phenomenology: August 2006 Archives

So Dr. Breuer challenges Nietzsche. I wrote about the first six chapters a few days ago: my enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed. :-)

“We are each composed of many parts, each clamoring for expression. We can be held responsible only for the final compromise, not for the wayward impulses of each of the parts” (300).

“’One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’” (179-180). [oft-quoted, even by the Deaf community!]

This one thinks, let me be the slender bow
of the violin. Another, the body of the instrument,
burnished, the color of amber.

One imagines life as a narrow boat
crossing water,
a light mist of salt on the prow.

And still another – planed down to planks,
then hammered into shelter
toices vibrating through the rafters.

We do not notice their pleasure,
the slight hum of the banister
beneath our palms,

The satisfaction of the desk
as we tap our pens, impatiently,
upon its weathered surface.

They have ferried us
across rough seas
to lands that smelled of cinnamon

housed our senators,
who pace the creaky floors, debating,
carried arrowheads to pierce our enemies.

We have boiled their pulp, pressed it
into thin, white sheets of paper
on which we describe all of the above in great detail.

And when we die
they hold our empty forms
in bare cedar

until the moment – and how they long for this,
when we meet again in the blackened soil
and they take us back

in their embrace, carry us
up the length of their bodies
into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.

Danusha Laméris
Atlanta Review: Istanbul and beyond…
Turkish Poetry (2006, p. 18-19)

“I love that which makes [humanity] more than we are!” So Nietzsche proclaims in his first encounter with Dr. Josef Breuer (Freud’s mentor) in Irvin D. Yalom’s absorbing imagination. The protagonists, their characteristics, and the intellectual trends of When Nietzsche Wept are “grounded in fact” and “historically in place”(307, author’s afterword) although in fact “Friedrich Nietzsche and Josef Breuer never met” (307).

Breuer challenges the passion and reverence for ‘the truth’ apparent in Nietzsche’s “holy tone.” “’Truth,’ Nietzsche [had said], ‘is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childwishing something were so.” Nietzsche rebuts Breuer’s challenge thus: ”It is not the truth that is holy, but the search for one’s own truth! Can there be a more sacred act than self-inquiry?” (68).

The two intellectuals are reveling in the directness of their discourse: “Usually what is not asked is the important question!” Breuer exclaims (67). They disagree – based on the perspective of their different disciplines? – regarding whether unasked questions ought still to be answered.

Earlier, Breuer chooses not to engage an “ex-cathedra distinction between the realms of illness and being.” Neitzche has proclaimed, “I have black periods. Who has not? But they do not have me. They are not of my illness, but of my being. One might say I have the courage to have them.” These periods are sometimes preceded by a day of “feeling dangerously good” (emphasis in original, 56).

Yalom’s genius is to illustrate the “talking cure” which becomes popularized as psychoanalysis when Breuer and Freud co-publish Studies in Hysteria in 1894. These fictional conversations between Nietzsche and Breuer are situated a dozen years earlier, in 1882. From the description of Breuer’s method, one can perceive the outline of discourse analysis: ‘[listen] carefully to the patient’s free-form description….systematically investigat[e]…..never [omit] any part [of all functional systems] … allow intuition full rein and … make all other inquiries that [the] data thus far suggest[s]” (54-55).

Notes on home: “My whole life has become a journey, and I begin to feel that my only home, the only familiar place to which I will always return, is my illness” (51) and “My home is my steamer trunk. I am a tortoise and carry my home on my back. I place it in the corner of my hotel room and when the weather becomes oppressive, I hoist it and move to higher, drier skies”(61)

on interpreters in general: “Interpreters of texts are always dishonest – not intentionally, of course – but they cannot step outside their own historical frame. Nor, for that matter, out of their autobiographical frame” (52, note: there is more).

on dreaming: “Perhaps dreams can express either wishes or fears. Or maybe both…Will a dream once dreamed change to accommodate changes in the dreamer’s life?” (39).

on neurobiochemistry: “Once the excess cerebral electrical charge responsible for symptoms is discharged through emotional catharsis, then the symptoms behave properly and promptly vanish!” (42) known as “chimneysweeping” (41)

on the labor of the intellectual: “reading…pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris” (37).

