Tufte
organizes information with respect to the world, a procedure which deals with questions
of complexity and ordering: the mechanisms which perform that ordering and
their relation to what is ordered through them; the desirable balance between
them which enables the greatest degree of logical precision, utility and
complexity. Information design applies aesthetic and
logical procedures to representations which address phenomena at a remove, but
acknowledges that remove as axiomatic.
The map is not the territory. Klee's
work is in a sense about capturing movement or emergence, so departs from
similar assumptions (the need to circumscribe the utility of recapitulating the
effects of grammatical mediation of the world as experienced in the interest of
capturing something about that world; the hard distinction between the results
of capture and representation or repetition).
If one takes Klee's writings as programmatic, his painting is
documentary, concerned with a relation to seeing as autofiguration within an
environment parallel to that which Merleau-Ponty claims for Cézanne. Klee's work moves in a more radical direction
because of the directions adopted in his formal interrogation of painting, his medium
for making maps. It is documentary in
the sense that it is generated through an engagement with and interrogation of
the world processed through a strict separation between the
"multidimensionality" of that world and the capabilities of
2-dimensional representation. So the
divergences between Tufte and Klee have to do with the orientation of their
respective projects: what unites them (beyond the dialogue Tufte initiates) is
that for both the space of staging, of re-presentation, is a present
itself. Within this, Tufte argues for a
self-effacement at the level of design through a way of the precise use of the
tools of organization (grids, lines) such that they function without drawing
attention to themselves. Klee's work can
be seen as operating from an improvisational space, which entails a different
mode of self-effacement. 2. Castoriadis' notion of the social-imaginary significations
is situated within the dynamic of the instituted and instituting and is a
device for formalizing something of the ways in which constraints are
performed, how the performance of constraints are situated socially, how
performance is situating. We therefore have to think of a mode of
being belonging to this world—to these worlds—of signification in its
specificity and its originality, without 'substantializing' them, even
metaphorically, or transforming them into 'subjects' of another order (…). Likewise, when we speak of the
social-historical and of the social imaginary, the difficulty is not to invent
new words for what is at issue here, but instead to understand that what these
words are aiming at is not categorizable by means of grammatical categories
(and behind these logical and ontological categories) in accordance with which
we are in the habit of thinking. The
difficulty lies in understanding that when we speak of the social-historical,
for instance, we are not intending a substantive, and adjective or even a
substantified adjective; in understanding that the social imaginary is not a
substance, not a quality, not an action or a passion; that social-imaginary
significations are not representations or forms, not concepts.[8] If social-imaginary significations are not to be
understood as substantive, analysis is pushed away from the sequencing and
emplacement entailed by conventional grammatical usage into a more
present-tense orientation. This raises
problems for analytic writing itself.
Typically, such writing operates at a remove from conceptual machinery,
which it puts into motion in such a way as to enable a reader/spectator to
understand the machine and watch its characteristics unfolding in a time-frame
which is other than that of reading. The
temporal relation of reader to conceptual machinery and the transparency of
that machinery from the viewpoint of that reader are, curiously, markers of the distinction between
"philosophical interrogation" and "creative or
"experimental writing." The
central distinction between the two can be understood as “where” the conceptual
apparatus is “located”----whether it is staged as a machine for the inspection
of a detached reader and put into motion with reference to agents/abstractions
which operate within the time-space circumscribed by the text, or if it is
built into the textual machinery itself.
More broadly, at issue is whether the text is
itself a “present” in any strong sense, or if it operates as a de facto
transcendent medium of no particular location which opens onto by staging a
“present” that it unfolds. Decisions as to “where” the conceptual apparatus is
built into a piece are also decisions as to form. Every
phenomenon is an interphenomenon.[9] The white frame at the rear of the image above the
beard of calcite is multistable. It is
impossible to tell whether a landscape appears behind the array of squares or
if a landscape is on top of an array of squares. It oscillates as you do. 115: A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay
in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.[10] Suture. Radical
documentary emerges from the internal critique of dominant forms of documentary
practice. It
presupposes partial determinist ontology and extends it's implications to the
registers of form (narrative viewpoint, which is doubled in that of the
spectator or reader it comes to the same, voice) and content (the definition
and organization of information) It
presupposes a distance between map and territory, between the 2-space of paper
or screen and the complexity of the world which is the signified of documentary
statements. From the exploration of this
distance emerges the centrality of the play of the instituted and the
instituting not simply as performed by others, but also as performed by
documentary itself and again by the experience of the documentary. The
exploration of open forms is a way to foreground the performative aspects of
this relation called documentary. The
following is a map: a map of a considerable duration, of a personal trajectory,
and of a movement through the problem of institution. The bulk of it is a large fragment that I
wrote about 5 years ago and abandoned to the wilderness of my hard drive and forgot
about entirely. When I found it, it
occurred to me that it recapitulated the problem that the first section is
about in its mode of presentation. In
Castoriadis, the terms social imaginary and the significations that order it,
and which by ordering it shape the continuous collective self-alteration of the
social-historical, all pivot on the relation of the instituted and the
instituting. The noun which is entailed
by this dynamic, institution, was a central theme in Husserl's later writing,
and fundamental for Merleau-Ponty's later work.
Despite it’s centrality for Castoriadis, the notion of institution is
not particularly developed as a theme in the published writing. I
was trying to work my way through this.
I was also trying to figure out how to integrate sound into my writing. Institution
involves motion; it involves temporal subjects constituting the world in
historically specific ways as they constitute themselves. So it necessarily
engages genetic phenomenology and enacts the complications this raises in
Husserl's last works. The following
moves through Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness and
the "Origin of Geometry," focused mostly on the latter. It then outlines Merleau-Ponty's trajectory
and is then devoted to his 1960 lectures on Husserl's "Origin of
Geometry" and elements from The Visible and Invisible. The idea is to trace Merleau-Ponty's use of
the notion of institution as a lever which pushed him up against the limitations
of determinist ontology. The
procedure for assembling this was simple. I decided to use the sense in which
my self of five years ago was pinned within the problem of form as an
advantage. I retained the fragment
character of the original. I cleaned up the sentences, adding very little new
material. I cross-cut this with some
newer writing, to make it's surface irregular.
The "pivot" which follows the quotation from Castoriadis' The
Imaginary Institution of Society is new and links back to the first section
and forward as well. This and the other
cross-cut elements refer to the final section, which outlines a project. The project is presented her in order to prompt
reconsideration of what precedes it, and of the whole of this piece.[11] a. Husserl's "Origin of
Geometry" Overview Husserl's
phenomenological work can be roughly divided into transcendental and genetic (concerned
with genesis) modes of analysis. Transcendental
phenomenology pursued a goal of certainty or apodicity in relation to concepts
through the procedure of the reductions, and through the analysis of intentionality.
Intentional analysis involves generating
accounts of features that condition or constrain constitution, the positing of
perceptual data. Both analytic trajectories
were set into motion across the suspension of the natural attitude. The goal of intentional analysis is to
provide an account of structural features that impinge upon the ego's relation
to phenomena, the verb in a sentence. Genetic
phenomenology is concerned with the question of genesis, of coming-into-being
of (perceptual) phenomena as they are shaped by the ego in time. This trajectory engages with the problems of
modeling time consciousness, an analysis of the dynamics particular to this
relation, and the outline of the operative processes shaped by these dynamics,
the "active and passive
syntheses" that are the precondition for experience that unfolds within
time. Husserl's
later work, which introduces the question of the life world and that of institution,
can be seen as a logical consequence of bringing these registers into contact. The
following is a critical outline of PITC and his later essay "Origin of
Geometry." The first text sets up
something of the problematic relation between phenomenological interrogation
and history. The second outlines a way
that Husserl tried to resolve these problems through the notion of institution. Boundary Text: The
Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness The
2001 publication of the 1920s lectures and related materials in genetic
phenomenology as Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis re-situate the relation between transcendental
and genetic phenomenology.[12] This rearrangement of Husserl's work has
particular implications for reading boundary texts like The Phenomenology of
Internal Time Consciousness.[13] PITC is an attempt to formalize or model the
mode of being-in-the-world particular to the ego across the medium of
time. Such a modeling is fundamental to
genetic phenomenology: it provides a
heuristic for setting the latter into motion.
