6.11.15 On the Day Ornette Passed Away

Earlier today I was at Crema Cafe with Stacy for our weekly writing session.   I'm working on a paper on music, which earlier this week had amongst the tentative titles:  "Hearing Serious Music, or Why Derrida Was Kicked Off the Stage at Ornette's Show in Paris."   So today at about the same time Ornette passed, I wrote the following, prompted by two fragments from Adorno's essay on music and philosophy.

Fragment/Prompt 1: Adorno: "The obstacle to all epistemological reflections...the basis of [music's] right to exist."

I wanted to find the quotation about the non-intentionality of music, which is the fragment that enabled me to get traction on the abstract for my UBC paper [see below].   Perhaps I'll find it for the next go around.

That not yet re-located fragment offers the context for the one chosen as my prompt.  When Adorno rules out the possibility of knowing what music is, we encounter a reverberation with the aphorism: "art precedes metaphysics."  Because it is precisely metaphysics that Adorno is denying when he identifies the "obstacles" to epistemological reflections.  Art precedes metaphysics is in this case heard as the basis of the right of music to exist.  What does it mean for music to have a right to exist, and why do we need to insist on protecting this existence, that is, why proclaim an inalienable right unto music?

Music, the product of humanity, which is to say, an art, is free of meaning; that is, free of intentional meaning, intentionality.  Human are medium through which music comes into existence.  But we don't make it via intentionality.

Fragment/Prompt 2: "One could add that enigmatic element...in all music."

Still didn't find the non-intentionality quotation. Maybe next time.

When I ended the first session I wrote that music is made without intentionality.  There's more to be worked out on this, because in a straightforward way that claim translated as: music has no meaning and this seems to be what Adorno is saying: music is music and has no meaning -- it just is.  Ok, again, much more to be taken up on that.

The non-intentionality of music is identified as the "enigmatic element...in all music."  And this qualification is helpful.  Music is a Sphynx, Adorno says, and we are not meant to play Oedipus and solve the riddle, to correctly say "Humanity!" All of this strikes me as the anti-humanist turn famously taken by Heidegger.   This is the return to Being, which Adorno is hesitant to say, as such.  But uncharacteristically, the word "Being" does appear in this essay. If we are not meant to solve the riddle of music, then we are meant to be moved somewhere in our encounter with the riddle, the Sphynx -- [Holy Smokes:  the riddle of music...the JGB symbol: Cats Under the Stars]

Abstract for UBC paper:

To the Music Itself!

Folk Phenomenology and the Return to Original Melody

Education, as Hannah Arendt showed us, exists in a pre-political sphere, and this means it is properly understood as existing against the state.  How do we arrive at this ‘proper’ understanding of education, to this utopian intuition, which is to say, How are we moved into and then occupy the utopos of Education?   This paper takes up these questions by returning to the category of music-making philosophy.    The category of music-making philosophy arrives to us from the prophetic writing of Nietzsche, who prognosticated the renewal of a chorus based poetic praxis, or what we would today describe as the dialogic learning community.   Like the chorus of Greek tragedy, the dialogic learning community occupies a time and space outside of the chronological events unfolding in the state-controlled political realm; it arises in the utopos of Education.  Music-making philosophy via poetic praxis is thus a collective working out of a counter-culture through a mimetic representation of music’s non-intentional and radically independent ontology.   It is the dialectical negation of the instrumental rationality of data driven ‘schooling’.  The return to Nietzsche’s category enables this paper to accomplish two aims: first, to take up what Theodor Adorno  identifies as “the right of music – all music – to exist,” and, second, to present the method, folk phenomenology, that discloses this “right of music – all music -- to exist”;  folk phenomenology mediates an effacement with what Nietzsche called “the original melody.”  Thus, the thesis to be taken up in this paper is the following: the disclosure via folk phenomenology of music’s right to exist is prior to any music-making philosophy.  Before we enter Education, then, we must first return to the music itself!  

5.14.15 The Phaedrus Project

 I've spent this early morning – since 2am EST – working on what I am calling The Phaedrus Project, although perhaps it should be simply The Phaedrus Project.

The name is taken from the title of Plato’s dialogue, a work that inspires me because it goes to the heart of the matter of thinking (philosophy) via writing versus speaking.  Socrates says the true manner of teaching and learning philosophy – aka of doing soul crafting  [poetic praxis] – is through dialogue: speaking and listening. 

Of course, the key here is the priority of the spoken word, of what, borrowing from Nietzsche, we might call ‘music-making philosophy,’ – invoking too Wynton Marselis’ assertion that speaking is singing.  

This morning I went back to my old edition of What is Called Thinking? – I bought it [a first edition hard cover] on 9/14/92 in Santa Monica, California.  I was called back to WCT in order to re-read Heidegger’s bit on memory.  The principal element of The Phaedrus Project was in large part revealed to me during a session of my Attic class, when Steven broke down αλεθεια and showed it to be rooted in λεθε = forgetting.  If αλεθεια = truth, then truth qua αλεθεια = not forgetting.  Put otherwise, truth = remembering.  Here is yet another instance of κοινονια: the gathering of the learning community via the re-membering or re-collecting of individuals into a collective, subjects gathered together inter-subjectively. 