One thing I question, based on Billig’s investigation of Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious, is the openness with which Breuer and Freud discuss anti-semitism. Although this imaginary conversation is many years prior to the Nazi campaign…I suppose it is possible that what was once an acceptable topic (the recognition of anti-semitism and its manifestations) could become less so over time. Billig’s fascinating argument is that Freud himself repressed his own awareness/recognition of anti-semitism, but his conclusion is even more stunning: that Freud’s investigation of the mechanism of repression illustrates that it occurs through talk (not via some imaginary structure in the brain which he invented and gave substance by providing labels – i.e. that he brought into being also through talk). The act of repetition seals what is remembered or forgotten.

Recep sends this article, Baby brains are hard-wired for math after reading my post about the Poincaré conjecture. (I kinda feel for the kid with a gazillion electrodes coming out of its head, but she/he doesn't seem to be bothered.)

"...there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought." Reports Dennis Overbye.

If solved, Overbye continues, the implications of Dr. Grigory Perelman's discovery will unfold for decades, but "the excitement came not from the final proof of the conjecture, which everybody felt was true, but [from] the method, 'finding deep connections between what were unrelated fields of mathematics'” (quoting Dr. John Morgan from Columbia, emphasis added).

This matters, because “'Math is really about the human mind, about how people can think effectively, and why curiosity is quite a good guide,' explaining that curiosity is tied in some way with intuition.

'You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it,' Dr. Thurston said, 'but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things'" (emphasis added).

The problem has to do with the nature of space: "In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this “anything” had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent: no matter how far you strike out in one direction or another, you can get only so far away before you start coming back, the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the Earth."

I definitely need to read this, Schroedinger's Ball, by Adam Felder. Reviewed by Richard Eder.

"As for a message, I suppose it would be, “Uncertainty transfigures.” To be taken no more seriously, and perhaps no less, than the “love will find a way” of a Strauss or a Franz Lehar. Which is also Mr. Felber’s message, come to think of it."

Do I resemble myself? Perhaps this kind of thing is what's being represented in the tattoo on Arzu's arm:

The Drummonds are implausible, but not quite. Every strange and random thing Coupland invents for them is evidence of the absurdities made possible by modernity (by which I mean individual consciousnesses – especially the much-revered quick wit – and bizarre social relationships and structures enabled by urban anonymity and all kinds of technology). The story, All Families Are Psychotic, unfolds mainly from the viewpoint of sixty-five year old maternal Janet, self-described as a dumb bunny, who had accepted the simplistic myths passed down by adults and advertisements.

The novel covers terminal illness, illegal drug marketing and manufacture, sadism, babies for sale, and a million schemes for making money. It includes affairs, drugs, alcohol, space flight and Princess Diana. It is also about family, memory, and philosophies of life. Janet's father once explained, “We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more’” (51).

Midway through a series of events that most people would consider more-than-plenty for a lifetime, “Janet sensed that her opinion of her life was changing. Two days ago, it had felt like merely a game of connect the dots – a few random dots, spaced widely apart and which produced a picture of a scribble. But now? Now her life was nothing but dots, dots that would connect in the end to create a magnificent picture – Noah’s Ark? A field of cornflowers? A Maui sunset? She didn’t know the exact image, but a picture was indeed happening – her life was now a story. Farewell, random scribbles (2002: 173).

“A voice belongs first to a body, then to a language” (52).

Negar told me about an Iranian saying, that learning another language adds a new person to your self. Yes, new capacities, new zones of expression and perception, yet what Berger says is also true, the voice – in its emotion-inducing physicality [my qualification] – remains the same. This use of the word “voice” is different than Blommaert’s conceptualization of “voice” as the operationalization of intersubjective, discursive power. The intersubjective part is the part between real individuals engaged in real time (face-to-face synchronic time or asynchronous technologically-mediated time – as in the turn-taking among myself, Yasser, Jeff, Amanda, and . . . you? wink! Why not?!!)

The discursive part is the larger framework of relationships in which each of us is embedded and all of us partake. Every time we speak (via our physically-embodied voice or through written text), each utterance spins forward along a dialectical trajectory as an outgrowth of previous exposure and knowledge. Simultaneously, each utterance opens onto a potential new vista, an unknown dark zone. “Dark” because not yet lived: unexperienced, and therefore unknown. (Thanks Negar; and original thanks to Chris Baxter, who played with calling me a "dark ally" during the 2005 Supporting Deaf People Online conference.)

I read Berger and translate his words into mine. “It is prudent to believe that the large is more real than the small. Yet it is false” (53). He is discussing the myth of scale, the myth that suggests that the macrosocial is more real (e.g., more powerful) than the microsocial. “If we are trapped, my heart, it is not within reality” (53). He writes to his love as I wish to write to mine. :-) The point, however, has wider application: let me attempt to articulate it precisely.

