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Discussion of Anti-Oedipus, chapters 1.6 - 2.2.

A Blade of Grass has just posted an article on non-hierarchical learning using Trade School and the Public School as two different models.

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Discussion of Chapter one of Anti-Oedipus

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This is a discussion of some key terms from the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus.

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[Slides which accompany the presentation can be downloaded here:

part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?4v6via18j4p4bmo

part 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?hg5oxka8lk5u5hb ]

Facilitators: Jackson Moore and Brian House

Music may have a biological basis as a faculty for synchronizing actions within groups of people.  Periodic rhythms grounded in the body allow us to coordinate collective behavior in time. As anecdotal support for this idea, I will discuss two independent cases in which nascent cognitive theories of music had to be refactored to take time into account: James Tenney’s theory of musical gestalts, and Fred Lerdahl’s generative musical grammar.  Both theorists came from a tradition that emphasizes pitch organization, but were compelled to ground their musical morphology in rhythm and time in order to produce a coherent formal model.  A look at these efforts will help us to think about how we perceive and participate in events as they occur, and supplement our original discussion of time itself as a transcendent entity with a look at the forms that emerge from it.

Jackson Moore is a musician / composer / artist.  In the nineties his work examined the semiotic systems that musicians use to think and communicate with one another.  Since moving to New York in 1999, he has undertaken various projects: writing and recording antisymmetrical song forms with jazz soloists, creating a musical pidgin language, developing a formalized music based on natural language, and building an auditory spacecraft, among other things.

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I will initiate a discussion on Rhythmanalysis (1992), a collection of essays in which Henri Lefebvre posits that rhythm deserves its own science. In one particularly evocative chapter, he attunes himself to the rhythms perceptible from his Paris balcony — a dérive through time rather than space — not just listening but engaging all of his senses to apprehend the cycles of the city. Lefebvre suggests that the acculturation of the individual to the environment and to society is a process of rhythmic entrainment, and he introduces classifications of rhythms and their relationships as a means of critical reflection on society’s relationship to time. I am also interested in the possibilities for and implications of a contemporary, data-centric practice of rhythmanalysis.

Brian House is a bricoleur whose work has traversed locative media, experimental music, interactive narrative, and social practice. By constructing embodied, participatory systems, he seeks to negotiate between programmed constraints and the serendipity of everyday life. He spends his days at the New York Times’ R&D lab and his nights at Eyebeam. http://brianhouse.net

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This is a recording of the first discussion of On Time, a class which invited participants from a wide variety of fields to share their thoughts about time.  Here is the course description:

Any sensation or experience that we have can be understood only on the basis of time, only if we locate the occurrence within its temporality.  Yet, we never have an experience of time itself; time is never an object present in our world that we can intuit or conceive of.  Something like this paradox led Hegel to call time the nonsensuous sensuous. What, then, can we actually know of time?

It seems that time, much like Being, can only be known through its difference from these phenomena (time never manifests itself as such, within the phenomenal realm).  Time is only intelligible on the basis of some difference, the changes in our world that lead us to intuit a temporal progression of cause and effect, which in turn requires time as the ground of its identity and continuity.   We expect something to support the flux of our world, and yet time is only this flux; Aristotle said as much when he defined time as the “number of motion,” and Einstein said the same when he defined time as what we measure with a clock.

We will hold a series of meetings examining how time shapes the form of expression in a variety of discourses, and how these arts and sciences play with and within their peculiar temporality.  We will begin with a meeting where we consider the representation of time in the history of metaphysics, by looking at Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money.  Derrida locates Heidegger’s lecture “On Time and Being” on the cusp of this metaphysical tradition.  Heidegger points out, among the many paradoxes of time, that time is nothing temporal.  What is temporal arises and passes away within time, while time itself does nothing such.  As with Being, Heidegger cautions against saying “time is,” as such a locution presumes what can never be a given, that time is, that it could ever come to presence as a being.  He employs an idiomatic German expression, es gibt, it gives, which would translate to the English “there is” (it gives time/there is time).  For the same reason, we must avoid asking the question “what is time,” and inquire instead - Time: what gives?