QUOTIDIANA

"Western music theory is expressed essentially in the context of its relation to science and its crisis: 'Our period will be occupied, and for several generations, with the construction and structuration of a new language, which will be the vehicle of the masterpieces of the future' (Boulez). Or again: 'Music is unified with the sciences in thought. Thus, there is no break between the sciences and the arts. ... Henceforth, a musician should be a manufacturer of philosophical theses and global systems of architecture, of combinations of structures (forms) and different kinds of sound matter' (Xenakis).

"The parallel to science is total. Like science, music has broken out of its codes. Since the abandonment of tonality, there has been no criterion for truth or common reference for those who compose and those who hear. Explicitly wishing to create a style at the same time as the individual work, music today is led to elaborate the criterion of truth at the same time as the discovery, the language (langue) at the same time as speech (parole). Like science, music then moves within an increasingly abstract field that is less and less accessible to empiricism, where meaning disappears in abstraction, where the dizzying absence of rules is permanent. Thus music voices the becoming of science in repetition, and its difficulties. It is linked to an abstraction of the conditions of functioning of the society taking root, of the difficulties of repetition."

"Agel, following Ayfre, complains that most studies of art seek to get at it from the outside. They impose on it laws taken from psychology, linguistics, general semiotics, sociology, etc., and hem in the work of art by discovering its conditions for life. But they never study the life itself. They never submit themselves to the work or approach it on its own grounds which, after all, are the grounds not of knowledge and science but of experience. An artwork is not an object like any other. Despite the metaphors we so often employ, it is neither like a flower nor a computer whose inner workings can be exposed and studied. An artwork is ethereal, because it exists only for experience and only as experienced. A different kind of science is needed to comprehend or appreciate it.

There are many kinds of truths, says Ayfre, and the phenomenological theorist wants to unveil the kind of truth which can't be reduced to logic. In Merleau-Ponty's vocabulary, art is a primary activity, a natural, immediate, and intuitive way of understanding life. All theory is secondary, placing the primary activities within a schema constructed to make their interrelationships clear. Psychology, for example, doesn't clarify dreams so much as it lets us see the connection between our dreams and our other behavior.

Phenomenology warns us against the engulfing power we accord reason in our society, reason which so often overwhelms and disfigures the primary processes it claims to understand. In the Introduction to this book I suggested that in modern culture there is a tendency to let the knowledge of an activity replace that activity, and I pointed to the flourish of books on religion, sexuality, small group dynamics, as well as art. For Merleau-Ponty, Ayfre, and Agel this is the direct result of an unbridled rationality which would devour all experience or, better, which would lay it out, dissected and organized, under glass. But rationality is only one mode of behavior, one manner of approaching reality, of understanding and responding to it. If it castrates sexuality or if it philosophizes religion, our lives are impoverished as is the world we inhabit and express. We become the automatons of Foucault, determined not by our instinct and ideology so much as by our reason."

"We can coldly isolate patterns in music or logic in dreams, as does the psychoanalyst, but, more warmly, we can begin to live the rhythm of the music as an invitation to dance and to vibrate; and we can feel in it a sense, as an unveiling of the world expressed in the epiphany of the sensible."

"We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. Too much 'wisdom' is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter's wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in this world while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up by time."

"According to Einstein himself, 'becoming' in the three-dimensional space has been transformed into 'being' in the world of four dimensions; according to Herman Weyl, 'the objective world is, it does not become'; it appears to become only to our 'blindfolded consciousness' (abgeblendete Rewusstsein) which creeps along its 'world line' into the future."

"[Dante's Divine Comedy] is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens if he has, all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already aquainted."

"There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgement ... And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and from particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried."

"A concrete philosophy is not a happy one. It must stick close to experience, and yet not limit itself to the empirical, but restore to each experience the ontological cipher which marks it internally. As difficult as it is under these conditions to imagine the future of philosophy, two things seem certain: it will never regain the conviction of holding the keys to nature or history in its concepts, and it will not renounce its radicalism, that search for presuppositions and foundations which has produced the great philosophies."

"[The Greek oral establishment] constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorised experience. He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it."

"Consider the metaphor, or heap of metaphors, known as 'the geometrical model' whose presence we can now detect in the systems of Descartes and Newton. Hallowed in science, it has been so constantly used in various fields that it is now nothing but a disguise placed on the face of nature, a disguise so complete and so ingeniously contrived by a succession of make-up artists from Pythagoras through Euclid to Descartes, Newton, and beyond, that most of us are fooled by it. Newton called it his 'Mathematical Way,' and Descartes 'The Geometrical Method' or Mathesis Universalis. But Descartes' is the best model because, of all the make-up artists, he was most aware of what he was doing. On the night of November 10, 1619, having experienced a moment of illumination, Descartes dreamed a dream which, after interpretation, enabled him to envisage the extension of the geometrical model to every subject. All his subsequent work amounted to presenting outlines of, and exercises in the use of, this model."

