File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9807, message 441


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)


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