«Memory is the gathering of thought....This is why we are hear attempting to learn thinking.  We are all on the way together...»

When we put together the formula truth = remembering, and understand re-membering as the κοινονια of the learning community – an event/process of gathering – then we understand the necessity of ‘bootlegging’ the dialogues.

The Spanish title for Being and Leaning occurred [presented itself] to me when I was reading the first lecture in WCT, the summary and transition section where Heidegger introduces the category of ‘apprentice’.  I thought of the conversation I had yesterday with Rocha, when he was recounting the events of the recent weekend’s symposium on study.  At some point during the symposium he interjected the Spanish would  for learning, aprender and made the link between aprender and apprentice.  I thought about that connection when I  read again Heidegger’s «The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they – he has to learn to let them learn.»  And this lead me to imagine the Spanish title for Being and Learning as Ser y Aprender.  Given the current movement of the work via poetic praxis, the Spanish title might also be Ser y Hacer, which offers an evocative sonic play of words.  Or maybe the second option is really the title of the next book, which would come out of 2.0:  Being and Making (i.e., making music/music-making philosophy aka ‘Socrates, make music!’)

5.6.2015 Last Day of Academic Year: 3D Audio

So…I haven’t blogged much since the end of 2.0, and I already feel exhausted after writing…what, 15 words?!...but it’s impossible for me not to write after my three hour visit to MOMA. 

Today is my final day of being down here in the NYCtropolis. Left the forest and hill 29 Sunset Drive this morning, feeling energized, inspired, and not a little bit sentimental, especially when I bid farewell to my folks, first my mom at the house, and then my dad at the train station.  I expressed sincere gratitude to both of them for the hospitality, the food, the warmth, the conversation, the laughter, they offered me this past 8 months.  Once on the train to Penn it was all work focus, listening to the last hour of the 34hrs of the Dead Zone I recorded, and reading Martin Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School The Dialectical Imagination, starting the prep work on the chapter on Critical Theory and Education that I’ve been commissioned to write – literally, I was invited and I’m being paid to do this work!  (what academics, let alone philosophers get commissioned to write chapters on Critical Theory and Education?  Oh… the irony, the sweet and bitter irony  <much like this Arnold Palmer I’m drinking at The Grey Dog Café on 16^th…MY place!>.   Two things jumped out to me when reading Jay:  first, the reminded that πραχις is the crux of the matter for Critical Theory, understanding praxis as the dialectical relationship between thinking qua theory and action qua practice.  Jay describes it as self-generating, which sounds to me like a euphemism for autonomy, and that ok so far as it goes towards pointing us in the direction of what Castoriadis said in the “Inside Television” installation that is part of the “Cut to Swipe” http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1516

exhibit at MOMA: ‘philosophy is freedom.’   Really?  I so much want to endorse this memory of Attic philosophy, specifically of the thinking/writing of Heraclitus, the street pedagogy of Socrates, and Plato’s dialogues, to the extent the latter are read as literary works, which the translator of the Hackett edition of the Phaedrus insists.  -- < in the compendium to the “Inside Television” installation, there’s that quotation from Aby Warburg that includes the category of the ‘old book,’ which was a central trope for me in B&L2.0 during the late spring/early summer.  I’ll need to search that when I get connected to wifi> --.  But it’s not enough to say  philosophy is freedom, especially when Aristotle explicitly tells us in the Metaphysics that philosophy arises in a particular temporal horizon, σκολε, one that is always available to a particular class of individuals who are granted this ‘free time’ of leisure by a class of individuals who are doing the necessary labor.  The Attic word for the workers in the political economy that ‘granted’ leisure time is δουλος, which is also the word that Paul uses when describing his relationship to Christ. δουλος is translated as ‘slave’.   So we need to hear Castoriodis’

‘philosophy is freedom’ through the mediated sonic filter of memory that recalls the dialectically rendered πραχις of Critical Theory arises from Marx’s 1844 manuscript, specifically his critique of Hegelian idealism.  πραχις is what Hegel’s writing offers as writing.  The second bit in Jay’s opening chapter that caught my attention was the history of the first ever meeting of Marxists in 1923(?...I’ll need to verify the details later) that would be the proto-Frankfurt School.  According to Jay’s history, the funding for that meeting was provided by [insert name later] whose father had moved from Germany to Argentina and made a fortune exporting grain from Argentina to the Continent.  In this sense it’s not at all a stretch to say that the roots and seeds of the Frankfurt School are literally Latin American!

Running out of gas with this writing...

From Penn Station I walked west one block down 34th street to B&H, where I picked up the Tascam portable audio recorded, microphone that Hofstra purchased for me!!!  Before picking it up I spoke with a B&H employee who works in the audio dept.  He confirmed I had all I needed in terms of patch cords, and also, coincidentally -- <there are no coincidences!> -- informed me he had purchased the same Tascam for recording that he does...the recording of live chamber orchestra performances.  As I told him, if it works for him, it’ll work for me.