Some of the problems within PITC re-emerge in the context of OG: both are concerned with problems that
arise for inherited ontology if time (and by extension the social-historical)
are taken as central to thinking being-in-the-world. PITC
is an analytic unfolding of the effects of conceiving of time as a line as much
as it is a descriptive analysis of the operations of the ego within time.[14] On the basis of figuring time in this
Aristotelian mode, Husserl tries characterize how perceptual material is
encountered within the temporal flux and the dynamics (retention/pretension) and
procedures which are the basis of the emergence of perceptual-level
experience. The analyses are conditioned
by the requirements of a "pure" phenomenology—that is of relations
staged at a level that precedes their social-historical articulations. From
this follows the notion that time can be understood as a line comprised of
abstract, identical. That is, time is in itself linear prior to any system of
social marking and/or co-ordination. Time happens to the ego, the line a ribbon
that is pulled through its center, breaking it open. This open-endedness onto time forces a shift
away from a substantive modeling of the ego and toward a schematic
understanding: the ego an effect of patterns of self-organization and time
consciousness a region. Intentionality,
a particular relation to…, operates as a
pivot: a stabilizing relation that cuts across the co-ordination of a stream of
incoming perceptual material. How
time consciousness works. Flux is to
adumbration as horizon is to object.
Flux is synthesized passively as context. Intentional phenomena emerge against the
background as a sequence of "object-like formations." Each such partial view of a phenomenon that
can be resolved in the direction of an object is held in place, delayed by
retention, which is a zone of memory that is not itself memory. Retention is of
a piece with protension: the recognition of visually significant aspects of a
given adumbration is also the projection of expectations as to what will
follow. These protensions either fit
with subsequent adumbrations or they do not.
If they do not, the system feeds back on itself and changes itself. It modalizes. The
barrage of phenomena is continuous. The
consequence of a temporality that happens to the ego is a continuous
streaming-though of material and an ego-schema that is reactive. A consequence of a temporality that happens
to the ego is a continuous streaming of material and traces of acts into the
past, every moment further and further into the past along the march of death.[15] The
relation of time to the ego. The
characterization of time as a line emphasizes a single dimension to the
exclusion of others. Husserl's
inferential schema compounds these in their assumption that the ego encounters
particular phenomena/aspects in isolation and builds up from parts to a
(projected) whole on the basis of inferences which depart from features given
within each partial view taken in isolation.
This amounts to a mapping of the analytic schema of transcendental
phenomenology onto time-consciousness.
This is compounded by the characterizations of time. Apply these parameters. It is difficult to imagine any coherent
experience. It
seems more likely that time would be an effect of bio-systemic operations,
their movements and phasings and would be experientially variable even as it is
amenable to various forms of social marking.
It seems more likely that the operations Husserl outlines as synthesis
would involve schemata (patterns, significations) that group or form (and
thereby limit) sequences or formations and that the step-by-step process of
building-up from isolated, particular partial views is a special case, a type
of modalization. These schemata would
have to intertwine modes of visual organization and social criteria, for
example edge-recognition and more obviously symbolic-level functionalities. Grouping/limiting
schemata also shape the content of experience and the figure of the I (which,
following Piera Aulagnier, would be a naming of the causal center of any given
visual field). These schemata would
enable a conception of the ego as a emergent imaginary characteristic of the
unfolding of dynamics, which are necessarily rule-bound. Once schemata are
introduced into analysis, the status of the ego-space particular to time-consciousness
shifts to one of play of the instituted and instituting, and the ego itself
becomes institution, an effect. A
parallel movement obtains at the register of the ordering of phenomena. An example will make this more obvious. The
question of grouping mechanisms emerges explicitly through Husserl's central
metaphor for temporal phenomena: music or sound. The main example is a perception of a pure
violin pitch. The staging of reception
is not unlike that of Proust's Swann as he takes in the little melody that for
him exemplifies love. Swann processes
the "little melody" as a network of associations, the result of which
is a refiguring of his sense of himself as one in love. The description of the perception of sound is
recursive, it's main effect is to push a reader's attention onto the music and
composition of the sentences that refer to music/composition. Swann hears the "little phrase" in
Vintuel's sonata as an affective and audio whole: individual notes emerge from
within that. For Husserl, the experience of a phrase is built up by the ego on
the basis of a note-by-note apperception.
The building-block for sound perception is the individual element (pitch)
abstracted from it's contexts. Phrasing
and other higher-order groupings are constructed or recognized through the
assemblage of sequences, shaped by the dynamic retention-protension. But we organize sound through patterns which
in turn lean on and express particular instituted separations—in this case
music as over against sound---the relations to which are functions of
immersion, repetition, habit, memory.
The way of understanding and parsing an audio environment is automatic,
a performance of ideology through dynamics and the attractors which inflect
them. Prior to 12-tone organizations,
European music was constructed around highly conventionalized types of phrasing
and a particular understanding of pitch which emphasizes attack, which in turn
emplots pitch as location. These phrase
conventions dominate pop music in most of it's forms, and comprise a
significant aspect of an audio habitat.
The dominant mode of phrasing groups pitches into units and defines them
in relation to that unit and not the other way around. Single sounds emerge as such through the
disruption of these conventions. So it
is that John Cage can argue that it is through the development of serial music
that sound begins to emerge as itself.[16] A "pure"
pitch in this context is one that can be duplicated across any number of
instruments, played in any number of spaces in more or less the same way. It presupposes a conception of pitch that minimizes the role played by the
acoustics of the space within which an instrument is being played and in it's
assumption of stability emphasizes attack at the expense of decay. Pitch is an ideality. Idealities are an effect of institution. Consider work by La Monte Young in the
context of which listeners are enjoined to focus on a single pitch (or very
closely grouped pitches) spread out over considerable durations. The durations involved undercut the
centrality of attack and refocus on the acoustic phenomena associated with what
James Tenney refers to as their "spread." This in turn complicates the notion of
repetition, which is tied to that of location and the separation of a pitch
from its acoustic environment. This
opens onto questions of tuning systems, of the characteristics which are fore-grounded
through particular system, and in the process complicates the notion of
audition. For present purposes what is
central is that Husserl's account of the perception of sonic phenomena as built
up on a note-by-note basis is a modeling effect, one which follows from the
attempt to graft a transcendental model onto the analysis of temporal being and
which, in the process, forces a separation between the operations of any
particular ego and the contexts which enable it to group and limit information. A second-order consequence of this move is
the bracketing of the historically specific definitions of the phenomena which
are used as metaphors for the running of the analytic machinery. It
is important to recall that PITC is a heuristic, both in Husserl's work and in
this introduction. For Husserl, it
provided the orientations which enabled his shift into the more complex analyses
of being-in-time developed in the lectures on active and passive synthesis. In this context, the separations between the ego
and the modalities of patterning which enframe it and its experience comes
apart, and the question of grouping mechanisms is broached at length. It is through the elaboration of these more
complex accounts that the questions of the lifeworld and institution emerge as
fundamental. “The Origin of Geometry” is
part of his response to this problem. Origin of Geometry The
project outlined in OG can be situated at the opposite end of the turn to
genetic phenomenology, and should be read off the sections in The Crisis [17]that
concern the life world. Both texts
attempt to thread a fine line between the concerns of philosophy as Husserl
understood them and an acknowledgement of the central role of history in any
account of being in the world. Most of
the difficulties Husserl encounters can be attributed to a genre anxiety. The
question that sets OG into motion is how to account for the social-historical
character if philosophical interrogation, which had been framed in most of
Husserl's earlier work as a voluntarist undertaking carried out primarily
inwardly along lines shaped by a restricted dialogue with other philosophers
(restricted in the sense of functioning as negative examples, what not to
do). OG is an interrogation of the
conditions of possibility of the intertwining of an inward interrogation
(philosophy) with its social-historical conditions of possibility. More specifically, Husserl tries to account
for the conditions of possibility for philosophical interrogation involving
intersubjective communities occupied with similar types of knowledge and the
historical density of that knowledge as they become operational for a
particular subject. The central bind,
then, is how to address this intertwining in a mode that resolves what is
thought into discrete, object-like formations. The
most direct avenue into this intertwining is reading: memory, knowledge of
genre rules, the depositories of which are texts organized as tradition, the
imaginative projection of the world inflected by what is read, etc.. It follows
that Husserl would see the type “institution” as elaborated around a textual core
or "tradition." Institutions
are then socio-cognitive environments which enframe and are enframed by
particular textual networks. This should
pose questions as to the discreteness of an institution. Husserl's particular account bypasses such
problems in ways that are conditioned by his choice of geometry as the
paradigmatic institution. The geometry
that Husserl has in mind begins with Galileo whose Physics initiates ways
of imagining physical space through geometrical forms. The institution of geometry establishes the
conditions of possibility for projections of physical space as "pure
forms" or "idealities."
This sets up a tight interconnection between the physical world and the
domain of Platonic forms. This in turn
enables the notion of institution to operate as a historicizing explanation for
the direct apprehension of form, the clarification of which was the main
project in transcendental phenomenology.