If we – for instance Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, Israelis – are trapped it is not exclusively because of impersonal institutional forces grinding out grim realities such as the devastation in Lebanon. We are “trapped” also within our own individual, personal and private (dialectical) trajectories. Our “hearts” (our loves, passions, dreams and visions) are constrained by “a vestige of the fear reflex to be found in all animals, in face of another creature larger than themselves” (53).

A major factor that feeds this fear is the loss of home. Berger ties the loss of home explicitly to emigration. More words about emigration are necessary, Berger claims, “to whisper for that which has been lost” (55). Emigration can be understood as the driving feature, the essential characteristic, of global transnationalism. Whether one chooses to move to another country temporarily or permanently, for purposes of education or work, or is forced to move for literal survival (to work or to seek asylum), what is threatened by this move is home. Edward Said discusses this too, in the extraordinary re-ordering of his conception of self that was required when he was sent to boarding school in the US.

“Originally,” Berger explains, “home meant the center of the world – not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense” (55). He continues, “To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments” (57).

When the physical site of home is lost (left, taken away, inaccessible) one resorts to “the habit which protects” (64) and “the psychic level of turning in circles in order to preserve one’s identity” (63).

It is impossible to convey the sounds and images of Sufi ritual through words. The most I can attempt is to describe my experience. I am a sucker for mysticism. :-) [Sucker: (2b) "One that is indiscriminately attracted to something specified."]

[Painting by Ayten Mungen Polat.]

The visit to Mevlevihanesi began with a gift. (Later, as I checked into my hotel for the evening, I received a compliment: “That is a beautiful scarf. Very Turkish.”) Beautiful tiling and religious inscription adorn the entry, a long hallway with four windows opening onto several richly-embellished coffins: the lineage of teachers at this particular temple (architecturally it is not a mosque). Adherents pause at each window to offer greetings and respect.

The hall opens onto a small courtyard with trees and the obligatory public water spigots. Among the various decorative tiling is a symbol I have not seen before.

We remove our shoes and pass through two rooms before entering the place of worship. The singers have already begun. I am gestured to sit with a few women at the far end of the space. I settle down and observe the surroundings. The walls are dense with script.

Immediately in front of where I sit is a large open space. The man who welcomed me with his eyes, indicating where I should sit, is spreading small fuzzy carpets around the edges of the wooden floor. The singers are clustered at the other end, squeezed into another room separated from the dance space by pillars and a low wall. They face the same direction as I do, so their backs are toward the dance space. They sing in unison, striking the same notes but at various pitches: a melodic blend of tenor, bass, and baritone.

The sound is low and quiet yet it fills the space. It is pleasing, rhythmic, soothing. I continue to look around and realize there are onlookers in the balcony, women and children. They have the best seats in the house. :-)

More people enter. I am distracted by two women who sit in front of me (their male companion sits with them at first, then is directed to the men’s section). They talk. Is it instructional? Perhaps, but it interferes with the singing. The woman doing most of the talking checks her cell phone. I am annoyed by the disrespect to the service and the auditory interference. But people move continually in to and out of the worship space. Late arrivals filter in throughout the service: some join the singers, others the audience. Some people depart at irregular intervals. The annoyance is only mine. I let it go.

Suddenly the dancers enter. After the first three I am surprised when the fourth steps into the room, then realize I’ve seen many depictions of five…yet they keep coming. I count nine. The dance space seems small to me now: how will they manage? They line up in front of the audience space; I can’t see much. The singers are in their third or fourth song now. A very few times a single voice has deviated from the chorus, usually in a sharp or punctuated manner: obviously deliberate. Upon occasion a soloist would sing a prayer. These seem to have been short and subtle because I had not noticed when they began: my consciousness would gradually register their presence as “having been there for awhile.” I was oddly alert while simultaneously being lulled.

The dancers, individually, bow. There is no rhyme to it, no pattern. If there is a cue as to who should bow when, I cannot discern it. Are they being visually directed? My view is obscured. Some time passes. When will they begin? How will they start? The singing provides me no clue: the chants seem to vary yet the overall sound remains more or less the same. A dancer moves into view to my right. Ah, there has been a leader, someone whom (I assume) the dancers have been facing.

