Text to the FSL seminar the 6th of Marsh
Download the text below as a pdf here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8M_mYqHqwntaTF4ZkY0QWFfaTg/edit?usp=sharing
Program: http://fsl-forskarseminariet.blogspot.se/2014/02/the-seminar-as-form-for-thinking-marsh.html
____________
Magnus William-Olsson
–Rika Lesser, trans.
Download the text below as a pdf here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8M_mYqHqwntaTF4ZkY0QWFfaTg/edit?usp=sharing
Program: http://fsl-forskarseminariet.blogspot.se/2014/02/the-seminar-as-form-for-thinking-marsh.html
____________
Magnus William-Olsson
THE
SEMINAR AS A FORM FOR THINKING
One of
Sappho's most beautiful fragments contains a couple of strophes, which in prose
translation read:
I bid you Abanthis, take your
lyre and sing of Gongyla while desire once again flies around you, the lovely
one – for her dress excited you when you saw it; and I rejoice: for the holy
Cyprian herself once blamed me for praying…[1]
There is
much speculation about the context the poem describes. Is it about a women's equivalent to the symposiums
several male poets address in their work, not least Sappho's contemporary and
compatriot Alcaeus? The
two-thousand-five-hundred year reception of Sappho shows that such speculations
more often reflect the ideas, desires and biases of the analyzer than the
historical circumstances. Neither is it the historical Sappho that interests me
here, rather the form of attention that the fragment creates and affords.[2]
Let us
examine the nodes and connections that support the "space of
attention." Who does the addressing
and who is being addressed?
First one
must naturally take into consideration that this concerns a poem. And a poem is always something spoken by
someone and heard by someone (in our time often the same per-son since we
usually read to ourselves in silence).
Then we have
an implicit speaker, the first person who speaks the poem and in whom all who
read the poem have an interest; I usually call this person "the signature" (here the sig-nature is "Sappho").[3]
Then of
course we have the one who speaks in the poem, she who begins, "I bid you,
Abanthis." The fictive space of
attention – which is always also an allegory of the act of reading – opens with
her, in that the space calls our attention to our attentiveness and its pos-sibilities. She – let's call her "the fictive
Sappho"– addresses herself to Abanthis and re-minds her how she once saw a
third woman, Gongyla, and was excited by her dress. That Abanthis recalls this incident, the
fictive Sappho believes, makes desire (like the dress) flutter around her. And this fictive space of attention, so
saturated with sensuality (song, sight, desire, rhythm and tactility) is
finally linked, through eschatological address, to a far greater context, the
goddess's possible attentiveness.
I think that
the structure of attention being exhibited and established here is a possible
point of departure for thinking about the prerequisites for the seminar as a
form for thinking.
*
We are
living the epoch's final phase of attention-crisis.[4] In many
ways this has altered the terms for thought, art and criticism. The ability to present a great deal of
information to a fleeting and impatient attention has become more important. Critical categories like "agency,"
"briefing," "linking," "tips" and
"quotation" have gained ground on genres that demand slow, careful
and thoughtful attention.
The crisis
becomes apparent on many levels and in many contexts. In the academic world we have, e.g., received
an almost industrial form of conference and seminar activity wherein groups of
often extremely knowledgable persons from all over the world attempt – in
thirty minutes and fifteen minutes for questions – to convey before one another
years of strenuous mental activity. But
what seems effective from the perspective of an information-economy appears as
a foolhardy waste of time from that of an attention-economy.
*
For
twenty-five years I have devoted myself to arranging seminars. For me it has been a way of seeking a
sympathetic response to my own thoughts, and also a way of losing myself in
those of others. During happy moments in
these seminars we have simul-taneously articulated thoughts, experienced
thinking and gone beyond it. Far more
often, however, the gatherings have become paralyzed by the distinctive
grimaces of the joint participants, by indissoluble antagonisms, by muteness,
by power plays, by insufficient attention and ruptured trust.
When I was
young and played improvisational music in various combinations, I experienced
similar dynamics, rare moments of actualized attention and long hours of
hopeless attempts to get out of a kind of spiderweb pattern of predetermined manners,
structures of response that only emptied out phrases and sounds to given stimuli, attempts to "get out" or "go further,"
which only brought us players back to repetitions and tame variations of
readymade experiences and thoughts. I
believe that many who have worked in and through some kind of ensemble
recognize themselves in such experiences.
