Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 11:55:54 -0700
Subject: Re: ritual habitual/repetition/rhythm/memory


Leonardo Raggo wrote:

<snip>

>       ..dismantling the coherence of plausible reconstructions, which
> always implies a repetition of experience. What is incomparably unique
>
> (such as a dream) occurs as an excess or overflow of this economy of
> return. The secondary elaboration that gives it intelligibility
> reproduces
> this uneasy relation to what falls out of the account, what can't be
> expressed as such but makes its effects felt as a deeper necessity.
> The
> necessity noted here is that of ananke, the path of chance
> contingencies
> whose passage of events is one's own (in a sense).

the "secondary elaborations" are then memory? This reminded me that I
have wanted to mention a few things about rhythm and music and since,
Lucio, you have been looking over _Peregrinations_ I thought I'd start
there.  What I zoom in on these lectures are the way Lyotard is
concerned with deconstructing a coherent notion of narrative by way of
questioning rhythm:"the decay of the epic or the decline of tragedy,
assuming this to be the case, implies the end of periodic rhythm as
such. Time then ceases to be organized as respiration according to a
process of inhalation and exhalation which inserts a moment of life
between two silences or zero points."(p. 2) This "delusion" of rhythm is
the programming of a life; its subordination to a destiny(authorial
intentionality) that forgets the grand forgetting pointed out by
holderlin.( In this regard  of interest as well is M. Detienne's
dicussion of alethia/lethe/mneme in a book whose title I forget but will
return to regularly to continue to (a) muse myself outloud. ) Yet you
can't just step outside narrative and take a timeless and overall view
of things a sort of minimalist linkage is neccessary between phrases for
which no determinate rule exists. The neXt phrase could be a drift
towards a poem or short story or a turn to Kant. Nothing governs the
genre of the texture that is emerging for the singularity(which does not
mean originality) of phrases don't fit under a genus that would govern
them as its expression.The "fidelity of a destiny" is distinguished by
an ability to be responsive to the minutest change in the atmosphere, in
drifting clouds of thoughts -- cataracts of the eyes. It is this
impressionist sensitivity that "governs"  the phrasing of pregnant
thoughts big with non-cognitive reflection.  Thus it is discord and
conflict that breaks up the resolution of narrative in a harmonious
chord. This harmonization  operates much like Hegel's result which is
always terminating tension rather than building intensity. To move from
the expression of a destiny is to disentangle oneself from narrative
harmony and become impressed by events(festival/orgique chaos/stochastic
irregularity/baroque technique).

And so on............