Now the line of dancers bow in unison and remove their black robes. Except the first one in line does not remove his. I count again, ten plus the leader, eleven in all. Two in black, nine in white. They kneel, prostrating themselves in the typical Muslim prayer position. Suddenly they strike the floor forcefully with their hands, startling a young woman near me. The volume of the singing also rises simultaneously, an accentuated coordination of the singers and dancers.

Berger argues “there has rarely been a more optimistic philosopher” than Hegel because Hegel believed in history as a positive force (38). [I might need to read him!]

Then he goes on to describe Marx’s genius, which was “to prove that this force – the force of history – was subject to man’s actions and choices” (38). [Finally – a concise, pinpoint definition of Marx’s main point!] “The always present drama in Marx’s thinking, the original opposition of his dialectics, stems from the fact that he both accepted the modern transformation of time into the supreme force, and wished to return this supremacy into the hands of man” (38).

[I read this with a flutter of panic. Have I misunderstood, still, and will this destroy the argument I began to make in my comps answer for Briankle? But I think not, because Marx in use, the discourses I’ve heard of Marx, the times and moments when the term “dialectics” or “dialectical” is used, consistently refer only to the former part of his equation. If there is an implication of “returning supremacy” to persons it is buried. And buried so deeply that no one, until Berger, of all the people I’ve had this argument with, has been able to articulate the latter empowering part of the equation. If it is so seminal, why is it not easier to say? Why are there so few examples? Which is why I argue that Bakhtin’s conception of dialogics serves better – it is premised on the future, on possibility. Dialogics acknowledges the past but does not confine itself to it. I would argue, that when Marxist dialectics is invoked as the explanation for some human success over institutionalized systems, it is coopting the more precise and more accurate conceptualization of dialogics, it is trying to colonize it and claim credit for something it has not adequately articulated. In Bakhtin's terms, dialectics ıs monologic. sigh. Do you think I will be ready for my defense?]

Berger continues: Marx’s “thought was – in all senses of the word – gigantic. The size of man – his potential, his coming power – would, Marx believed, replace the timeless” (38). [No wonder he was and is so compelling. But this message is not evident to an outsider, it has been coded within a discourse that takes it for granted. Not only coded, but I would say obscured by the very term, dialectics, clearly coming from dialect, which is a variation of a particular language, a derivative, another version of the same thing (with unique, local modifications).]

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The wikipedia definition (linked above) defines dialectics as "an exchange of proposition (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue" (emphasis added).

:-) Only a step in the direction of dialogics - which puts logics into a process of exchange, not just ideas.

John Berger on time, imagination, and love.

“The modern transformation of time from a condition into a force began with Hegel” (38).

Summary: Berger argues there is a phenomenological problem with conceiving of time as a unilinear and uniform flow; this is an unchallenged residue of the 19th century. It is a phenomenological problem because only human consciousness can conceive of time in this way. Such “remorseless time” causes the past to be lost, to fall into nothingness (37). “It follows that one no longer counts what one has, but what one has not. Everything becomes loss” (38).

“That life may be seen as a Fall is intrinsic to the human faculty of imagination. To imagine is to conceive of that height from which the Fall becomes possible” (emphasis added, 39).

It was imagination that enabled the invention of linear time, and imagination that can reclaim a dimension of time that remains intractable to it. Berger explains:

“…hidden within the conceptual system that allows man to measure and conceive of such boundlessness [i.e., the distance which light will travel in one year] is the cyclic and local unit of the year, a unit which can be recognized because of its permanency, its repetition, and its local consistency. The calculation returns from the astronomic to the local, like a prodigal son” (37).

At the local level – of you and me experiencing the passing of time – are “two dynamic processes which are opposed to each other…The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. This is why the moment is lived as longer. The dissipation of the time flow is checked. The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density” (all emphases added, 35).

As a natural example (countering artificial limits of “culture” or “subjectivity”), Berger describes the accelerated growth of plants in spring and early summer: “These hours of spectacular growth and accumulation are incommensurate with the winter hours when the seed lies inert in the earth” (emphasis in original, 35).

“If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic, then prophecy and destiny can coexist with a freedom of choice” (34). Berger ties the exercise of choice to language:

I was thinking this morning about reincarnation (whether or not, under what conditions I choose to believe in it or not), so it's odd (in an oddly-reassuring kind of way) to peruse the art and sentiments of Maira Kalman linked from today's New York Times headlines.

Some of it verges on the too touchy-feely but then hey, it is about emotion: death, love, hate, living.