This relation between physical space and form within the institution of
geometry is repeated at the level of the analysis of the institution itself in
the rendering of institutions as objects, as discrete or self-contained, and as
endowed with a type of essence in tradition. In
this superimposition of physical space and form one can see a distanced staging
of an interaction between form and history, but scaled in such a way as to
minimize the consequences of this interaction.
Because geometrical forms are understood as transcendental, the
possibility that they might be changed through this interaction with imagining
physical space presents Husserl with a problem.
He explores this through the metaphor of sedimentation. The cumulative result of the history of an
institution is the elaboration of tradition.
This elaboration is also a refiguring of tradition: the textual networks
at its core are reframed (different relations established, different ways of
attributing weight to variables, different operations, etc.) Tradition can also be seen as unfolding in an
additive manner. The problem of agency,
of what or who does this reframing, is taken up below. The interaction between
these produces sedimentation, which is a way of accounting for the density of
experience as inflected by interaction with tradition. For Husserl, reading is a
"re-activation"—one takes over the ways of staging and thinking the
world elaborated by another, but with associations in play that inflect of make
dense that re-activation in ways that are not a simple repetition. On the other hand, because the result of
geometry as institution is the reprocessing of space in terms of idealities, it
follows that, for Husserl, the central rules etc. had to have been posited the
beginning. Commentary, then, would be
the revealing of what was always there, rather than a combination of adjustment
and reframing of the institution that mirrors (in a variety of possible ways)
wider changes in particular historical contexts.[18]
In a sense, this metaphor is a device
which enables Husserl to not choose between the alternative conceptions of
tradition as textual network outlined above.
Sedimentation is a condensed expression of the experience of tradition
(for oneself, for the history of such experiences or commentary). But because the basic features around which
an institution is elaborated are present from its origin, tradition is
additive. An alternate way to think
about sedimentation is as the result(s) of feedback loops which connect an institution
to its effects in the world. For example, much of this was written while
sitting at a café in A
second peculiarity of Husserl's account of geometry as institution can be
traced to what Natalie Depraz calls the performative character of Husserl's
writing, which can in turn be mapped onto normative protocols for attentive
reading.[19] According to Depraz, Husserl's texts are
staged across a tight association between thought and visualization: attentive
reading renders transparent the surface of the text. Depraz discusses the reductions in these
terms, arguing that they amount to exercises that the reader performs along
with Husserl. The clearest example is
that of the epoché, or bracketing, which is the operative notion within the
process of reduction in general.
Bracketing the natural attitude is entirely a visual act: one groups the
various features that characterize it, mentally draws brackets around them and
puts the assemblage out of play. This
conception of reading as visualization of results is echoed in the model of
institution in Husserl's emphasis on the taking-up of idealities as the marker
of intertwining of subjective and instituted spaces. In this context, what matters are the results
of the genre rules, not the rules themselves.
This way of framing the interaction leaves Husserl nowhere to go except
toward activation as repetition—he cannot otherwise explain how the effects he
valorizes are produced, what schema they lean on, how and why these schemata
might be transposable. Husserl attempts to resolve this by introducing a
distinction between types of activation: active and passive. Activation
designates the opening up of a given intellectual space through interaction
with sedimented material. Looping this
back through the notion of tradition, activation refers to a reframing of
mental activity through taking up a mode of inquiry. Husserl accounts for the
possibility of creation through a distinction between active and passive. Passivity entails a simple repetition of previous
results, those which are deposited in textual form, a repetition that would
encompass a range of interactions, from distracted engagement through simple
application. An active relation is
predicated on re-assuming an originary relation to the field itself, pushing
through repetition to a kind of engaged immediacy. If the basic features of the institution are
all posited at once through an originary act it follows that creative action
that could have the ability to transform the institution itself would have to
depart from a second originary relation to the institution itself Behind this is a notion of creation as a
function of a demiurge or its secular correlate in genius. All
the above features combine to explain the ahistorical character of Husserl's
notion of institution. OG stages
institution as an object in the world—we
have offered two explanations for this outcome, one that refers to the
idealities that result from interaction with the space, and the other from the
way in which Husserl's work equates thought and visualization, with the
attending assumptions about determination.
Within institution-as-object, tradition functions as essence, and
therefore is posited as continuously and simultaneously present within it. The characterization of activation as
repetition (further differentiated into passive/active modes) follows from the
status imputed to tradition. So what we take
from Husserl is: a point of departure for considering the intertwining of
mental activity and social co-ordinates; a provisional theory of institution, a
category to be developed; a stipulation of the level at which institution and
mental activity interact in the stylization of retention. Beyond that, Husserl's conception of
institution, and its philosophical underpinnings, operate largely as a foil for
subsequent work. Merleau-Ponty: Husserl at the limits
of phenomenology (The 1960 seminars on “The Origin of Geometry”) This
section outlines MP's close reading of OG given as a lecture course at the
Collège de France during the 1960 academic year. This section is not a complete account of
MP's thinking on the question of institution[20],
but rather focuses on the 1960 lectures because (a) the interpretation outlined
there is elaborated at the edge of what appears to have been a shift in MP's
work and because (b) the outline of the notion of institution to be found in
these lectures points beyond the frame within which MP tried to situate it. His
last writings are elaborated almost entirely within the process of
reorientation and do not articulate the viewpoint toward which he was
moving—though one can see in certain elements how he might have moved.[21]
His later work offers surprising resources, even as they at times need to be
read against the frames within which they are situated. MP's reading of Husserl points both forward
and backward, toward a break with object-oriented thinking about the
social-historical while nonetheless remaining pinned by his determinist
ontological framework. Overview To
orient what follows, a brief schematization of MP's work seems in order. The point of this section is threefold:
to situate the interaction between MP
and Husserl's text in the 1960 seminars; to locate aspects of MP's trajectory
that could have prompted a harder break with the separation of philosophical
inquiry and social analysis; and to frame some of these latter elements as
potentially useful in dialogue with Castoriadis. MP's
narrative of his own intellectual paths in The Visible and Invisible (VI)
points to the importance of The
Structure of Comportment (SC), his first published work, in setting up the
problems that would subsequently occupy him.
He places particular emphasis on the centrality of kinesthetisis—and by
extension of the body—in the production of perception. This is a fundamental break with the
assumptions that shaped Husserl's phenomenology. Here, I focus on a single theme from within
that work which dovetails into The Phenomenology of Perception (PhP), and
which, in turn, opens onto some of the major the concerns central in his later
writing. The main insight that MP
isolates from SC is that, considered from a nervous system level, the body is
radically open onto the world. Linked to
this were two other correlates: perception is the result of processes and that these
processes are organized in such a way as to make the assumption of a mind/body
split incoherent. Perception is a result
and not a state. If
one routes these claims above through MP's dialogue with Piaget, a number of
conclusions follow. I will simply list
them for brevity's sake. The traditional
conception of cognition is obviously inadequate, as is the assumption that the
processes which shape cognition can be understood on the basis of mechanisms
located within the boundaries of the skull.
For Piaget, particularly in works like The Construction of Reality in
the Child, the emergence of particular stages of a child's ability to
separate itself from a world and develop a socially coherent relationship to
the world are functions of the unfolding of particular neural configurations. Neural patterns then are themselves symbolic
functions in the sense that they operate through an internalization not only of
language but of the social relations which enframe and are enframed by it. Language in turn reorders and leans on other
forms of organization/differentiation. These
functionalities deploy as constraints and are oriented outward. They appear to bundle
and limit at once, shaping in certain respects information prior to their
emergence as such within the platform of consciousness. The development of a sense of self, or an
ego, is then a result of complex interactions between neural development and
social contexts, which inflect the unfolding of these dynamic parameters. It
follows from this that the ego is necessarily a social formation, an effect of
temporal patterns which interlace the instituted and instituting, processed
through a dimensional shift which is the distinction between being-through
language and being as mediated by it.[22]
At
the same time as the work outlined in SC points beyond phenomenology, MP's dialogue
with Husserl loops back through it. PhP
performs the tensions this generates. In it, perception is staged as the
practical result of modes of interaction of the embodied subject with "the
world." While the analysis is
quite far ranging, and undermines many of the basic assumptions of inherited
ontology, the frame of an account of subjective experience in the context of an
abstraction called "the world" generates limitations. For
example, in another paper I develop a critical reading of MP's analysis of the
question of depth of field that pointed to the centrality of projection in its
production. MP argues that the subject
organizes its visual field around itself, positing itself as its causal
center. The ability to process depth of
field is a function of the ability of the subject to project itself into this
visual field. Like space, which for MP
is a production rooted in the subject's capacity to move around (so is not an a
priori), depth is the result of underlying processes. Following the logic outlined above, these
processes are at once social and particular to the psyche. Perception is made
over into a mode of being-in-the world (rather than one of apprehending the
world). Being-in-the-world is in turn
analyzed on the basis of the situation of an ego-in-general which finds itself thrown
into a world which is not differentiated, which simply is. This is a
consequence of retaining a subject-centered framework: to speak in terms of
"the world" and not of particular social-historical configurations of
"the world" and to take experience as what is to be elucidated places
a particular frame over the problèmatique the occupies him and truncates it. This limitation emerges in the account of the
interconnections of broader social-historical patterns and the experience of
the pschye, which is restricted to the category of habit, which he reduces
largely to a type of learned response acquired through repetition and rooted in
muscle memory. The
category habit is shaped as it is in PhP as a function of MP's attempt to transpose
intentionality from a directedness-toward…undertaken by the ego (as for Husserl
in the transcendental works) onto a model of the historically situated
subject. Directedness-toward the world is embodied for
MP: it is deployed through the complex interweaving of the body-as –schema and
the body-as-object. The body as schema or
as organizing nodes for networks of patterns (which can be understood as
involving something like a retention/pretension relation, but pushed away from
the traditional space for thinking perception) characterizes the body in terms
that are at once static and dematerializing.