And yet it's almost always worth continuing to try. The capacity to "stir the ashes,"
as if to give up the effort and listlessly busy oneself with what remains in
the ashes' trail of loss, is, I have learned, one of the decisive capacities of
the seminar and of ensemble playing. To
endure the silence, the embarrassment, the relentlessness, and the
alienation. To "damn it to
hell" and yet not break up.
But is there
joint thinking that is not individual thinking through and by virtue of
others? From Heraclitus to St. Augustine,
from Descartes to María Zambrano and Gilles Deleuze, time after time it's been
asserted that thinking is solitary. Its
critical power to change has its origin in the individual, even if through
con-versation thoughts can bounce off one another. In return the action that enables
transformation is usually described as dependent on that which is held in
common. The model for the former idea of
course is dialogue's binary condition and double entendre,
participation's and division's to-gether.[5] While the
model for the latter is often the relationship of the body to its limbs under
the direction of the head. When
all-and-one appear as a body of organs, senses and limbs in the mind's
(cons-ciousness's, the ego's) pay, we can hope to change the world. In this tedious metaphorics re-volutions,
armies, forms of government, organizations, families, seats of learning, con-ferences
and businesses persist.
How would a common way of
thinking be able to arise beyond such urgent metaphorics? A common way of thinking that does not have
its starting point in that which already has been thought, rather in readiness
for thought?
Would it
perhaps be possible that the seminar, like the musical ensemble, out of
listening could give expression to a "polyphonia," a
"sound"?
Within the musical sphere
harmony is represented with the term "accord," a word that
etymologically goes back to Latin cordis, "heart." To the heart – "a-cordis." The
heart will then be understood as the muscle of feeling. Accord [in Swedish] is stämning
["mood," "voicing," "tuning"], a consequence of
["pulling oneself together"]
"stämmer sig samman."
(Compare German Stimme ["voice"] and Stimmung
["mood," "attunement," "accord"], ein Lied anstimmen, ["begin to sing
a song"] etc.) The heart, however,
is also the pulse's muscle, which offers measured "syn-chrony," the
kind of commonality that consists of a "close-beside-one-another-at-the
same-time."
For jointly
no one is free. Commonality is always
obedience to participation's mutuality.
This obedience to mutual participation has perhaps its original form in
the meal. And the meal's community has
its basis not in conversation, but in listening's mutuality. Franz Rosenzweig reflects on this in Stern
der Erlösung:[6]
[A] meal
together always means a real, realized and active community; in this wordless
mutuality in itself of the meal is taken mutually, the mutuality is presented
as a real mutual participation animated in life.
Where a meal is taken together, there such
mutual participation exists. It is so in the home, but so too in monasteries,
lodges, casinos, associations. And where mutual participation is lacking, as in
classrooms or even in just university lectures, or even seminar practices, it
does not exist, although the foundation of mutual participation, the mutual
listening, is indeed by all means here.[7]
The Greek symposium's community is a meal
community, a communion. The word symposion
(from syn "together" + potis "drinker")
signifies banquet. The phe-nomenon was,
during early Greek history, one of the several regulated exceptions to other
forms of sociality, but through antiquity it evolved and in classical Athens it
took the form that we--thanks to authors like Plato and Xenophon--best
recognize. However, there was very
likely great variation in how symposiums were held, not simply over the course
of time but also in connection with local customs and traditions.[8] I
prefer, as indicated, to think of it as a form of attention, a
"community" built not on dia-logue, on speaking and the word, but
rather on all the capabilities and arts of attention which have their basis in
what Rosenzweig calls "a wordless mutuality in itself."
The archeological hoard of Greek vase painting
encompasses a long series of de-picted symposiums. There the symposium is most often created as
a kind of com-munity of interchange; musical, sexual, poetic, terpsichorean,
intellectual, culinary. People
distinctly turned toward or away from one another. But like all painting it
works first by virtue of someone looking at it.
Observation is always one of its most important themes. In this sense the observer of these vase
paintings cor-responds to the eschatological addressee in the above fragment of
Sappho. The one whose potential
looking, out of wordlessness, provides "mutuality." This per-son is always seated [with the
others] at the table. In the sympotic
seminar-form we have tried to develop at FSL [Free Seminar in Literary
Criticism] I tend to think of this absent eschatological addressee as "kleos"
[glory, fame, rumor, that which is heard]. The at-tention before which
everything is at stake.
