From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 22:48:36 -0500 Subject: Re: Re. Cage and Nietzsche: broom 2 Does the Refrain refrain from the refrain? Or does it affirm it - precisely because, if and when anything passes, it passes only because it is a fragment of the cosmos the artist harnesses? If it were a problem of science and not art, specifically music, one would be hard put to ignore that plenty of harnessing harnesses nothing - not even a black hole, just a jumble. So, the adequacy of the harness - a problem of technique (in D&G's sense), but not an aesthetic one, since the art (tekne) in question would have to claim itself as science: how to render visible, audible. Yet, maybe the greatest objection to Cosmos philosophy as proposed by D&G, is the very notion of cosmos it elaborates - "a void which is not nothingness but a virtual" (WIP), _without consistency or reference _ because it is either too fast or too slow. The Music of the Spheres inspired on Kepler's Laws can only be heard, perceived by the human ear, when captured on a recording surface and sped up. If simulated on a computer, as has been done, the fine structure of the actual irregularities is lost - but still it must be sped up to be heard as music by a _human_ observer; the synchrotron emission from planets, stars, galaxies, etc, can only be "heard" by a human observer if it is slowed down - "it is by slowing down that matter, as well as the scientific thought is able to penetrate it with propositions, is actualized" (WIP). But we must ask - was it inconsistent or devoid of referenciality (forget for now the electromagnetic reference which relativity privileges) before it was slowed down to synchronize with our speed? One is almost tempted to be blunt - where the observer is human there can be no science, there is only science when the observer is partial. The difficulty in getting at these partial observers is precisely a question of stripping observers from their humanity - or the same is to say, of their morality. So, to our minds, this raises the problem - aren't D&G making consistency or referential coordinatization a function of human perception? Maybe coordinatization, specifically in the context of a Physics which cannot privilege any reference frame, must be brought back to that fold - but are we to hold that consistency is absent from chaos? That the sounds of cosmic events are not music? That the cosmos does not listen to itself? That, it is insensible? The problem is that chaos is not a jumble - anymore than the image of order and equilibrium, or a virtual void. If Nietzsche held onto the First Law so determinedly, it is because the energy machine is consistent outside and beyond any exo-referenciality. Philosophy cannot claim exclusive rights to consistency, anymore than metaphysics was able to define and construct immanence - or that referenciality, such as it exists in physics, can provide a plane of consistency. Philosophy may appear to be the only one that can stake a claim to consistency - but that is only because science has now lapsed into error, fantasy and illusion: a whole domain of normalized functions, most of them false and inoperable. All the scientific attempts to escape mechanicism have failed - Einstein's and Schrödinger's, and Bohr's, and Bohm's. And they have failed for simple reasons - above all because of the incapacity of Physics to deal with Time, as synchronism and simultaneity (Reichenbach wrote some very profound words on this problem, which raise questions that neither Bergson or Jung ever considered). This is a problem of thought, when confronted with the question - what is cognition? Duration is qualitatively different from extension - but it seems to us to be a mistake to stick to the Riemannian distinction between Space as the domain of the quantitative (not even that, since in relativity the metric is one of intervals), and Time the domain of the qualitative which science can only quantitatively reduce by a logico-mathematical trick. Bergson and Deleuze make the correct critique of relativity and quantum-mechanics as they stand, but are unable to cross the passage - either as philosophers or, if you will, as 'scientists'. Time has measures of its own and their speed cannot be an objection to their consistency. " "Your error is to think of the jaguar's power in terms of his capacity to figure things out", he said. "He can't think. He only knows." " (CC, "The power of silence"). Likewise with music - it is not musicology we need, but philophonics. Musicology is a matter of taste - and tastes are cultural acquisitions: Nietzsche disliked Schumman (and so do you) and liked Liszt: we would not change the former for the latter (is there really a refrain in Liszt?), and would take Clara any time over Robert (and we could not care less about their romanticism - for one listens from _somewhere else_, if need be, even to Liszt!). But if we are not to refer any longer to a matter and the apparatuses of expression; and if we are to realize that capture of the energetic cosmos is what life, knowledge and art are all about, then even silence makes Time audible: "Il n'y jamais silence. Même les vers rongeurs de ton cadavre en font de la musique": death is nothing, it is only life that can pick 'la relance'. Maybe we might disagree from Cage to this extent - silence has more than duration, because duration, by itself, is already frequency: the sound of silence: what in 1925 Einstein proposed as the frequency of the vacuum: m(e) * cˆ2/h. To this day, physicists have been silent on this matter. If a Cosmos philosophy is about forcefields and planes of assemblage, not about foundations and origins, if even a ground cannot be ascertained - because it is fleeting, and if consistency in one's process is all that matters, it is with force one must focus one's assemblages - since the whole socius resists such doing; there is where we see the beginning of an articulation that concurs with D&G: one must focus while moving, and move by slight defocussing. Still further along into unknown planes - an energy synthesizer - mobilizing the energy of thought to keep it moving beyond any form and any matter, beyond thought itself, into the jaguar's knowledge of the night. Is that consistency? LC "é tutto musica" (To be followed) --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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