I then made my way up to MOMA, ostensibly to experience the much talked about Bjork exhibit, that, it turns out, has been trashed by the NYC art critics.  [After attending I have to agree it’s a bit more hype that substance.]  The installation I attended was noteworth for what it described as the 49 speaker 3D audio system that was ‘specially’ designed and installed for the installation.   It was the category of ‘3D Audio’ that most caught my attention, especially since just yesterday I asked, in the final exam for my spring Intro to Philo of Ed, my students to produce a ‘three dimensional’ portrait of the philosophical educator.  3D audio indeed!

Little did I know, but the Bjork installation was the appetizer for what would be a feast of art that I would experience for the next two hours.  The first course, which followed the Bjork appetizer, was the “Cut to Swipe” exhibit that featured the very kind of multimedia works of art I was calling for in the final exam I designed for FDED 127. (I had a sense that I was calling for something of the sort, but only hinted at it during my discussion of the final with the students.  I folded a paper into three parts and made reference to triptych, thinking but not saying it, of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”  And further, when describing section 2 I used the analogy of walking into an art exhibit and being greeted with a description on a wall.  After today I am now intending to give my students extra credit if they attend the MOMA and include an selfie and a description of what they encountered. 

The third and main course was the new installation that featured a history of sound recording and broadcasting, starting with Edison and Marconi.  Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1523

This hours after picking up the Tascam, and in the wake of completing the 34hrs of radio work!!! To say that I feel the poetic praxis/folk phenomenology project has a kind of destinal force behind it would be to both diminish and understate the amplitude I experienced as I made my way through the exhibit.  At several stops along the way I couldn’t help but smile widely as I encountered the propaganda for early radio, and the description of Marconi’s experiments with recording.  At times I experienced the proverbial goosebumps and chills, especially when an original poster for WQXR, whose studio speakers were donated to WRHU and are now in the very same annex where I recorded the 34hrs.   In sum, I experienced such an intense intimacy with the material in the exhibit that I had moments where I delusionally and manically imagined it was all meant for me!  Of course is was meant for me, or dare I say for the poetic praxis/folk phenomenology project, especially now that it has made the turn toward the sonic, to the recording (documenting of conversations, dialogues), to the engagement with the fundamental questions raised in Phaedrus regarding philosophical dialogue – the voices of philosophy – as the manner of planting seeds of wisdom in the soul.  --<Yet another way of describing ‘soul music’?>--  Planting and sowing of seeds via dialogue is all just a way of talking about cultivation, of cultivating a particular world together, such that we experience freedom together. But…there is indeed the need to engage in παιδεια, specifically, in offering a training in listening.  As I’ve said many times, there is an important distinction between hearing and listening, which maps on to the distinction between speaking and saying.  And this is the first reason why we’ll be recording the seminars. 

“This is a very interesting recording, it’s listed as an in-house FM.” Professor Iguana, hr1 min3 of Dead Zone July Show Part 1, 88.7FM, WRHU.ORG."

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FINAL for FDED 127

FDED 127 Intro to Philosophical Education

Prof. Duarte, Hofstra University

Spring 2015

“The teacher who seriously wishes to impart philosophical insight can only aim at teaching the art of philosophizing.  He can do no more than show his students how to undertake, each for himself, the laborious egress that alone affords insight into his principles.  If there is such a thing at all as instruction in philosophy, it can only be instruction in doing one’s own thinking; more precisely, in the independent practice of the art of abstraction.”

            Leonard Nelson

Final project: Portrait of a Philosophical Educator

portrait |ˈpôrtrət, -ˌtrāt|

noun

1 a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, esp. one depicting only the face or head and shoulders.

• a representation or impression of someone or something in language or on film: the writer builds up a full and fascinating portrait of a community.

For your final project you should revisit the original question of this course:  Who is the ‘philosophical educator’?  

After a semester of studying many philosophers, and, more importantly, engaging in philosophical study together and forming a learning community, we can now revisit this original question and ask, not simply Who is the ‘philosophical educator’?, but How does the philosophical educator take up their work?, How do they define teaching and learning?, What are some their fundamental goals?  (I’m sure you can think of some additional questions!)

How will you take up these questions?  What will you say and how will you say it?

Part 1a:  write a single sentence that completes following:

A philosophical educator….

Part 1b:  in 250-300 words offer a concise articulation of your sentence.

Part 2:  in 500-750 words offer a concise explanation of the design of your final project, i.e., explain how you are responding to the original question.

Part 3:   with a combination of words (max 750), sounds, and images, offer a portrait of the philosophical educator.   Your portrait should be three dimensional:

three-dimensional  (adjective)

having or appearing to have length, breadth, and depth: a three-dimensional object.

• (of a literary or dramatic work) sufficiently full in characterization and representation of events to be believable.

Specifically, the portrait should have three perspectives:  a three-part description that includes words, sound, and image.

FINAL PROJECTS ARE DUE FRIDAY MAY 15^TH NOON, AND SHOULD BE POSTED ON THE DESIGNATED BLACKBOARD DISCUSSION BOARD.

BREAK A LEG!!!