But the seminar, the sympotic seminar, depends
on attention being made present, that it attends to itself not only in
postures, miens and gestures but also in interpretations of what was said. To appear as listening. When the seminar is successful as a form of
attention it seems to the individual as answering the not-yet-articulated
question.[9]
*
In the book Reading
Precedes Writing – Poetry's Actuality I try to develop a poetics on
the basis of attention.[10] Poetry
– defined in the book as "language in its highest potentiality, to
someone" – appears as the prerequisite and possibility of thinking, in
competition with philosophy. What do I
mean then by "think"? I don't
mean conceptualize. I don't mean the
distinctions of dialogical reason, rather think in the meaning of making
way for thought; to form attention so that thinking can be actualized in its
possible multiplicity.
I will call
it critical thinking if with "criticism" we mean acts of selection
and judgment.[11]
In this view criticism, critical thinking, is constitutive for all types of
art, for art itself in its forming, because it's a matter of selecting and
judging while oscillating between these positions. The starting point in attention allows us
to understand this formation as work on one's own character; the work of
practicing one's sensibility in all corporal and cognitive registers, so that
one is able to form an attention that can actualize the work in its complex
possibilities.
It is out of
this insight and experience that the seminar appears as a form for
thinking. Its concern is not an exchange
of opinions and ideas. It's never about
instructing and being in-structed. Nor
is it about making oneself understood or understanding. It concerns forming an attention that gives
thinking the power of judgment and selection, which allows it to be expressed
while it is taking form. [12]
One can seek
a point of departure for such a form of attention in Plato's as well as
Xenophon's portrayals of symposiums. The
symposiums that appear in them offer sch-emas rather than dramaturgies. There is an order (which for that reason can
be modified).[13]
There are expectations in different registers; sensuality, beauty, knowledge,
pleasure, etc. There is a promise to the
individual to come into being, to be transformed and to stand out. Those present obey a mutual participation
based on the meal. This affords the
possibility of intoxication. Kleos
takes part in the party.
In such a
form of attention the objects of thought are not unimportant but are still sub-ordinate. Almost any subject at all proves to be worth
considering because the mutual capacity to manage and transform, to form
thinking, is central.
In its
"knowledging" [creation of knowledge] these sorts of seminars
resemble theater, dance, and music more than a school's or university's forms
of knowledge[14]. If the lat-ter are marked by dialogical,
communicative and intermediary knowledging, the sym-posium is marked rather by
performativity. So seen the sympotic
seminar has the form of a party. It
creates itself like a work.[15] Simply
put, in its forming, it forms conceptions of its externality and its
future. Like all festivities it dreams
of eternity.
*
I usually
argue that because art now with accelerating speed allows itself to be
academized, under the protection of the phenomenon known as "artistic
research," among other ways, it cannot take on the apparatus of
institutional, scientific and philosophical knowledging. If art is to formalize its knowledging it has
to theorize, which, however, is possible only by virtue of a fundamental
revision of traditional knowledge-theory's concepts and traditions with its
starting point in the arts' own way of knowing, its own traditions of knowledge
and specialized vocabularies.
This also
concerns its forms of thought and knowledge.
I believe that such forms ought to be developed with their starting point
in the concept attention. [16] The
symposium of antiquity offers a form to set out from. But equally important is the starting point
in the concept criticism. And
here I mean criticism not only in the meaning "select" and
"judge," understood as a determinative act in all artistic
knowledging, but also criticism in the meaning philo-sophical and esthetic
criticism, criticism that through interpreting and evaluating, describing and
conceptualizing, aims at understanding and transforming. For the latter criticism the public sphere is
a prerequisite and starting point. The
seminar as a form for thinking must therefore, in my opinion, operate in and
through the public sphere. Understood as
thinking it is actualized not only in participation's mutuality, in its
occurring, but also when it breaks up and like an artwork stands out as a
subject of conversation, interpretation, judgment and evaluation.
Plato's Symposium
is presented precisely as such a conversation about the symposium as an artwork
made public. The story is related as an
anecdote told again years after the actual banquet occurred.[17]. The symposium thus has taken place as a
public anecdote, far from mutual participation, and is abandoned by all and no
one, for reflection or dismissal, admiration or scorn. But the retold banquet also ends in breaking
up. Some of the company make their way
out, others fall drunkenly asleep and Socrates in the end leaves the party with
his kleos in tow.
This is, as
I see it, a decisive moment. Understood as
an art form for thinking, the symposium, in its knowledging, doesn't
only part with the apparatus of dia-logical reason, it also depends on it. If art is to be able to formalize its
knowledging, and gain legitimacy as an academic form of knowledge, it must
decline, and it cannot decline, the kind of thinking that in imitation of
antiquity we call philosophy.
