copernicus risen

After so many workshops in which we urge one another to replace everything vague or general with "specific, concrete, sensory details", I've got to get out and play . . .

Copernicus Risen

Quite a few, someone had asked.

So I felt the overlap
of some larger-
scale forms.

If any of us "got" the arrangment
then we knew a whole
world, haunted.
Therein

Copernicus passed
slowly, poetic, quite at face
value, in unconscious
petrified form.

Perception must declare
itself, must disengage
from its awareness of the screen.

Clearly this view of the object revolves
around the earth via slight-of-hand,

with such universals or patterns
somehow already implicit
in every remark.

So our eyes lie prone, incredible,
downright wacky, as two cases
of a general kind.

To translate this roughly:

A single crucible
loses its hard outlines.
But it doesn't stop there.

It culminates in various
intersubjective selves of moral
behavior. Our collective

everything -- monolithic,
incontestable -- manifests
itself as a picture

of the music of the philosophers
of days to come

patterns, hegel, theory, disputes, multiculturalism

Quite a few years ago, I found myself in the middle of a light debate among several of my philosophy professors. Someone had asked "what is music theory, exactly?" Before majoring in philosophy I'd majored in music theory & composition and so I felt qualified to pipe in with "well, it's mostly the study of harmony, of what happens when certain pitches overap, and also the study of larger-scale forms of compositions . . ." and so on. Before I could finish, the only non-analytic philosopher of the group shut all of us up by stating (with a smart-assed delivery he'd clearly picked up from his younger, analytic, collegues): "It's the arrangement of the notes."

I don't think any of us got it -- or even knew whether to take him seriously. But certainly none of us knew how to respond. In fact, I still don't, but since then I've been haunted by the notion that if I could understand what he meant, I'd see the the whole world anew.

I knew enough about Hegel to know to characterize my professor's remark as somewhat Hegelian, but I didn't know enough at the time to say why. Recently, however, I picked up a used copy of "Hegel: A Re-examination" by J. N. Finlay, and therein found a clue. At first this passage (below) seems almost as difficult to digest as one by Hegel himself; yet I believe that part of the difficulty is that what it asserts strikes one as deeply counterintuitive -- as if Copernicus himself rose from the dead to announce that the whole of the cosmos does, in fact, revolve around the earth after all. Read the passage slowly and take it quite at face value. Findlay's not waxing poetic, nor does he engage in the sort of linguistic slight-of-hand to which philosophers are prone. He means what he says. As incredible and downright wacky as it sounds.

[Consciousness] is not [...] the illumination of an unchanged object by a metaphorical searchlight trained on it ab extra: it is rather a process in which an object yields up a universal meaning or unifying pattern of which it is an instance. Such universals or patterns exist in natural objects in an unconscious 'petrified' form: their disengagement, and the ranging of objects under them, is, however, an affair of 'consciousness', and consciousness is, in fact, no more for Hegel than just the disengagement of such universals and patterns. For there to be consciosuness of something [...] it must decalre itself as a case of some general kind, of which no case is perhaps an adequate embodiment: it must align itself with other objects in a connected picture governed by some unifying rule.

In other words, consciousness of an object comes from the object itself. Yes, I meant to say that. Consciousness of an object comes from the object itself. It really does. In this view of things, at least.

So, my awareness of the fact that a computer screen now sits before my eyes was somehow already implicit in the computer screen itself. My consciousness of the screen before me -- that is, not merely my sensory perception of the screen's light, but rather my awareness of the screen as a screen (and not, say, as a window, a wall, an unorganized chaos of sensory perceptions, or even nothing at all) -- is nothing other than "the disengagement" of "screen-ness" itself from the screen. The screen "declares itself" as a case of screens in general, and this very declaration is precisely what we call "consciosuness of" the screen.

To translate this roughly into Hegel-ese, we could say that the screen "in-itself" always already contains within it my consciousnes of it: which is to say, the screen "for-itself". Findlay continues:

To say that I exist, or I think, is therefore simple to say that varying items are brought together as in a single conscious focus or crucible -- that latter image is Hegel's own -- and that as so brought together they lose their hard outlines, and their random diversity, and become instances of a kind, or elments in a unified pattern.

But the process doesn't stop there. It culminates not in the production of individual selves, but

is rather manifest in the various intesubjective norms which raise conscious experience above what is merely personal and infinite, in the cateogires and canons of logic and science, the rules of legal and moral behaviour, of aesthetic taste.

So our collective knowledge of everything-there-is-to-know about computers screens is the ultimate for-itself of the all of the in-themselves of all of the comptuer screens that anyone, anywhere, has ever been conscious of.

And music theory is (the for-itself of in-itself of) the arrangement of the notes.

Ok, then where do disputes over theories and facts come from? How can more than one theory exist? How can bodies of knowledge compete? And doesn't this imply the existence of one monolothic, incontestable, absolute culture? What about other cultures? These are issues I'm wrestling with right now. I'll try to post some thoughts in the days to come.

quotes from Hegel: A Re-examination by J. N. Finlay, Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 41-43

rich people

are good people who can be trusted to look out for the interests of all of us.

after all, the only real mirror may be a sheet of transparent glass

Red bat, upright against a mountain of shadows. Wind flickers. Do not remove. R spends the morning gathering dried leaves, twigs, photographs of yellowed skies.

quote from diogenes

Against fate, I put courage; against custom, nature; against passion, reason.