Put into motion, these schemata operate as constraints that shift the
dynamics which underpin the emergence of a visual field in one direction as
over against another. From a viewpoint
shaped by the results, by interactions with the world that take a visual field
(a result) as a point of departure, bodily schemata would disappear into what
they organize. The field itself then is
a form of auto-figuration as it is a figuration of phenomena outside. Within the results of this process, depth of
field is a projection that takes temporal figuring as it is condensed onto the
seemingly atemporal zone of perception as it's basis, is a kind of
temporalization of what appears as simultaneous, a re-envelopment of that which
is enveloped. [23]
What shapes these schemata in their
unfolding is repetition, context, habitat.
In MP these are all condensed onto the category of habit. In
his later work, MP pushes apart what remains in PhP condensed onto habit, developing
this line of thinking through the themes of the flesh and chiasm or intertwining. It the process, this theme becomes separated
from the close analysis of specific subject positions and shifts into a space of
metaphorical exploration of the interpenetration of thought and world. FOLD For a long time I would get out of bed
early, before dawn, turn on my shortwave radio and begin hunting on the ocean
of static for Of
the many possible avenues that could be isolated from within PhP to demonstrate
how it gives way to the later work, I will follow Claude Lefort, for whom
movement is a central underlying theme.[24]
Lefort isolates movement as an underlying feature of the physiology of vision
(eye movement) and points to through the centrality of kinesthesis (body
movement) in the practical production of spatial orientation. Movement poses significant problems for
linguistic and/or visual modes of representation, to the extent that both are
geared around fixing what is described.
This limit shapes MP's relationship to the textual medium through which
his work is deployed, and forms the basis for a kind of meta-level that runs
through much of published work after PhP.
I refer to this as a meta-level because of the recursive function MP
attributes to it. At its most general,
the problem is that of practice and representation and of the tensions produced
within/across bringing the two into relation with each other. MP breaks quite early with the Marxist
framing of the question of practice and reroutes his interrogation through
painting—in two major essays, he moves in quite different directions.[25]
In his consideration of Cezanne, the
question concerns the relation of Cezanne's painting to a register of what he
later calls "wild being". A
broader formulation of the question that propels this essay is to see it as an
interrogation of the extent to which someone working within a particular
instituted/instituting space which is shapes and is shaped by conventions
concerning representation (and the ontological assumptions that underpin it)
can push through these conventions to bring into a kind of formalization that
which precedes and is to an extent precluded by those very conventions. The other, later essay addresses the
limitations that follow from the visual representation of practice. These texts function as signposts in the
development of his later category of vertical being, that which escapes
representation, that which causes the status of visual representation of be
dislodged, and which could be argued points to the limitations of an
ontological framework built with/on the basis of an unquestioned privileging of
the visual. MP
develops these analyses through the space of philosophy and the medium of
writing. The relations and assumptions
that shape his interaction with his chosen medium recapitulate the problems
staged through painting. These levels of
interrogation necessarily turns back on themselves and dovetail into MP's
extended interrogation of the relation of language to thinking. It is at this level that MP concludes that
inherited ontology was inescapable since its primary features are coterminous
with those of language itself. For
example, nouns tend to fix what they denote and substitute for the referent a
manifold of meanings delimited by the chain of signifiers within a sentence. Taken as a whole—as a signification—the relation
is atemporal and it is this atemporality that accounts for the problems of
verbal (and by extension visual) representation of practice/process. It is not that process cannot be represented: to say that would needlessly make practice
the object of a kind of negative theology.
Rather the nature of process is fundamentally altered through this
representation, shifting from a continuum to a series of states (from Marey to
Muybridge). MP
argues, even in VI, that this particular conception of signification is
necessary and its effects inevitable.
Naming is the condition of possibility for generalities. As a function of the dynamic across which MP
understood thought as moving—from text to process back to text—thinking is
itself structured and delimited by these
same features.[26]
Because his conception of the intertwining of thought and the language that it
shapes and is shaped by it is conditioned by explorations of limits conditions
(vertical being) which were opened up as a function of his interrogation of
being-in-the-world that ties it closely to a version of history, MP was pushed
in two directions. At the level of
writing, he tried to develop a style that would slip through these constraints
and perform a sense of motion, of historicity.
Analytically, MP counterpoised statements on the order of the following: Must we maintain the Marxist essence of
history and treat the facts that call it into question as empirical and
confused variants, or, on the contrary, are we at a turning point where, beneath the Marxist essence of history a
more authentic and more complete essence shows through? The question remains unsettled in scientific
terms, because in it truths of facts and truths of reason overlap and because
the carving out of the facts, like the elaboration of essences, is there
conducted under presuppositions that remain to be interrogated, if we are to
fully know what science means. (VI 108) Essences—"real"
essences—emerge in and through history and so are at once specifiable in terms
of location and mobile or dynamic. So like Heidegger, MP operates at a register
of reversal as a point of departure, substituting metaphors of below or depth
for those of transcendence, movement for stasis while nonetheless accepting
determinist ontology as an inevitable effect of the medium of writing. History
is equated with that which escapes representation almost entirely except as is
it carved up by various social systems of marking. Time is the region of ontogenesis: vertical
being indicates the relation of what escapes to modes of bringing into
representation which (partially) formalize an otherwise diffuse becoming. Wild being is a zone of pre- or
un-differentiation, a Heraclitan space in which what would be grouped as phenomena
occur as singularities. This amounts to
positing of a prior condition into/across which bringing into differentiation
and/or generalizability occurs: the
"Being as container: that Castoriadis isolates as one of the central
limiting features of MP's work.[27]
Hollow The first time I sat on my brother's
houseboat moored at the lowest mid-point of a circle that can be superimposed
over the When I returned to When my life at a remove came unraveled, I
disappeared into the map. Now, very
small, by day I move from a point on that map into a second grid, travel as
packets that race through telephone systems and circulate through vast
horizontal libraries. In the evening, I
sit on a bench at the edge of the salt marsh.
When the tide is half in or half out, the bank opposite is a giant
biscotti. There
are real tensions within this position that MP's sudden death in 1961 left
hanging. I rehearse them to provide a
general idea of the framework within which the seminars on Husserl
unfolded. It is to these seminars that
we now turn. The Lectures on Origin of Geometry The
first and perhaps the most striking difference between Husserl and MP on the
question of institution is that the latter does not approach institution as
discrete formations or objects. With
this, the status of institution becomes problematic. In the previous section, I linked Husserl's resolution of institution
into a visualizable object to the imputing of an essence to the staging of tradition
as essence. Among the effects of this
are the assumption that activation is a kind of repetition. For
MP, an institution is a social-historical formation that functions in the
shaping of regions of social being but is not for that graspable as an
object. A number of consequences follow
from this. I focus on the notion of
tradition. As for EH, the core of an
institution is tradition and the core of tradition is textual. In Husserl, it appears that tradition is
simultaneously present within the institution itself. For MP the mode of being proper to tradition
is otherwise: The essence of tradition is not immediately
graspable as in its essence static.
Geometry and its tradition become for is, for our reflection, a fold
(creux—hollow) which opens a dimension.
While there is no question of all this, of all its intentional
referrals, in principle these are not included in an actual and simultaneous
essence. Overcoming the opposition: history or philosophy by
introducing a familiarity of all human activity to all human activity, of
potentials "wissen," pre-traced /possibilities of all human
creations, of all culture, which is not an explicit knowledge, not an
intellectual possession, but which is knowledge of the ignorance/presence
within me of the past as past/which assures communication between me and
history, because tradition is forgotten from its origin. in relation to an
origin that is not taken up by the present, which operates in us and pushes
geometry before us precisely because it is not grasped by thought. What enables us to understand the past is a
tradition, that is (in fullness) a certain void, a certain
"forgetting" a circumscribed negativity which calls for reference
from the outside.[28]
The
essence of tradition is not immediately graspable as in its essence static.