–Rika Lesser, trans.
[1] Greek Lyric, Sappho and Alcaeus, trans., David A. Campbell, Loeb
Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1982).
[2] The concept of attention for
many years has been central in the discussions at FSL (Free Seminar in Literary
Criticism). For three years the seminar pursued
a project entitled "Forms of Attention," which lay the groundwork for
an entire way of thinking, to be seen, for example, in the books Reading
Precedes Writing--the Actuality of Poetry by Magnus William-Olsson, Performative
Criticism (Magnus William-Olsson, ed.) and And they saw that they were
naked--On Shame and Protection by Kari Løvaas, all published in the series
Ariel/Literary Criticism (Knopparp, 2011, 2013, 2013).
[3] We always read the author as
author, even when a poem appears anonymously.
In the case of Sappho this is particularly complicated because her texts
are the result of comprehensive philological deliberation that can always be
tested and questioned. But the signature
(from Latin signare "mark") is always the mark through
which we are given entry to the poem.
[4] The crisis of attention is
allied with digitalization. It's often
said that we live in an information economy.
But economy is usually defined as "the art of keeping house with
limited resources." In our time,
however, information is all but a limited resource. On the contrary, we're drowning in it. In information society the limited resource
instead is attention. The concept
"attention economy" has become a central tool when we in FSL have
attempted to theorize and understand the information society and the public
sphere. When digitalization in a short
time made available enormous quantities of easily accessible information,
almost all of us reacted by wasting our limited resource of attention wildly
and chaotically. Now most of us are
slowly beginning to learn to use our attention more cleverly in accordance with
our newly won possibilities. We have
learned to "scan read" and "multitask," but to a greater
and greater extent we also begin a return to slow and careful attention which,
e.g., poetry like much other art and thinking presuppose. See Richard Lanham, The Economics of
Attention, Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[5] Greek dia-logos "through
words" from dia-legein ("through-to speak"). But dia also means "apart"
and legein means "to pluck / pick" and the word dialegein
even has the meaning" to separate, to divide." The prefix dia is of course a variant
of di (related to bi) which denotes "two, du-," etc.
[6] The Star of Redemption, trans.,
Barbara E Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 335.
[7] Like Swedish German has
several alternatives for expressing "together-ness." Gemenskap (Gemeinschaft), and even the
Latin Kommune are at hand. The
Germanic as well as the Latin words ultimately revert to Indo-European's kom-moini
where kom means "with, beside"; moini means "general,
collective."
[8] A penetrating analysis of
the symposium as occurrence, motive and phenomenon is given in the book Sympotica--a
Symposium on the Symposion, Oswyn Murray, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990).
[9] See my lecture "This
uneasily attentive alone-with-my-self-polka in the dark," in Methodos
-- Art's Knowledge, Knowledge's Art (Knopparp: Ariel/Literary
Criticism [5], 2014).
[10]
Ariel/Literary Criticism (Knopparp, 2011).
[11] The word
criticism goes back to Greek kritikos "to judge, to evaluate"
and krinein, "to select, to discriminate."
[12] If the verb form existed
in the inchoative (formna) it would be useful here. Inchoative verbs indicate the beginning of,
or passage from one condition to another.
That is to say occurrence in its occurring. For example [the Swedish verbs] : mulna, klarna, härskna, svartna, which
in English denote: get cloudy, begin to
clear, become rancid, become black.
[13] The order consists of the
number of participants (never more than 30), their sex, social rank and age,
the sequence of activities (from arrival to departure), etc. Op.
cit. , Oswyn Murray, ed.
[14] In antiquity the symposium
was a context for knowledge and education that clearly distinguished itself
from instruction's paideia and akademeia. See Manuela Tecusan's "Logos
Sympotikos. Patterns of the Irrational in Philosophical Drinking,"
op. cit., Oswyn Murrary, ed.
[15] Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer's
Die Aktualität des Schönen--Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest (Reclam,
1977).
[16] A revision of this kind is
needed, for example, for the concepts "form," "method,"
"concept," "theory," and "knowledge."
[17] The text begins with the
storyteller Appollodorus being addressed by Glaucon, who believes he knows that
the addressee was present at the famous Symposium he has heard his friend
Phoenix talk about. Appollodorus brushes
aside the thought but, like Phoenix, he's had it described to him by someone
who was present. In Plato's ingenious
fiction