"I have hitherto described this earth, and generally the whole visible world, as if it were merely a machine in which there was nothing at all to consider except the shapes and motions of its parts"

"To throw out the past leaves only a new lacuna. Even the residual blunders we inherit from history are better than no history, that vacuity and illusion of a clean slate, the new, the now. History undigested only repeats, sour."

"Insight would no longer mean translation, no longer mean the reformulation of imaginal speech into psychological language, mainly through understanding our fantasies, interpreting our dreams. We would let the insight contained within the fantasy appear of itself, in its own 'intrinsically intelligible' speech. For, try as we may, we cannot make insights with reason or will. Something imaginitive is needed."

"...in the years when Freud was diving into--and uncovering--the Unconscious, so too was Schoenberg; because in a very real sense, having abandoned tonality, and with it the 'subconsciously functioning sense of form which gave a real composer an almost somnambulistic sense of security in creating, with utmost precision, the most delicate distinctions of formal elements,' Schoenberg had only his Unconscious to look to as potential source of the means and principles of unity and organization which would replace the lost paradise on tonality."

"Bolter [David Bolter, Turing's Man] argues that time is a resource for the computer just as coal is a resource for the steam engine. Time is used to transform 'billions of countless impulses of electrical energy into useful instructions for manipulating data.' The difference then, between clocks and computers is that 'an ordinary clock produces only a series of indentical seconds, minutes and hours; a computer transforms seconds or microseconds or nanoseconds into information.' With this new timepiece, time is no longer a single fixed reference point that exists external to events. Time is now 'information' and is choreographed directly into the programs by the central processor. With computers we enter the age of 'multiple times.' Every program has its own sequences, durations, rhythms, its own unique time."

"It is possible to distinguish two forms of approach to a problem. One, which may be called the theoretical approach, is to formulate the problem in relation to what is already known, to make additions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles, and then to proceed to test these hypotheses experimentally. Another, which may be called the mosaic approach, takes each problem for itself with little reference to the field in which it lies, and seeks to discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed area."

"Around 1910 Picasso and Braque, as a consequence of a new conception of space, exhibited the interiors and exteriors of objects simultaneously. In architecture Le Corbusier developed, on the same principle, the interpenetration of inner and outer space ... But this interpenetration of space at large and space-particles could have further development only in an age whose science and art both perceived space as essentially many-sided and dynamic."

"At the phenomenological standpoint, acting on lines of general principle, we tie up the performance of all such cogitative theses, i.e., we 'place in brackets' what has been carried out, 'we do not associate these theses' with our new inquiries; instead of living in them and carrying them out, we carry out acts of reflexion directed towards them, and these we apprehend as the absolute Being which they are. We now live entirely in such acts of the second level, whose datum is the infinite field of absolute experiences--the basic field of Phenomenology."

"Even psychical states point to the ordering conditions of absolute experiences in which they are constituted and take on the intentional and in its way transcendent form 'state of consciousness.' "Certainly an incorporeal and, paradoxical as it may sound, even an inanimate and non-personal consciousness is conceivable, i.e., a stream of experience in which the intentional empirical unites, body, soul, emperical ego-subject do not take shape, in which all these empirical concepts, and therefore also that of experience in the psychological sense (as experience of a person, an animal ego), have nothing to support them, and, at any rate no validity.

"The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing"

[Enframing] is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets man upon and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing ... The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve.

"Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way."

"[for the new man] the world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot."

"Social time, for example, has been described as qualitatively differentiated according to the beliefs and customs common to a group and as not continuous but as subject to interruption of actual dates. It is influenced by language which constrains and fixes prevalent concepts and modes of thought. It has been argued by Marcel Granet that the Chinese are not equipped to note concepts or present doctrines discursively. The Word does not fix a notion with a definite degree of abstraction or generality, but evokes an indefinite complex or particular images. It is completely unsuited to formal precision. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived: time proceeds by cycles and is round.

"When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name--hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were.

"From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from another angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened, all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even like theories but like whims."

"The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use for the doctrine of idols is to the intepretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic."

"An original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with. Hence when he breaks with these conventions, he is often apt to assert that he is nothing but an eye, that he merely paints what he sees as he sees it, and the like. His motive in talking such nonsense is clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not merely facile decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real spatial problems. But this may be freely admitted without agreeing that the formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an assertion which would destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously.