Geometry and its tradition become for us, for our reflection, a fold
(creux—hollow) which opens a dimension. By
this point in the seminars, the notion of essence is a metaphor used to account
for regularities: structural features, generalities. The problem around which this revolves is the
reversal of the transcendent and historical.
History is a field of scatter or flux, a space of singularities only
some of which are captured by being assimilated into a region of marking. Construed in this way, regularities emerge as
a problem. To explain them, MP retains
the structure of objects in their traditional form, but puts them into motion
by submersing them in this stream of flux, in the context of which they operate
as surface irregularities. Pushed into
this space by remaining within a determinist ontology and by inverting the
relation of form and doxa, MP argues
that because there are such ireegularities—folds or hollows---in the surface of
this vast field in motion, the category is
a logical necessity. Without it
there is no way to explain regularities.
Regularities are explained with reference to a discrete whole—so it is
that explaining the regularities of regions of the instituted presupposes that
there are discrete spaces called institutions.
Institution cannot be a byproduct of the dynamic which links the
instituting and the instituted. Within
this framework, to argue that is to reduce what it is instituted to scatter. For
Husserl, phenomenological interrogation is a stripping away and clarification
of transcendent features of perception.
On the object side, essence is a result of phenomenological
investigation, a set of predicates attached to an empty placeholder x which are
necessary if the referent is to be itself and not something else. This set of predicates is a manifold of
features which are simultaneously present in the category being clarified. This register of analysis, and the
clarification of the viewpoint of the transcendental ego which is of a piece
with it, operates at a register above that of the natural attitude. For MP, "depth analysis" entails an
encounter with history. Again, history
is a field of motion, of scatter as such.
Within this, regularities create zones or folds always specific in space
and time. Understood at across a
different time-scale than that of an embedded observer locked in the present (a
possibility which presupposes institutions by presupposing written traces of
history), essence is mobile or dynamic but nonetheless itself, a system
characterized by high levels of redundancy, which is amenable to being fixed
analytically at a given moment through inductive procedures. This
move is tied up with MP's critiques of "la pensée du
survol"----history is flux; the Observer is locked within it. Abstraction becomes a problem to the extent
that abstraction traditionally has entailed a bracketing of flux. The question then becomes one of distance, of
viewpoint, of constraints. …my incontestable power to give myself
leeway (prendre du champ), to disengage the possible from the real, does not go
so far as to dominate all the implications of the spectacle and to make of the
real a simple variant of the possible; on the contrary it is the possible
worlds that are variants and are like doubles of the actual world and actual
Being. I have leeway enough to replace
such and such moments of my experience with others, to observe that this does
not suppress it—therefore to determine the inessential. But does what remains after these
eliminations belong necessarily to the Being in question? In order to affirm that I should have to soar
over my field, suspend or at least reactivate all the sedimented thoughts with
which it is surrounded, first of all my time, my body—which is not only
impossible for me to do in fact but would deprive me of that very cohesion in
depth (en épaisseur, in thickness) of the world and of Being without which the
essence is subjective folly and arrogance.
There is therefore for me something inessential, and there is a zone, a
hollow, where what is not inessential, not impossible, assembles; there is not
positive vision that would definitely give me the essentiality of the essence.[29]
The
problem follows from MP's assumption that history is a pathway to posing
questions about the Being of beings, so the world is singular as history is
singular as the question is singular.
The world and history are singular terms, so there must be unified
meta-processes which enable both to be categorized—the problem here is the fact
of embeddedness. MP seems primarily
embedded in his own way of framing the questions he is asking, a way that leans
on and performs the limitations of determinist ontology. To
be is to be determinate. If history is a
single field of scatter but there are nonetheless observable regularities, it
must be possible to link them to the mediation of a particular form. The paradigmatic form is an object. So institution must be an object, but an
object that is stretched out in time (as an expression of the past in the
present) and is itself in motion. If an
institution is a temporal object, it would have to have the defining
characteristics of an object. There is
the instituted and the instituting: within this framework the way to explain
the specificity of this dynamic is to link it back to a discrete space. Space, location, thing. Fold Click this: http://www.obscure-disk.com/AtTheTone/31.mp3 Atomic clocks are quite complex. Like all clocks,
they are intended to make the same event happen over and over. Other days I would get home from school
early enough to catch the end of the interval signal Why must time
be measured so precisely? Precise time synchronization has many uses
in everyday life. Synchronization between two or more locations is necessary
for high speed communication systems, synchronizing television feeds,
calculating bank transfers, and transmitting everything from email to sonar
signals in a submarine. Power companies use precise time to regulate power
system grids and reduce power losses. Radio and television stations require
both precise time-of-day and frequency in order to broadcast programs. Precise
time measurements are also essential for accurate navigation and the support of
communications on earth and in space. Scientific organizations such as NASA
depend on reliable and consistent time measurement for projects such as
interplanetary space travel. Fractional disparities in times between a space
probe and tracking stations on Earth can dramatically affect the positions of
spacecraft. Precise time measurements are also essential to radio navigation
systems like the Global Positioning System (GPS). By synchronizing the
satellite clocks within nanoseconds of each other, it makes it possible for a
receiver to know its position on earth within a few meters. From the fractured space of Official Time I
would tune away. Interval signal and sign-on announcement: Ici Lomé...Radio
…essence is therefore always locatable in
space, in time. In short there is no
essence, no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of
geography. Not that it is confined there
and inaccessible for the others, but because, like that of nature, the space or
time of culture is not surveyable from above, and because communication from
one constituted culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they
have all originated. Where in all this
is essence? Where is the existence?[30]
This turns onto question of signification/signification
of signification: Say that the things are structures,
frameworks, the stars of our life: not before us, laid out as perspective
spectacles, but gravitating about us. […]Essence, Wesen: Underlying kinship
between the essence and perception: the essence, likewise, is an inner
framework, it is not above the sensible world, it is beneath or in its depth,
its thickness. It is the secret bond—the
Essences are Etwases at the level of speech, as the things are Essences at the
level of Nature. Generality of the
things: why are there several samples of each thing? This is imposed by the very definition of the
things as field beings: how could there be a field without generality?[31]
Generality
is the condition of possibility for posing questions about Being: MP finds himself locked into this formulation
because his project is framed as being contingent upon it. Because determinations can be grouped into
patterns, essence can be understood as operational in the work at the level of
"inner structure." But one's
embeddedness in specific social-historical situations conditions any "positive
vision" of the (potential) register of essences, of forms. This sequence generates results such as: there
are generalizable features to the structure of perception, therefore perception
has an essence. The elimination of the
pensée du survol, the transcendent viewpoint,
simply means that essence is not present, is not an immanent or potentially
immanent phenomenon (as it might be as a result of the reductions in
transcendental phenomenology.) But that
we are asking questions about mode of being presupposes that these regularities
are operative and accessible. In
this lecture series, MP does not disengage language from the world and from
history, so if the latter are singular, it follows that the former would be as
well. The world is staged through
language in its spaces of regularity and escapes where it is not. The correspondence between language and world
is not here pushed apart. The notion of
institution remains locked in the frame that Husserl made for it. While
there is no question of all its intentional referrals in the above, in
principle these are not included in an actual and simultaneous essence. An
institution is at once discrete and open.
For MP, that it is discrete, that it has (or is) regularities means that
an institution has an essence at some level or another, is a kind of object.
