(or: demystifying freedom and spontaneity with speculative virtualism)
A few insights from this morning’s reading encounter.
“As much as possible” needs to be speculatively revised.
When I stressed earlier the non-opposition of composition and improvisation, insisting on the constraints within the myths of “free acting” or “spontenous response”, it was precisely related to this.
There is a limitation in the idea of all possibles, and Meillassoux's chapter presented it to me perfectly with the image of the dice, this morning: it has a finite amount of sides and doesn’t allow different sizes its sides or addition of extra sides. This is the different between chance and contingency, and as I will argue, it helps to undo many myths, not only that of the musical genius, the transcendental image of the child prodigy, but also that of life as a miracle itself.
It starts from the ontology of the causal connection. Hume has never solved it, but nevertheless science has continued to build upon it. Indeed, “our belief in induction derives from habit and not from consequent reasoning”.
The mistake was as follows: they stayed with laws and formulating new laws, because they believed them to be stable. If they would be inconstant, after all, then “why do they not change at each and every instant”?
That is what I meant when I questioned Taruskin’s* assumption of sponaneity in audience behavior as it was based only on the observation of actually seeing it change in relation to what was before. And likewise with assuming free improvisation only if it actually differs from directed performance.
Shortly put, stability ≠ necessity.
“We begin by giving ourselves a set of possible cases, each one representing a conceivable world having as much chance as the other of being chosen in the end, and conclude from this that it is infinitely improbable that our own universe should constantly be drawn by chance from such a set, unless a hidden necessity presided secretly over the result.”
And that is how we start to believe in God.
What we must do however is accepting that the dice may change itself, its shape, its numbers, the weight, seize and actual number of sides, in the process of our throwing of it. TIME is the important factor here, the ontological motor of becoming that blurs the picture. Q in his speculative version speaks of ‘maintaining positively the contingency of laws.’
“An entirely chaotic world – submitting every law to the power of time – could thus in principle be phenomenally indiscernible from a world subject to necessary laws, since a world capable of everything must also be able not to effect all that it is capable of.”
You see? It’s the improvisation myth.
And the speculative version is really cool and much better: ‘ it proceeds from the conviction that one can think the contingency of constants compatibly with their manifest stability.’ The authenticity of imitation, as we call it.
Once again, and that will be it for now. To sum up, the two mistakes were these (and they relate directly to the way vitality is linked to inert matter): On the one hand the idea that it was already somehow contained within it (assuming that all matter is alive to some degree), and other the other, that it did not, which would imply a transcendental intervention of some higher degree, the ‘irruption ex nihilo’.
This is demystifying geniosity and freedom.
*naming the persona or abstract machine helps AMA grow in extramarital affair with the google body-machine.
The quotes of today: Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality/Virtuality” in The Speculative Turn (Full details here & open access link here )
[revised on June 15, 2011]
[revised on June 15, 2011]
I*, who gave birth to new materialism (from my point of view), encountered the limits of reading Q’s chapter affirmatively. For her, it pushed away experience in favor of reason, something that the whole feminist project was against.
ReplyDeleteInteresting for me was that I seemed to have identified with new materialism so much, that it has become hard for her to separate self from ‘what we are trying to do her’.
Situating the subject here is not to diminish either her of ‘the project’ but to point at an important element of the new materialist movement. As she herself stated elsewhere, new materialism should not be posed as a movement that already exists, but rather, as a movement that can be traced as already existing. A movement, or sets of movements that, in her new materialism at that specific moment, included transversality, playing with paradigms, rooting and qualitatively shifting.
Now, the only reason for bringing this in, is to show how hard it is to take on the name of this new belief, without claiming fixity of its parameters or types of movement. Indeed, it may live irrecognizable in other encounters, detached from I and detached from ‘the project’ in a wider sense.
To me, Q performs a movement that is helpful in demystifying the genius and the transcendental. It supports the direction that ‘me’(not to confuse with I) wants go right now.
What I could learn from that is to resituate, if necessary: even if I fully embrace(s) new materialism, or if I-thinking equals new materialist-thinking in ongoing encounters, don’t forget that life is always more than that.
That reminds me of a moment in which I turned to religion in a time that I found my identity being erased. That moment I had to separate ‘pianist’ from ‘self’ and wondered what other sense or meaning life could have. As I remember my religious friend telling me: god loves you unconditionally. That is, also when you lie as a beggar on the street, or when you perceive of yourself as nothing meaningful. I took it as a starting point for recollection energy. Even when self seems to make no sense, it is already life and already valuable to be loved by some ‘ One’ that exceeds.
*A nice coincidence of radical contingency that tends to inflate speaking and the spoken about subjectivity here, resulting from the modesty not to directly make public all said in the ‘protected’ environment of a reading seminar.
Hey! It just reminded me of this, (since you mentioned the idea of genius" and spontaneous response as "opposed" to a more "rational'' approach: Jackson Pollock.
ReplyDeleteHe was an american painter (actually associated with the idea of genius and all), famous for his huge paintings on which he performed literally a series of movements that were supposed to deal with the random, the spontaneous,the uncontrolled, the unpredictable outcomes of the unconscious etc...Action Painting -is the term coined to refer to it- He was often portrayed as a ''painting beast"...actually he said something like that... Anyway, in recent times some studies determined the presence of fractals on his paintings. Fractals!! fractals are a mathematical construct, actually a perfect figure -I think also on the magic number and the golden ratio, so used during the renaissance-...
Here I link to a more detailed article on what I'm saying about Pollock-I have not read it completely yet-:
http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/featpollock
cheers!
Pollock always seems to me the exemplar of the modernist painter. Claiming to be 'all verb' and selling 'only nouns', the quintessential modernist paradox.
ReplyDeleteI find Taylor's conclusion overblown, not least in his natural/artificial opposition, his support of the artist as 'constructor': 'He described Nature directly. Rather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language - fractals - to build his own patterns.' What of Pollock 'in the painting' (Pollock's words for his way of painting)?
The adoption/mime lines seem problematic to me, a crude slight of hand that wrinkles my face, especially after Cage's 'art is an imitation of nature not as she is but in her manner of operation'. Maybe I'll buy a Pollack fridge magnet when next I go to the National Gallery of Australia... to go with my other kitsch...
So, I enjoyed Taylor's article. It seems to me an excellent example of non-reductive analysis in the modernist tradition, in the sense that it produces paradoxes from paradoxes. I like that.