"The effect of stimulations, external or internal, is to break up the unison of action of some part or the whole of the brain. A speculative suggestion is that the disturbance in some way breaks the unity of the actual pattern that has been previously built up in the brain. The brain then selects those features from the input that tend to repair the model and to return the cells to their regular synchronous beating. I cannot pretend to be able to develop this idea of models in our brain in detail, but it has great possibilities in showing how we tend to fit ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves. In some way the brain initiates sequences of actions that tend to return it to its rhythmic pattern, this return being the act of consummation, or completion. If the first action performed fails to do this, fails that is to stop the original disturbance, then other sequences may be tried. The brain runs through its rules one after another, matching the input with its various models until somehow unison is acheived. This may perhaps only be after strenuous, varied, and prolonged searching. During this random activity further connexions and action patterns are formed and they in turn will determine future sequences."

"Today man has developed extensions for practically verything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature-control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body."

"These tools have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days. A man has a reputation, and is no longer free, but must respect that. A man makes a picture or a book, and, if it succeeds, 't is often the worse for him. I saw a brave man the other day, hitherto as free as the hawk or the fox of the wilderness, constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs, minerals, and mounted birds. It was easy to see that he was amusing himself with making pretty links for his own limbs ... The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody."

"What I call the 'auditory imagination; is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word: sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin, and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality."

"If we can consider form the reversing of archetype into cliche, as for example the use of an archetypal Ulysses in James Joyce's novel to explore contemporary consciousness in the city of Dublin, then we may ask what would be the status of this pattern in primordial times, in the medieval period, and today. The answer would seem to be that in primordial times and today this archetype-into-cliche process is perfectly normal and accepted but that in the medieval period it is exceptional and unusual. The Balinese say, 'We have no art, we do everything as well as possible.' The artist in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or the era up to the nineteenth century was regarded as a unique, exceptional person because he used an exceptional, unusual process. In primordial times, as today, the artist uses a familiar, ordinary technique and so he is looked upon as an ordinary, familiar person. Every man today is in this sense an artist--the administrator, the scientist, the doctor, as well as the man who uses paint or sculpts stone. Just as the archaic man had to follow natural processes or rhythm in order to influence and to purge, cleanse them by ricorso, so modern electric technologies require such timing and precision that only the following of processes in nature can be tolerated. The immediately preceding centuries of mechanization had been able to bypass these processes by fragmentation and strip-mining kinds of procedures."

"But to indicate more clearly the opposition and crossing of two orders of phenomena that relate to the same object, I prefer to speak of synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic. Similarly, synchrony and diachrony designate respectively as language-state and an evolutionary phase ... "The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of languages is that their succession in time does not exist insofar as the speaker is concerned. He is confronted with a state. That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony. He can enter the mind of speakers only by completely suppressing the past. The intervention of history can only falsify his judgement."

"The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually, simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding environment.

"We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were beyond their immediate control. they would not accept the fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried they could not read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the word, thus spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effects, of course, we had an observer looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their eyes move were discounted. This kind of upset was easily corrected by continuing the demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and accepted them, he no longer became upset by the unconscious operations of his biocomputer."

"Some anthropologists argue that the emergence of 'true language' was more sudden, that it coincided with the abrupt forward leap in the elaboration and diversity of tool-making towards the end of the last Ice Age. Neither hypothesis can be verified. But it might be that neither sees the full import of asymmetry. Pavlov's often-reiterated belief is worth recalling: the processes of learning and of language in men are different from those in animals ... The sources of superfluidity, with their anatomical analogue in the asymmetries of the cortex, generate new surpluses. Asymmetry, in the central sense of which the configurations of the brain are the enacting form, was the trigger. It set in motion the dissonance, the dialectic of human consciousness. Unlike animal species we are out of balance with and in the world. Speech is the consequence and the maintainer of this disequilibrium.

"This view of translation as a hermeneutic of trust (elancement), of penetration, of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the sterile triadic model which has dominated the history and theory of the subject. The perennial distinction between literalism, paraphrase and free imitation, turns out to be wholly contingent. It has no precision or philosophic basis. It overlooks the key fact that a fourfold hermeneia, Aristotle's term for discourse which signifies because it interprets, is conceptually and practically inherent in even the rudiments of translation."

"Language is made of words and gesture in modes of motion... Words are made of motion, made of action and repose, at whatever remove; and gesture is made of language--made of the language beneath or beyond or alongside of the language of words. When the language of words fails, we resort to the language of gesture...When the language of words most succeeds, it becomes gesture in its words."

"...most surprising of all was the discovery that sounds never came from one point in space, and never retreated into themselves. There was the sound, its echo, and another sound into which the first sound melted and to which it had given birth, altogether an endless procession of sounds."