The emphasis falls on the qualification: an object-like formation that operates
in particular ways in the context of a particular register of being. Institutions are open in that they are
basically spaces defined by patterns of referrals—which are themselves articulated
in and through ordinary language. Referrals:
signifiers that direct one's attention from…to… mediated by the particular
modes of figuring/style. These are
primarily what they do: by being activated, referrals stylize action and
reflection, redefine the surroundings,
and open onto the possibility of specific types of interrogation. So an institution is a pattern and a node in
a pattern of patterns which are not "contained" but which are
amenable to being invoked. MP moves
through paradoxical character of tradition, its modes of givenness, its
historicity, focusing particular attention on the interwining of reflection in the present with
a density that leans on the collective past. Castoriadis
provides another way of thinking this level of institution through the category
of the social-imaginary signification. What is signification? We can describe it only as an indefinite
skein of interminable referrals to something other than(than what would appear
to be stated directly). The other things
can be both significations and non-significations—that to which significations
relate or refer. The lexicon of a
language does not revolve around itself, is not closed in upon itself, as has
flatly been stated. What is closed upon
itself, fictively, is the code, the lexicon of ensemblist-identitary
signifieds, each of which can take on one or more sufficient definitions. But the lexicon of significations is always
open: for the full signification of a word is everything that can be socially
stated, through, represented or done of the basis of this word. In other words,
it can never be assigned determined limits, a peras. To be sure, this
skein of referrals, in which each leads to what, in turn, is the source of new
referrals, is far from being an undifferentiated chaos. In this magma, there are flows that are
denser, nodal points, clearer of darker areas, bits of rock caught in the
whole. But the magma never ceases to
move, to swell and subside, to liquefy what was solid and solidify what was
almost inexistent. And it is because the
magma is such that move himself and create in and through language, that he is
not pinned down once and forever by the set of univocal signifieds of the words
he uses—in other words, that language is language. And yet not only the definition but the thing
itself would be impossible if the ensemblist-identitary dimension was not
present as well. For this signification must be this skein and not another, and these referrals must be referrals from…to…, relations that are provisionally
posited as between terms posited as fixed. (IIS 243-244) Pivot History
in MP is a space of heterogeneity which is itself heterogenous in that it is
striated by zones of regularity. History
is flux, is time. This results from the
inversion of the assumptions of determinist ontology. The zone traced by flux is itself
unitary. Language is a unity within this
other unity. The interactions between
these surfaces render each irregular.
The camera-eye of theory planes beneath these surfaces. Partial
determinacy enables a disaggregation of language. The disaggregation of language opens onto
partial determinacy. There is no
experience, including that of the vewipoint of theory, for which all of
language is simultaneously present.
Rather, as Wittgenstein put it in the Tractatus: 108: We see that what we call
"sentence" and "language" has not the formal unity that I
imagined, but is really a family of structures more or less related to one
another. Language
is not a thing. The idea that the situation is otherwise follows from a mapping
of the effects of the noun form onto the phenomena that it organizes. One can refer to language as a whole, but
that does not provide access to a whole. Disaggregating
language conceptually entails a series of effects. Recursive operations and ordinary usage
alike move through "families of structures." These structures are not discrete objects,
but rather are actions and what constraints them, signification and what shapes
particular signifying acts. Words and
groups of words are constraints which direct the act of bringing phenomena into
relation in some directions rather than in others. For Castoriadis, words paradigmatic of a
broader operation, that of bringing into relation and this bringing into
relation is itself the play of the instituted and the instituting. Institution
collapses down onto the nodes that are these bundles of referrals. The metaphor of the magma , which is itself a
mapping of the schema of partial determinacy onto networks of significations,
prevents institution from being rendered as object. Institution is the pivot that is entailed by
performed connections between the instituted and the instituting, between
patterns which enable the delimiting and connecting of information and the acts
of delimitation and connection which are shaped by them. What is delimited and/or fashioned through
connection or linkage or bringing into relation is other than what constrains
that action. Creation is everywhere,
continually. One
moves through the magma, moves through the social-imaginary. The emphasis on the act of creating meaning
within constraints, with constraints, against constraints is an emphasis on
motion and on process. There is neither
the determined or flux, but the partially determined and the actions of
bringing into determination. The status
and outcomes of these acts are conditioned by normative relations to them which
are performed more or less automatically.
Ideology is performed. The relation of the map to the territory is
performed: it is not that there is no relation, but rather that one actively
makes this relation. This means that
there are multiple possibilities for exploring the space which is made to link
them. In this scenario, the pensée du
survol which MP subjected to an internal critique is a recursive operation that
is also a moving-through. It is on this
basis that questions of theoretical form emerge. If ideology is performed, then traces which
are produced through that performance regarding, say, the relation of analytic
form to what is analyzed, themselves perform ideology. There
are analytic complications which arise from this at the level of scale. Pushing the theoretical viewpoint into the
magma, putting it into motion inclines thinking about signification toward the
register of "time consciousness."
At this register, signification is a more capacious term than
"category" and could be brought into a potentially fruitful dialogue
with recent work in cognitive neurolinguistics, which in general is opening new
ways of exploring the processes of translation and ordering which enable
perception as an emergent characteristic.
At this register, social-imaginary significations can be understood as
thoroughly internalized and as operating at the neurological level as much as
at an explicit level in the shaping of sense-data. They would disappear into what they organize
and presumably could be read off from accounts of that which they
organize. Any
given action could be constrained through relations to these significations of
varying degrees of articulation and sedimentation. In principle the notion of the
social-imaginary signification alone does not provide a way to generate and
debate such differentiations. The
problem with Castoriadis' work is not that it is not important and interesting,
but rather that no-one knows about it. In
Castoriadis' later work, this reading-off of significations from accounts which
perform them typically unfolds at a very high level of abstraction, through the
category of "master significations" which seems little more than a
way to rename the zeitgeist. There is still tremendous work to be done. Overcoming
the opposition: history or philosophy by
introducing a familiarity of all human activity to all human activity, of a
potentials "wissen," [of?] pre-traced possibilities of all human
creations, of all culture The
core of this is an argument made in OG that is taken up in MP's own voice. One the one hand, it is a peculiar argument
to find wedged in between what precedes and follows it because it seems to make
of recognition a justification for a kind of universal viewpoint. It can only do this by separating the level
of essence (whether knowable or not) from that of the mechanisms that
characterize how an institution functions (the "intentional
referrals"). In Husserl, this
characterization of institutions as "spiritual creations" that
subject "recognize" as distinct from a natural formation is a way to
explain the different relations that each type of formation entails (the former
can be assimilated subjectively, while the latter would be and remain an epistemological relation). The claim, in Husserl as in MP, is of a piece
with claims for/about the genre of philosophy as over against history. It is also an index of the extent to which both
are working from the traditional philosophy of the subject: the re-stylization
of thought/action through interaction with history is a problem created by the
assumptions which shape this approach. . [W]hich
is not an explicit knowledge, not an intellectual possession, but which is
knowledge of the ignorance/presence within me of the past as past/which assures
communication between me and history...because tradition is forgotten from its
origin. in relation to an origin that is not taken up by the present, which
operates in us and pushes geometry before us precisely because it is not
grasped by thought. What enables us to
understand the past is a tradition, that is (in fullness) a certain void, a
certain "forgetting" a circumscribed negativity which calls for
reference from the outside. MP
presents a meta-figure, a figure of possible figures, one that is fashioned to
specify a general mode of intertwining of the mental world particular to the
subject with history as instituted/instituting. It collapses sedimentation and activation
in Husserl's analysis into a description of a mode of imbrication that
emphasizes in its first step the particular combination of structuring and
opening that effectively positions institution as a kind of grid or frame that
stylizes and renders more complex ideal-typical types of intentional
relations. The meta-figure is
effectively a recapitulation of the topology of institution—it makes more
specific the character of institutions that were characterized above as a
hollow or fold in a Being, which is understood across the metaphors of quantum
theory as a field. The resolution into a
way of processing the world—the effect of the "dimension" onto which
a given institution opens—is a result of practices specific to that space. The diversity of practices that can be
activated to this end are functions of particular institutional spaces and
would be consigned in MP's reading to the "inessential"—that is to a
historical problem---following the logic outlined earlier. What
is important in this description is the characterization of the kind of history
that MP understands as being available through this type of interaction in the
present, and the shifts in the understanding of tradition that make of this
interaction not a type of repetition as for Husserl, but creation. The particular characteristic of the history
is that it not be tied directly to its empirical coordinates, that it operate
in a kind of curious transcendental register that has a sense of the past as
one of its features. One can see this
relation played out across the whole history of the Marxist Imaginary in the
particular ways of reading the central texts as if they characterized
capitalism once and for all and so referred at once to particular empirical
conditions that obtained in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and
equally to empirical elements in the twentieth.
There are several devices that enabled this type of reading: the
assumption that Marx had isolated in laws of capitalism, the dialectic; the
effects of the abstraction and application of the dialectic to the reading off
of features in the world in terms shaped by Marx's texts, and so forth.. Another mechanism is central but not
particular to Marx: the transformation of what is described through the
linguistic medium used to describe it, the capacity for fixing and generalizing
words carry with them. The
transcendentalizing capacity of language as medium is a condition of
possibility for reading, for the sense a reader can generate for him or herself
of entering into a scene that is materially the result of interaction with a
series of particles laying flat on a page.