- Diogenes of Sinope

This shows the vast degree to which our popular notion of 'reason' differs from that of the ancient Greeks. In the quote, Diogenes associates reason with nature and courage, pitting it against custom and fate. Reason, in Diogenes view, appears indeterminate, free, a means of spiritual liberation transcending human convention. Today we popularly view reason as a means of suppression/oppression, a product of human convention intended to serve authoritarian interests. Could it be, instead, that the notion of reason has been turned against its more original meanings by those very interests?

quote from Herakleitos and Diogenes, translated by Guy Davenport, 1979, Grey Fox Press

barbour and kant

Just stumbled across an interview on Edge with physicist Julian Barbour. Toward the end of page 5 he attempts to reconcile our subjective experience of time with his view of a static, timeless reality. Specifically, he defines our subjective experience of time as a sort of weaving-together of discrete, static arrangements of matter calls "Nows".

Without knowing anything more about his theories than what I've read in the interview, it occurs to me that he may be describing something like a Kantian synthesis. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something naive about the attempt reconcile Ultimate Reality (the noumena, or Thing in Itself, which Kant would agree is timeless) with our phenomenal perception of it (as filtered through the perceptual apparatus of time and space). Because time is a condition of all possible (phenomenal/perceptual) experience, any intelligible description of a phenomenal event must presuppose its existence. This requirement introduces an absolutely irreconcilable gap between descriptive systems used to describe, say, a neurological synthesis of sensory perceptions, and Ultimate Reality as a timeless field of probabilities. Attempts to describe one in terms of the other will inevitably lead us into an inescapble, labrynthine tangle of language games.

a worker-owned free market?

Many thanks to Gabriel Mihalache for his thoughtful comments on my last post.

Critiques of free-market capitalism are often greeted with "at least it's better than communism, where everyone gets paid the same."

Why force the either/or choice? Communism (the state owns and controls everything and everyone gets paid the same) and laissez-faire capitalism (private individuals own and control everything without state interference) are both ideological extremes, both bound to reproduce the same anti-democratic polarization between haves and have-nots that they were allegedly conceived to cure.

My proposal (in two parts) for an economy both more equitable and fair than either extreme:

1) All major corporations become worker-owned cooperatives. Workers would own the vast majority of shares in the corporation for which they work, elect the board of directors, etc. Both pay and dividends would be distributed according to merit, performance, and productivity measures. Corporations would still compete with one another on the global market to maximize profit, but would be limited in size to ensure a healthy and diverse competitive environment (i.e., anti-trust laws would significantly broadened and aggressively enforced).

2) The state would fund enough social services to ensure that no one starves, goes without adequate shelter, medical care, and education. Such services would, for the most part, guarantee little more than subsistence-level living and thereby not eliminate the "I want to work hard and get ahead" incentive. The state would additionally fund "institutions of cultural enlightenment" (artistic, educational, religious, etc.), some in full and others in part, in order permit them to flourish outside of and beyond the marketplace.

Worker-owned corporations would both minimize exploitation and provide incentive for maintaining high levels of productivity. State funding of social services and cultural institutions would provide a humane counterbalance to the violence of the market's volatility without neutralizing its productive power.

free market feedback loop

Any instutition which serves to increase the level of education or cultural literacy of (i.e., "enlighten" for lack of a better word) a society should never be exposed to market forces. Implicit in the nature of enlightenment is that only those who are already at least a little bit enlightened will seek to further their own enlightment. And even the already-enlightened must sometimes be poked, prodded, provoked further down the path.

Consumerist market forces respond primarily to base needs, desires and drives. While niche markets for those seeking cultural enlightenment may emerge, the market as a whole will never secure enlightenment for society as a whole because society does not realize that it needs enlightenment.

japanese sound art

Comparing bits and pieces of Japanese sound art I've encountered lately, particularly on the lowercase sound 2002 compilation (see also Wired's article Whisper the Songs of Silence), to Western art of the same genre, it seems there's some truth to the cliche that Japanese culture treats negativity (i.e., silence, non-being, etc) fundamentally differently than we do. Next to the Japanese pieces, the European and American pieces seem sometimes overdone -- something could have been said much more simply and effectively, but it wasn't. Quiet sound art, more than just about any other art I'm aware of, seems ephemerally suspended in a sort of emptiness or void; part of both its quaint charm and its arresting, vertigo-inducing power lies in the thinness and near-transparency of the veil its places over that emptiness. Nevertheless, some of the Western pieces strike me as not so much ignorant of the emptiness as a sort of smoke-and-mirrors show intended to distract from it. Consider Toshimaru Nakamura's "nimb #20" (you can hear a bit in the Wired article), which consists solely of unedited feedback from a mixing board. Silences punctuated by a few humble yet mysteriously intriguing tones. What's curious to me, as a Westerner, is that the silences, the empty spaces, are no less interesting than the tones, nor do they exist for the sake of adding dramatic tension. They simply consistute another "voice", a natural counterpoint to the audible sounds. While I will not claim that Western music never uses silences in such a way, I think that, more often often than not, silences in Western aesthetics are used to heighten the sense fullness or presence we receive from what we do hear. A dramatic pause. The calm before the storm. A solitude to be broken. A frame around the subject. By contrast, pieces like "nimb #20" don't seem to presuppose an essential opposition between silence and sound, negativity or positivity, emptiness or presence. The "frame" is no less interesting or present than the subject, and the subject is no more interesting or present than the frame. To suggest otherwise is to creatively misdirect attention, to suspend our mindfullness of the emptiness underlying everything for the sake of entertaining an illusion of impossible fullness of presence. Which is ok, I suppose, so long as you -- and your art -- aren't seduced into believing it.

the inevitable test

Hopefully the only one. Time will tell.