MP
reprocesses the figure of Galileo along lines that parallel the reworking of
origin.. Rather than a proper name
linked to an originary viewpoint on tradition/institution (as for EH), for MP Galileo is understood as a signifier
constructed in/through the institution of geometry itself. Galileo would be
among the central organizing signifiers, constructed in and through his own
texts and the layers of socially authorized commentary on those texts.[32] Claims to closeness to or distance from
Galileo become moves in conflicts over legitimacy within that instituted social
space. Proximity and distance are types of claims made about a given
argument/position usually accompanied by or worked in/through assemblages of
texts/references. The particular modes
that shape these conflicts are themselves one of many indices of the extent to
which even instituted/instituting spaces that operate in opposition to a
dominant order recapitulate features of that order in their mode of
operation. At issue in these conflicts,
across the question of position relative to the signifier that stands in for
origin, is the positing, rearranging, elaborating tradition, arguing for
boundaries to be understood around that space or for the opposite: in short
creating the space anew. This
basic phenomenon is accounted for in a general way by the characterization of
tradition as "forgotten from its origin" but at the same time
operating itself with "in relation to an origin not taken up by the
present." The traces of tradition
then can be understood as referring back to an originary context, but this
referral is not primary. To keep with
this metaphor for a moment, the convergence of referrals around an originary
point can account for something of the contours that shape a sense of
engagement with collective modes of thought and their history, but the meanings
are not shaped by reference to empirical origin. Origin becomes figure, the inner-most frame
around a space of interrogation the status of which is reinscribed by
commentary, which also redefines meanings and rules for interaction. In this way, tradition is continually
refigured. Meanings are not implicit
from an originary moment. Institutions are
their history. For
MP, the abstraction of empirical origin appears to be a lynchpin that enables
an "accomplishment" of the past to be swung round in temporal terms
as operate as a mode of enframing or stylizing activity in the present. For Husserl, this "accomplishment"
had its source in tradition. For MP,
this may still be the case, but in a strange way: for him. the primary
characteristic of tradition is that it is forgotten from the outset, is available
only as trace, as "circumscribed negativity."[33] The problem is not that tradition is
forgotten from the outset, that it can be characterized as available as trace,
as circumscribed negativity. The result
of this would be the claim that, at any given point, tradition is a
configuration fashioned by particular actors for particular ends, shaped both
by the sociological situation that regulates questions of legitimacy within
that field (who gets to speak, at what register, to whom) and by the content that
shapes and is shaped by the fabrication of such a configuration. What is curious in this is the relation
between this claim and the relegation of "intentional referrals" to
an "inessential" status, when it is clear tat, if what MP argues is
true, access to tradition would be a function of these referrals, and the
regularities that obtained at the interzone which connects the instituted to
the instituting would be shaped by them.
MP's framework here does not allow him to give relationality a
priority. He is still thinking in terms
of objects. It is at this point that the
framework outlined by Castoriadis is more suited to a descriptive analysis of
institutions. What
MP does say is that tradition, because it is forgotten from the outset, "calls
for reference from the outside." MP
has shifted thinking about institution well away from the visual paradigm that
shaped Husserl's analysis, and in so doing has displaced the question of the
determination of institution to another level.
The metaphors MP uses gravitate around problems of determining the
character or limits of institutions, which function as such as a result of the
grouping of effects more than anything else.
He emphasizes the linguistic dimension of an instituted/instituting
social space where Husserl tended to read this textual dimension as
transparent, preferring to focus on idealities (the results of textual
engagement). What one is left with then
is a formation (institution) rooted in texts that are themselves operative as
primarily as trace, as negativity. This
accounts for a materially obvious feature of traditions: the texts which
comprise it are nowhere simultaneously "present." In terms of the type of relation MP is
analyzing here, even if these texts were stacked in front of you on a table,
they would not be present. Access is
always necessarily partial, and the parts always refer, directly and
indirectly, to what is beyond them. This
is a sense of circumscribed negativity. Institutions
are patterns and are that which pattern the production of certain types of
meaning. They are spaces of the
instituted which open onto spaces of instituting. Because the instituted conditions without
being able to account for the instituting, the relation in its spatialized form
would necessarily be open-ended. At the
register of the instituted, of texts, this open-endedness repeats. What patterns are genre rules, which lean on
and deploy through ordinary language, the multivocity of which cannot be
eliminated [34]
Were an institution to be thinkable as an object, it's core would not be texts
as objects but rather texts as modes of stylization of language and procedures
which conditioned them. These
necessarily act upon regions of language that extend well beyond the texts. The
distinction inside/outside is impossible to fix at the level of institutions in
general. At the level of particular
institutions, arguments can be and are advanced concerning closure or the relative separation of instituted spaces
from their environments, but these are ideological claims commensurate with
types of relations to regions of the social-imaginary and not statements about
these regions. Such was the case with
the Marxist Imaginary, which operated as the dominant form of opposition within
capitalism, and which refracted this oppositional status back onto itself by
arguments and modes of practice that functioned to generate a sense of separateness. One result of this is that recognition of the
extent to which, say, Marx's texts recapitulate features of the dominant logic
of the dominant order that they set out to radically critique comes as
something of a shock.[35]
Roughly
in line with EH, MP takes the notion of
institution to provide a kind of "noncausal historicity"---which EH
takes up but attributes largely to the effects of
"sedimentation." The register
at which this noncausal historicity is deployed is that of retention, in the
schema outlined in PITC. Memory then—the
type of memory that enables the onslaught of incoming perceptual material to be
resolved into anything like a dense experience—is refigured by interaction with
the clusters of trace material characteristic in general of institution. Within/across this trace material are
patterns, which may or may not be formalizable into rule (they would not be from
the viewpoint of direct interaction: analytically they might be, but with a
certain distortion of what is happening).
The stylization of meaning is a result of the inflecting of
retention/protention in a particular manner, the appropriation of materials/rules
and the shaping of conceptions of the world through them.[36] Given
the characterization in MP of the nature of these materials as they are
encountered in the world, this appropriation of patterns is also a
creation. For MP, creation involves a particular
intertwining of experience in the present with history. So when MP talks about historicity, he refers
to historicity as in a enframing of particular dimensions of experience. This historicity is noncausal in that the way
in which history is brought to bear on experience is a function of assemblages
fashioned from within what Castoriadis would call the magma of significations
particular to that instituted/instituting social-historical space. That is, while institution enables one to
account for patterns, rules, materials, they do not for that account for
particular outcomes, either at the level of social or psychic elements—this is
an "intentional historicity" that which conditions relations or
"reference to…."[37]Describing
the effects of this intentional historicity, as it is performed at any given
point, through the metaphor of assemblage assumes a kind of distanced
viewpoint: from a more immediate viewpoint, practical movement through an
institituted/instituting social space is the production of figures shaped by
patterns (definition of variables, patterns for bringing phenomena into
relation with each other, rules for combination, etc.). These operations are only understandable if
perception is understood as practice, as a process shaped by certain parameters
(biological and social, with no obvious way to separate them). Perception is not and cannot be an immediate
relation, a direct apprehension on the part of a subject of a world wholly
external to itself. This process
involves not only the bringing-into-resolution of a particular phenomena (the
staging one what one might think of as the platform of consciousness) but also
an active reading-off of meanings—a reading-off that is always shaped by the
mediation of institutions. 1.
MP generalization of notion of institution: time as chiasm (287) time as
institution 2.
tacit cogito: movement through i-space as refiguring of the I as it is a
refiguring of the world. CC. Reframe
Marsh 1. The situation made available by these [tape
recording] is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are
ear-determined only, the position of a particular sound in this space being the
result of five determinants: frequency or pitch, amplitude or loudness,
overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology (how the sound begins,
goes on, and dies away). By the
alteration of any one of these determinants, the position of the sound in the
sound-space changes. Any sound at any
point in this total sound-space can move to become a sound at any other
point…musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or
curve…in total sound-space. We
are…technically equipped to transform our awareness of nature's manner of
operation into art.[38] Tape
music, field recordings, phonography open the audio-world as a space of
interrogation. Microphones capture a
range of sonic phenomena which ordinary sense hierarchies limit. The
use of a single set of microphones is a centering. This centering associates soundscape with
music, reversing the relation of set to subset.
Music is a subset of sound. The
dynamics of a recorded sound field acquire a structure through the fixing of
duration. Elements which are do not
repeat within the field that is recorded can be made to repeat across multiple
listenings. The route to the audio world
is acousmatic.[39] There
is no separation of sound from acoustic properties in the environment. Listening
to a soundscape is experience of the intertwining of the instituting and
instituted. 2. Project. When
you move through the Essex Salt Marsh, typically you focus on what you see: the
shifting colors of grass and trees, water and sky; the high contrast
juxtaposition of the white sand of Crane's Beach against strips of blue above
and below; the early 20th
century colonial-style garden and it's knob of pines on Hog Island. When
you move through the Essex Marsh, the soundspace is maybe dominated by a boat's
engine, waves hitting the hull and the wind.
When
you stop, a soundscape emerges: waves lapping the hull perhaps the insects and
birds perhaps bent by the wind perhaps.
You orient yourself by scale and position. The
audio environment of the marsh, reproduced with precision but abstracted from
its visual correlates, both is and is not itself. The audio environment reproduced with
precision but displaced is a time sculpture.
The audio sculpture in physical spaces around Essex makes Let
me explain. The area around All
sound will be amplified to the same volume. Birds passing through the channel between Hog
and The
interface will contain minimal visual materials for orientation: it will have a
map of one kind or another and a coding system that will indicate where and at
what scale particular microphones have been placed. The site's primary feature will be a series
of 3 audio mixing panels. These mixers
will vary by degrees of complexity and will afford different types of sound and
control. So for example, an initial
mixer may enable a casual user to select 1 of the soundspace options; another
may enable separation of scales of sound. A third mixer another click will enable
control over as many channels as there are microphones, enabling the user to
compose using the entire audio environment.
The
mixers are conceptually fundamental: they
break down the distinction between composition and reception to the greatest
possible extent. Listening, engineering
and composing become a single action. An
optimal experience would be across a sound system with as many channels as
there are microphones and as many speakers as there are channels, arranged in
different configurations around the floor of a house or building which one
would move through, a marsh within your space, an immersive sonic world, itself
and Other at once, real-time and displaced, precisely documented and infinitely
rearrangable. All
equipment will be self-contained and will be set up for a finite period. Once removed, no trace will be left
behind. I imagine real-time feeds
running for a period of 2-3 weeks.
Thereafter recordings of varying durations, ideally of up to 24 hours,
would be available as individual compositions or pieces. The advantage of recordings in this case
would not only be the enabling of a permanent site presence, but also that the
recordings can be explored or learned through repeated listenings, which open
up possibilities for exploring nuances or further rearrangement of signals. I imagine fragments of the Marsh turning up
in other recordings, the Marsh replicating itself, and the experience of these
long recordings to be curiously like the Marsh itself: a second surface, mutable and enveloping,
another spurious landscape. Zone The
island is a quarter mile from the parking lot connected by a straight road that
cuts across a lunar salt marsh. Walking.
The wind movements of static, the grass around sculpted into pseudo-spheres,
Minkowski manifolds. The tide
pools. At a distance, amongst the conical
formations of grass and the blue glare of the pools, white cranes freeze, watch,
return to what they were doing. Walking
up this straight road, the sound closing in behind. To either side the marsh stretches to the
horizon irregular green planes streaked with yellow. As sound closes around, the distance to the
island increases. The road becomes ribbon.
The spaces to either side lift and twist. the irregular planes of marsh now green now
pink now glare. Birds. Along the surface of the ribbon pools of
water. Beneath the water is teeming:
fleeting tracers of movement emerge against a background of hundreds of tiny
spheres. Walking again. The enveloping sound, a sense of being
solitary the road the ribbon slack now.
Rhythm of footsteps push the surface downward. The island is always the same distance away.
The sound stretches to the horizon, irregular planes of marsh now green now
pink now glare. The spaces to either side lift and twist. Along the surface of the road pools of
water. Beneath the water is teeming:
fleeting tracers of movement emerge against a background of hundreds of tiny
spheres. Walking again. The photograph is “Max ERNST and Dorothea TANNING playing Chess” ©2007
Dorothea TANNING ( [1] George
Mead, "The Process of Mind in Nature" Essay 21 in Charles Morris,
John Brewster et. al., eds.: The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1938) p. 363. Text
available at: http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs2/philact/Mead_1938_21.html [2]
Castoriadis, "Fait et à faire" in Fait et à faire p. 57 [3] Excerpted from Jules Renard, Journals (Berkeley, Ca.: Tin House Books, 2008), September, 1887. Quotation taken from the pubishler's webpage: http://www.tinhouse.com/books/catalog_jof_jr_ex.htm. More extensive materials available here: http://abu.cnam.fr/BIB/auteurs/renardj.html including the original quote (13 and 17 Sept. 1887). [4] "Let us have a closer look at the hole
in a Klein bottle. This loss of
continuity is necessary. One certaintly
could make a hole in a Moebius strip, torus or any other object in
three-dimensional space, but such discontinuities would not be necessary inasmuch
as these objects could be properly assembled in space without rupturing them.
(…) With the Klein bottle, it is different…" Steven M. Rosen,
"Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy" in Foundations of
Physic (2008) no. 38, p. 570. See the rest
of Rosen's analysis of the Klein bottle.
Sections of this essay were enormously helpful in the construction of
this one. [5]
Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT.: Graphics Press,
1990) p. 15. These are truly fantastic
books. Generally, when one uses a text
in an essay, there is an implicit assumption that you will provide the reader
an illusion of mastery over the text through the demonstration of your
own. One consequence of this is that it
may seem unnecessary to read the texts themselves. Nowhere is this more wrong than in the case
of the work of Edward Tufte. An idea is
available here: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi These books have been as fundamental for me
as anything that I have read, and are a great pleasure as well. [6]
The ethical component emerges most clearly in his attacks on PowerPoint as an
information display platform, which are elaborated in his analysis of the
Challenger accident. Tufte demonstrates
that the information that should have prevented the launch of the Challenger in
50 degree or below weather was available in the mass of data that was
accumulated and presented within NASA prior to launch, but that it was buried
beneath the pseudo-coherence of PowerPoint—which Tufte argues has more affinity
with the accurate presentation of the world as stratified by vertically
organized bureaucracy than it does accurate organization and presentation of
data. See “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint [7]
Paul Klee, On Modern Art cited in Edward Tufte, op. cit. [8]
Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary
Institution of Society, Kathrine Blamey, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1988) p. 369. [9]
Castoriadis,
“Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation in Crossroads in the Labyrinth
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984) p. 367. Quoted in Suzi Adams: Castoriadis and
the Circle of Physis and Nomos ( [10]
Numbered paragraphs in this section are taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical
Investigations G.E. Anscombe, trans. (bibliography) [11]
There is another at least one more writing project which centers on the marsh
that is in process. I am also working on
mounting the project itself. [12]
E. Husserl: Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis A.
Steinbock, trans.( [13]
The 1910 lectures on time consciousness and later papers devoted to the topic
are collected in the Kluwer edition. See the note directly below. [14]
Juxtapose IIS, ch. 5, pp. 200-204. [15]
Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness John B.
Brough, trans. (Dordecht: Kluwer, 1991) p. 376. [16] This is a recurrent motif through many of the essays collected in John Cage: Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1973). [17] Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970). References to “Origin of Geometry” in the main text are from the version appended to this edition. [18]
Contrast with Claude Lefort's analysis of the role of commentary on Machiavelli
in the creation and elaboration of the category of the political in Le
travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). [19]
See Natalie Depraz, Ecrire en phénoménologue: une autre époque de l'écriture
(La Versanne: Encre marine, 1999) Chapter 3. [20]
The notes from Merleau-Ponty's seminar on the concept of institution, L'institution dans
l'histoire personelle et publique were released in
2003 from Belin, Paris. I did not have
access to these when I wrote this paper. [21] See Lefort's introductory essay to
Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwester UP,
1973) Merleau-Ponty's text is hereafter
abbreviated as VI. [22]
See in general Francisco Varela et al.: The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT, 1992). [23] See Rosen, op. cit. and Ingar Brinck, "Situated Cognition, Dynamic Systems and Art: On Artistic Creativity and Aesthetic Experience" in Janus Head (2007) vol. 9 no. 2, pp. 407-431. [24]
Claude Lefort, "Le Sens de l'orientation" in Notes de cours
pp. 221-238. [25] “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Non-sense and “Indirect Speech and the Voices of Silence” in Signs See also Eye and Mind in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964). [26]
VI 118-119. [27]
In Castoriadis, Fait et à faire: Les carrefours du labyrinthe 5 (Paris:
Ed. du Seuil, 1997) [28]
MPOG, 22 [29]
VI 112 [30]
VI 113 [31]
Working Note November 1959 (VI220). See also 118-120. [32]
See Lefort's Machiavel for the claim that commentary defines variables and
refines procedures particular to a given institution, and that the formulation
of the question of the political is a creation of the institution of commentary
around Machiavelli's work. [33]
[[note re. general definition of "traditionality" given later in the
lectures]] [34]
On this, see Derrida's analyses of Husserl in his Introduction to the Origin
of Geometry. [35] MRT, pt 1, passim. [36]
Chiasm—VI 266. [37]
MPOG, 22. [38] John Cage: "Experimental Music" (1957) from Silence, quoted in James Tenney "John Cage and the Theory of Harmony" (1983) (find link) [39] Acousmatic refers to the separation of sound from source. |
causing
to stand, also pertaining to or skilled in weighing, f. 
